Teaching children at an early age to follow instructions without questioning them and to instinctively look to an expert/web browser for expertise are possibly the most valuable job skills we can give them.
I know you're playing the devil's advocate here, but this still needs refutation. This attitude, which far too many people hold, is how the Psychic Friends Network gets such great business and evolution gets banned in schools. Gullibility is never good.
I think that kids should be required to take a critical thinking course. I don't mean it like those pointless "critical thinking" questions you find on the SAT now--"Explain multiplication to an alien that knows no math"--but the sort of reasoning necessary for making rational decisions in everyday life. It should cover the following areas: logic--not necessarily symbolic logic, but how to follow a logical argument, and to spot holes and logical fallacies; statistics--the different kinds of averages and what they mean, what statistical significance is, etc.; and the scientific method--amazingly, in my experience science classes tend to either gloss over the method at the beginning of the course or ignore it entirely.
A suggested "reccommended reading" list for such a course:
_The_Culture_of_Fear_ by Barry Glassner. Why so many people are so afraid of such rare, freakish, and sometimes downright mythological things (e.g. razorblades in Halloween candy) and the damage it does to society.
_How_to_Lie_With_Statistics_ by Darrell Huff. Not really a how-to, but more of a how-they-do-it and how-to-avoid-getting-suckered manual.
_Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things_ by Michael Shermer. This would probably be the most controversial, since it slaughters a lot of sacred cows. I'd prefer this to a book by The Amazing Randi (although Randi is fun reading), because Shermer is much less holier-than-thou.
I don't think this would really work. Sure, you could create a sh!tload of false entries, but they're expecting that. Remember, these are the people who run webcrawlers to find anything that looks like an email address on as many webpages as possible. They're prepared for false positives.
The whole idea is that if they send an email to every person on the net, some sucker is going to respond and take the offer. If a bunch of messages go to waste, big deal. They were just entries on a bcc: line anyway, so the mail routing software takes all of the abuse.
Since most spam addresses aren't real, the spammers don't even see the bounce messages. The bounce messages just bounce back, burning up bandwidth and server time. The spam addresses that are real usually filter bounce messages, or aren't checked (in which case the actual reply address is in the body of the spam, if it isn't just a webpage ad).
I'm not sure what the underlying felony was (I though refusal to pull over was a misdemeanor), but she was charged with CAPITAL felony murder. She was ultimately sentenced to life-in-prison, no parole.
At least in California, killing a cop is Murder with Special Circumstances. But I'm not sure how that would affect things. Since she didn't actively cause the cop's death, IMO she should have been charged as an Accessory, with a separate charge for the burglary.
They're out to make their business more efficient so clients don't waste thousands on sending ads to people who will never use them.
Wasting thousands? It costs effectively nothing to send bulk email. That's why it's such a big problem compared to physical junk mail, which costs quite a bit to send, even at bulk rate.
I was just saying that the poster who pointed to "pro-life far-left democrats" as being "typical" was mistaken. I wasn't saying that there were no pro-lifers on the far left, or that pro-life leftists weren't organized, just that they weren't "typical".
You also have to admit that the far right has gone out of its way to identify itself with the pro-life position.
Your opinions, while I respect them, quite remind me of a anti-abortion anti-gun propagandist far-left democrat.
Anti-abortion far-left democrat? That's hardly typical. The rabid pro-lifers seem to mainly be on the far right. Christian coalition and moral majority and all that stuff.
Not that it matters. Two sides of the same coin, really...
--- Zardoz has spoken!
Re:One Point Twenty-One Quickiewatts!!!
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1.21 Quickiewatts
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· Score: 1
I think he understood the reference. Otherwise, he wouldn't have put in the "Great scott!" quote (Doc Brown's favorite phrase).
Oh, and "What the hell is a gigawatt" was a Marty McFlyism from the first movie.
If you go online in any dorm, you'll see a whole host of people happily sharing their hard drives and printers with full permissions.
Hehe...one time I managed to confuse the hell out of a friend of mine by printing stuff on his printer through Network Neighborhood, including a document that said something like "Doesn't it suck having people print random stuff in your room? Take your printer off the network and you won't have this problem." He had to get me to do it, but at least he was more security conscious from then on.
Of course, this is the same guy whose dorm room I rewired so he couldn't turn off his lights...
--- Zardoz has spoken!
Only if you're slick about it
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At the server page, it specifically states that files larger than 100k cannot be stored.
Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from splitting an MP3 into several files, a la Usenet pr0n.
I'm probably missing something, but can anyone explain how the BSD license differs from public domain? In both cases, anyone may take the work and make it proprietary.
'Discrimination' is another one of those words, like 'prejudice' which has gotten a bad rap. In Radio technology, an FM receiver has a 'discriminator' circuit. It's function is to separate the signal from the carrier wave. In gourmet cooking, having 'discriminating taste' means someone has the ability to tell good food from mediocre food. If my doctor can't discriminate between ordinary benign moles and possibly malignant 'melanoma' moles I'll switch to a new doctory, thank-you-very-much.
Now you're playing semantic games. You know what I was talking about. Discrimination against groups of people. Happy now?
As to your little anecdote about 'digging yourself out of a hole,' it just sounds plain insincere the way you put it, like you're a college-educated liberal who doesn't have a clue what poverty is about. Why do you imply only poor people have to work right out of high school? Does everybody else just sail into prosperity?
I implied no such thing. Of course affluent people have to do some work (although, in my experience, there are a few that just get a free ride. I hate USC.) But poor people are much more likely to have to work right out of high school, and have a lot more hurdles to overcome to get into college.
Oh, and economies are NOT all human inventions. Sure, plenty of theoreticians like Karl Marx have invent economic theories (many divorced entirely from reality), but nobody ever said 'hey, let's be Capitalists' and then proceeded to print leaflets.
Just because it built up over time doesn't mean it's not a human invention. It's just not one person's invention (a case might be made for Adam Smith, but his work was really a description and explanation of how things worked at that time). Mercantilism was going strong for a while there, and gave rise to Colonialism. And way back in the day, barter was pretty much all there was.
In case you hadn't noticed, poor people are poor because they're stupid, in large part.
Bullshit. Do you believe there's no such thing as discrimination? Do you think that it's easy to dig yourself out of a hole your family has been in for generations? Being in poverty is more than just having a used Buick instead of a new Ferrari. For one thing, most poor people have to work as soon as they get out of high school. This doesn't leave much time for college, even if they could scrounge up the money (scholarships & grants only go so far). It's a Catch-22: poor people can't in general afford good educations, and since they're uneducated they can't get well-paying jobs.
there's also a natural filtering process that leaves the dregs living in poverty.
Only if you think that a capitalist economy is "natural". All economies are human inventions--there's nothing natural about them. Or do you think money really does grow on trees?;)
Which means that those who create and control the tools have the power to destroy these efforts. You can see one angle of this in laws like the DMCA, which put restrictions on who can make tools to deal with information. Expect in the future more and more crippled hardware that will curb more and more the freedoms you enjoy now on the net.
What does this have to do with the article you're replying to? You seem to be equating "tools" with "software". But that's not how the poster you're replying to meant it. In the context, just basic conversation is a tool--a tool for political action. He's saying that petitioning with digital signatures should allow young people, who normally find it harder to get politically active, to have some influence.
Are you saying that's wrong? Do you really think any company will put out a license saying "You may not use this software to organize a political effort that we do not like"? This post just sounds like an attempt to appeal to the average Slashdot reader's latent (or not-so-latent) paranoia. It's good to be wary of large software companies, but this is ridiculous.
I don't know how this got modded up as "Insightful". Should be "-1 Offtopic".
LDAP isn't. This seems to me to be the killer feature needed for the Mozilla Mailnews component. A lot of businesses use LDAP to maintain a companywide address book. The sad part is, most of them don't even know it (it's not exactly a buzzword) or just take it for granted, so Netscape's polls of needed features really didn't show it.
There's some skeletal code for LDAP in the Mozilla codebase, but it doesn't work yet, and Netscape has no plans to have it done by Netscape 6 final release.
Will it become say, popular as a standard Windows/Linux/etc format for backgrounds, or just become a format that has a single use such as the TIF?.. can we see any OTHER uses for it besides the web?
Well, as the article says, PNG is used as an internal format for a lot of applications, including MS Office. One Macromedia app also uses it as its main format (can't remember which). There are also a lot of extentions having to do with scientific and geographical information, so I'd expect that those fields use it too.
Because a lot of Slashdotters still haven't figured out the difference between milestones and nightlies. Specifically, the fact that nightlies are named after the upcoming milestone confuses a lot of people.
Or maybe ``translucency'', which can mean ``partial transparency''. Generally speaking, one can see right through transparent things...
Yes, but transparent objects may have color. Think of colored glass. Translucent objects allow light to pass through, but scatter it to a certain extent. Think of frosted glass, or a fogged-up windshield.
Translucency would be kind of a cool feature for an image format (blurring images beneath it). You could probably set up a "translucency channel" if you wanted in a non-standard PNG chunk--call it tlUc (check the PNG spec to see why the capitalization is all wonky). The only problems being support (although it would degrade gracefully if a viewer followed the spec strictly), and the fact that it would probably take a lot of processor time.
That article sounds like a storyboard for a Dilbert strip.
Sounds more like a Coen Bros. movie, like Fargo or the Big Lebowski. It's so wild and improbable--with bizarre details like the exec jumping out of a moving cab, and another returning in the nick of time from a horse riding trip with mud-caked cowboy boots--yet it really happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're playing the devil's advocate here, but this still needs refutation. This attitude, which far too many people hold, is how the Psychic Friends Network gets such great business and evolution gets banned in schools. Gullibility is never good.
I think that kids should be required to take a critical thinking course. I don't mean it like those pointless "critical thinking" questions you find on the SAT now--"Explain multiplication to an alien that knows no math"--but the sort of reasoning necessary for making rational decisions in everyday life. It should cover the following areas: logic--not necessarily symbolic logic, but how to follow a logical argument, and to spot holes and logical fallacies; statistics--the different kinds of averages and what they mean, what statistical significance is, etc.; and the scientific method--amazingly, in my experience science classes tend to either gloss over the method at the beginning of the course or ignore it entirely.
A suggested "reccommended reading" list for such a course:
---
Zardoz has spoken!
I don't think this would really work. Sure, you could create a sh!tload of false entries, but they're expecting that. Remember, these are the people who run webcrawlers to find anything that looks like an email address on as many webpages as possible. They're prepared for false positives.
The whole idea is that if they send an email to every person on the net, some sucker is going to respond and take the offer. If a bunch of messages go to waste, big deal. They were just entries on a bcc: line anyway, so the mail routing software takes all of the abuse.
Since most spam addresses aren't real, the spammers don't even see the bounce messages. The bounce messages just bounce back, burning up bandwidth and server time. The spam addresses that are real usually filter bounce messages, or aren't checked (in which case the actual reply address is in the body of the spam, if it isn't just a webpage ad).
You can't win this way.
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Zardoz has spoken!
At least in California, killing a cop is Murder with Special Circumstances. But I'm not sure how that would affect things. Since she didn't actively cause the cop's death, IMO she should have been charged as an Accessory, with a separate charge for the burglary.
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Zardoz has spoken!
IANANL (I Am Not A Naval Lawyer), but I'm pretty sure that ships in international waters are subject to the laws of their port of origin.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Wasting thousands? It costs effectively nothing to send bulk email. That's why it's such a big problem compared to physical junk mail, which costs quite a bit to send, even at bulk rate.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Um...newspapers actually tend to follow up on major stories. It's just rare that a followup gets front-page coverage.
Newpapers even print errata when they really blow it.
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Zardoz has spoken!
I was just saying that the poster who pointed to "pro-life far-left democrats" as being "typical" was mistaken. I wasn't saying that there were no pro-lifers on the far left, or that pro-life leftists weren't organized, just that they weren't "typical".
You also have to admit that the far right has gone out of its way to identify itself with the pro-life position.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Anti-abortion far-left democrat? That's hardly typical. The rabid pro-lifers seem to mainly be on the far right. Christian coalition and moral majority and all that stuff.
Not that it matters. Two sides of the same coin, really...
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Zardoz has spoken!
I think he understood the reference. Otherwise, he wouldn't have put in the "Great scott!" quote (Doc Brown's favorite phrase).
Oh, and "What the hell is a gigawatt" was a Marty McFlyism from the first movie.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Hehe...one time I managed to confuse the hell out of a friend of mine by printing stuff on his printer through Network Neighborhood, including a document that said something like "Doesn't it suck having people print random stuff in your room? Take your printer off the network and you won't have this problem." He had to get me to do it, but at least he was more security conscious from then on.
Of course, this is the same guy whose dorm room I rewired so he couldn't turn off his lights...
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Zardoz has spoken!
Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from splitting an MP3 into several files, a la Usenet pr0n.
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Zardoz has spoken!
I'm probably missing something, but can anyone explain how the BSD license differs from public domain? In both cases, anyone may take the work and make it proprietary.
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Zardoz has spoken!
No, you're thinking of Tintin's dog Snowy.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Aside from when you hit the atmosphere and go splat, like a 100 mile per hour bellyflop. After that, it's clear sailing! ;)
Reentry is always diagonal, because at those speeds, the air may as well be cement.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Now you're playing semantic games. You know what I was talking about. Discrimination against groups of people. Happy now?
I implied no such thing. Of course affluent people have to do some work (although, in my experience, there are a few that just get a free ride. I hate USC.) But poor people are much more likely to have to work right out of high school, and have a lot more hurdles to overcome to get into college.
Just because it built up over time doesn't mean it's not a human invention. It's just not one person's invention (a case might be made for Adam Smith, but his work was really a description and explanation of how things worked at that time). Mercantilism was going strong for a while there, and gave rise to Colonialism. And way back in the day, barter was pretty much all there was.
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Zardoz has spoken!
All my votes are spoken for, sorry. And I'm not familiar enough with how LDAP works to implement it.
But if anybody's interested, the bug report is here. You can also see the full list of LDAP-related bugs and feature requests here
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Zardoz has spoken!
A lot of people say it "dubya-dubya-dubya"...
Wait...Oh no!
George W. Bush has stolen Al Gore's thunder! Gore may have invented the internet, but the World Wide Web is George W. Bush's middle name!
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Zardoz has spoken!
This post is both cynical and misinformed.
Bullshit. Do you believe there's no such thing as discrimination? Do you think that it's easy to dig yourself out of a hole your family has been in for generations? Being in poverty is more than just having a used Buick instead of a new Ferrari. For one thing, most poor people have to work as soon as they get out of high school. This doesn't leave much time for college, even if they could scrounge up the money (scholarships & grants only go so far). It's a Catch-22: poor people can't in general afford good educations, and since they're uneducated they can't get well-paying jobs.
Only if you think that a capitalist economy is "natural". All economies are human inventions--there's nothing natural about them. Or do you think money really does grow on trees? ;)
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Zardoz has spoken!
What does this have to do with the article you're replying to? You seem to be equating "tools" with "software". But that's not how the poster you're replying to meant it. In the context, just basic conversation is a tool--a tool for political action. He's saying that petitioning with digital signatures should allow young people, who normally find it harder to get politically active, to have some influence.
Are you saying that's wrong? Do you really think any company will put out a license saying "You may not use this software to organize a political effort that we do not like"? This post just sounds like an attempt to appeal to the average Slashdot reader's latent (or not-so-latent) paranoia. It's good to be wary of large software companies, but this is ridiculous.
I don't know how this got modded up as "Insightful". Should be "-1 Offtopic".
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Zardoz has spoken!
LDAP isn't. This seems to me to be the killer feature needed for the Mozilla Mailnews component. A lot of businesses use LDAP to maintain a companywide address book. The sad part is, most of them don't even know it (it's not exactly a buzzword) or just take it for granted, so Netscape's polls of needed features really didn't show it.
There's some skeletal code for LDAP in the Mozilla codebase, but it doesn't work yet, and Netscape has no plans to have it done by Netscape 6 final release.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Well, as the article says, PNG is used as an internal format for a lot of applications, including MS Office. One Macromedia app also uses it as its main format (can't remember which). There are also a lot of extentions having to do with scientific and geographical information, so I'd expect that those fields use it too.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Because a lot of Slashdotters still haven't figured out the difference between milestones and nightlies. Specifically, the fact that nightlies are named after the upcoming milestone confuses a lot of people.
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Zardoz has spoken!
No, I'll knock him out.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Yes, but transparent objects may have color. Think of colored glass. Translucent objects allow light to pass through, but scatter it to a certain extent. Think of frosted glass, or a fogged-up windshield.
Translucency would be kind of a cool feature for an image format (blurring images beneath it). You could probably set up a "translucency channel" if you wanted in a non-standard PNG chunk--call it tlUc (check the PNG spec to see why the capitalization is all wonky). The only problems being support (although it would degrade gracefully if a viewer followed the spec strictly), and the fact that it would probably take a lot of processor time.
It would be especially cool in MNG.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Sounds more like a Coen Bros. movie, like Fargo or the Big Lebowski. It's so wild and improbable--with bizarre details like the exec jumping out of a moving cab, and another returning in the nick of time from a horse riding trip with mud-caked cowboy boots--yet it really happened.
This would make a hilarious movie.
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Zardoz has spoken!