No no; you don't get it. More small letters are used every day than big letters. They must be better. His post just sticks to the best all the time and ignores inferior "capital" letters. You and I are just misguided throwbacks.
Is Computer Science so much easier than engineering that you can just shift manpower to cover the latest issue?
It's good to see that you have come here to learn and know good questions to ask. Yes, computer science is completely different from engineering; in some ways easier, in others harder. One of the key differences is that, because of the internet, if someone releases a defective product, all installations of that product can be almost instantly reached by attackers. Another is that it's possible to repair all installations without having to send someone to fix them. Another is that most proprietary software is not user serviceable where most engineering projects give full serviceability to the customer. Yet another is that failures in one application cascade to the whole system by letting the attacker in. Finally, another thing is that simple computers with MS Windows are used in a very wide range of applications from home gaming to ensuring food delivery to Nuclear power plant control.
Imagine if a fault in your water pump design allowed people to poison all the families of all the people who owned the pump by remote control without even having to leave home. I think you would take faults a bit more seriously then.
I hope you get the chance to learn a bit of respect for people who know more about a topic than you do.
Actually, MS is making a choice: Either endanger everyone or inconvenience some MS customers. They can put out patches earlier, with less emphasis on testing and more emphasis on disabling features. The problem is that if they did that, soome customers might go over to other systems from other companies which don't have these vulnerabilities. They choose instead to wait until the full testing cycle is up and until the next convenient patch tuesday. They endanger the rest of us for their profit.
Except that a) cryptome seems to have done fine without demanding nearly as much money and Wikileaks is inherently distracting from that good work and b) (on the same page) there are pretty clear accusations that Wikileaks organisers have been pretty wasteful which could just simply be answered with the statement "Wikileaks has a policy to only ever expense the price of an economy class ticket and always choose the cheapest reasonable travel".
Assange seems to be showing the kind of stupidity that discredits Jimbo Wales. All he has to do is clearly publish his expense policy (not too much) and make sure to distribute most of the documents he has as quickly as possible (e.g. by giving them to cryptome) and he will regain much of his credibility.
We should all remember that quite a bit of this could be a false flag operation. Where have those hundreds of middle east diplomatic messages gone? If you do leak to wikileaks, as with anyone else, make sure they don't know who you are and make sure that the documents you leak won't be identified as coming from you.
Mea kulpa; very sorry please forgive me Mr Khan. I even read the article (to check if I couldn't find a linked torrent to troll the poster with), went back and copied from K Dawson. Oh the irony of having a nick which means I can blame only my own failure. I shall find an appropriate punishment for a troll. Go and read 4chan or dive off a bridge or something..
P.S. In searching around I have found that
the Khan Academy is a nonprofit, so if you do like the videos and manage to download them then please do donate (see FAQ and donate link at top of page (paypal only unfortunately).
The scary thing is you are probably right. This is probably about as polite as some people know how to be. The point I realised that is the point I realised I have joined the "get off my lawn" brigade on Slasdot... at little over thirty.
Is there a place where I can get the videos without a flash wrapper? It would be really appreciated? If not, would someone be willing to set it up so that this Kahn guy doesn't have to spend his time doing it? If not, does someone have 20TB or so of space and a really big connection so I can set up torrents for this.
I mean the guy's obviously put quite a bit of effort into this.. the effort to write a bit more tha.... oh get off my lawn:-)
Possibly; though I'm really not convinced. However, if you just want to hear better music and don't care about the comparison, I think more live musicians would really help. More performers means more chance to discover the greats. Music live just is better, if nothing else because the musician can react to the mood in the venue.
Put another way, Mozart, many of the serious good Jazz musicians and lots of the "best" music came before the entertainment industry. Even most good recent performers tend to be on the edge of that. The hight of the entertainment industry's production is Lady Ga Ga and, perhaps Madonna. I really don't see how that has helped people hear the "best" music.
It might not die, but there would be a whole lot less.
I don't think so. One of the problems most live musicians face is that they don't have to compete with their neighbors; they have to compete with the best in the world. Why listen to some guy who's just "good" at the guitar when you can listen to Jimmy Hendrix? If there was a whole load less recorded music, that would definitely be good for actual live music.
That's somewhere between one and two. At the point where they've started asking for donations to fight us, it's more likely we're laughing at them. They've definitely blown their cool...
In a way this is great news. As long as people are ready to answer them with a good message, this will give great publicity. However, it's really important to point to new things that are produced by the free as in freedom movement. Out of copyright stuff and especially illegally copied stuff isn't stuff we have any right to claim and doesn't show the value of the new approach. Find good artists on Jamendo. Create your own stuff. Talk about how most new things in computing come out of the F/OSS movement.
It seems that a volunteer company (some "Nokia" if you've ever heard of them) has already done that (5th post down). No real need to do it again..
I'm hoping that they keep the open nature of Maemo/Meego on these new phones. The N900 is the first phone I've had in ages which doesn't crash all the time. Not as slick as an iphone yet, but definitely much more flexible. Nothing quite as fun as controlling your phone from it's web server via WiFi...
It's true that javascript is crucial to the web. However, good and important javascript is limited to a handful of sites. What you should do is take a liberal approach at the beginning and e.g. immediately turn on the whole of google.com and the other top ten whole domains that you use regularly. Next, if you find yourself allowing a site a second time, you do it long term. Finally; learn a few alternative sites that are less script dependent. The worst ones are ones which make you use javascript for menus or for content access. This normally means that they have some really nasty advertising (overlay frames with flash or something) which relies on javascript.
Once you have a you will actually find that your browsing experience is better with noscript than without it. You will very occasionally temporarily allow a site and that costs you a second or so, but most of the time you will just not see the various annoyances which take up so much time when web browsing normally.
Comparing browsing with noscript to browsing with lynx really shows you have never tried it properly. Maybe it's not for everybody, and people with no understanding of what a URL is or a server name / DNS name might have difficulties with the interface to start with; however for anyone with either a slight technical knowledge or under the age of 50, browsing with noscript is going to be better than browsing without it.
The important thing to know is that you won't achieve this in your first five minutes of noscript.
Well, you go to jail for accidentally killing someone too.
No; actually you don't. You can go to jail for "negligently" killing someone, but not normally for "accidentally" killing someone. There may be special exceptions where the accident was something that could have been avoided by a specific action you failed to take, but these are basically special case of negligence.
N.B. I am of course ignoring miscarriages of justice, but if we included those then you could go to jail for not killing someone.
Wow; what an intellectual tour de force. I just don't know how to respond to your brilliant insight. Your eloquence and brilliant arguments just converted me immediately.
That's not my point at all. Thatcher was torturous, Major was messy Tony was terrible and Gordon was just gross. None of that changes the fact that the first change to incompetent management happened under Maggie, and the others just continued where she started.
Talking of which
weren't Labour able to sort out the alleged mess and insane manager/useful staff ratio?
Most of the "closed source" stuff is based on "ripped off" FreeBSD. Juniper routers; MPLS switches most of the ATM core etc. etc. If there was no closed source then we'd have a chance that these things were running an OS their owners could audit. The fact that the BSD developers supported this happening is not to their credit.
Lots of people who are stuck with their email addresses in AOL. They don't want to change because they are afraid to lose business (the same a people don't like to change their mobile numbers). I wonder; the EU might make email address portability mandatory if we start shouting loud enough about this. Would you like that AOL? Do you really want to annoy us?
Your post has quite a bit right and I hate to pick nits, but you conflate two different things and they are very very different.
[..] every human being deserves the best medical care possible [...] every human being should be provided with ample attention from doctors
We can certainly afford to provide pain relief and basic medical care for every member of humanity. "the best medical care possible" is a completely different thing. There is always one "the best heart surgeon in the world" and he will never be able to see everyone. Hopefully he gives access to people with difficult and interesting cases, but in the end money or pot luck may not be a bad way to control access to him. However, we can ensure that everybody can see a doctor who has a reasonably good chance of being competent.
"The best is the enemy of good." said Voltaire - if we try to pursue perfect care we won't be able to afford to do basic stuff for everyone.
I can't really suggest a solution except to keep science and technology marching along and hope that medicine eventually starts getting cheaper when the remedies we invent finally start outpacing the diseases we discover.
That seems to be the solution we're following so far.. I don't think it has a good track record. Everybody really needs to face up to these kinds of issues. I guess soon we'll have "health care problem denialists" who will claim that spending 90% of GDP on health care is a natural state.
Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion.
on
What US Health Care Needs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The thing is, that you don't actually have to go as far, politically, from the USA to see a working health care system. Before Margret Thatcher's management reforms crippled it, there used to be one in the UK and to a large extent there still is one in Scotland. The key element is to understand that money is a terrible motivator in health care.
There are always many many treatments and tests possible. For any given patient, most of those tests will either do more harm than good or be unjustifiable financially (costs 100,000, has a 1 in a million chance of helping you). The doctor has to be trustworthy to say "no, it's not worth it". That means that you have to believe that a) he has nothing to gain from not giving the treatment and b) he really has to have nothing to gain from giving the treatment c) he has to be competent and well enough trained to make that judgement.
Unfortunately, as soon as we have insurance companies, financial administrators and ignorant courts involved this breaks down. The insurance means that the doctor is doing the treatment for profit, so the more he gives, the more a non-involved third party pays. The financial administrators (e.g. in UK state care) mean the opposite. Now the patient knows the doctor is under pressure to not deliver treatment and will not leave until they get it (even if they don't need the treatment). The courts mean that the doctor can get away with killing hundreds of people with extra CAT scans, but if he misses one brain tumor by not doing one he goes bankrupt.
We need to take the direct money out of front line medicine, or at least pay it much more cleverly. For example, if you pay doctors by results (percent patients cured) they will only work on easy cases. Almost any such system I can think of can be gamed.
My problem with this, and the reason why I'm willing to accept the policy as it stands is that I'm constantly surprised by the new features in NoScript. However this is in a good way. I find it solving problems I had never even realised I had and that, once I know about them I realise I wanted them solved. Adding features is a good thing. It's very difficult to write a policy which says which features should be allowed and which not. The easiest way is to make sure that those that might have a privacy implication or similar have to be turned off by default. The real problem which remains is that the people chose the software believing that it's license would protect them. They could always tell what software they had and fix it if something bad did happen. Instead a license change took away that right. That's what Mozilla should be protecting against.
Slashdot Mirror
No no; you don't get it. More small letters are used every day than big letters. They must be better. His post just sticks to the best all the time and ignores inferior "capital" letters. You and I are just misguided throwbacks.
Is Computer Science so much easier than engineering that you can just shift manpower to cover the latest issue?
It's good to see that you have come here to learn and know good questions to ask. Yes, computer science is completely different from engineering; in some ways easier, in others harder. One of the key differences is that, because of the internet, if someone releases a defective product, all installations of that product can be almost instantly reached by attackers. Another is that it's possible to repair all installations without having to send someone to fix them. Another is that most proprietary software is not user serviceable where most engineering projects give full serviceability to the customer. Yet another is that failures in one application cascade to the whole system by letting the attacker in. Finally, another thing is that simple computers with MS Windows are used in a very wide range of applications from home gaming to ensuring food delivery to Nuclear power plant control.
Imagine if a fault in your water pump design allowed people to poison all the families of all the people who owned the pump by remote control without even having to leave home. I think you would take faults a bit more seriously then.
I hope you get the chance to learn a bit of respect for people who know more about a topic than you do.
Actually, MS is making a choice: Either endanger everyone or inconvenience some MS customers. They can put out patches earlier, with less emphasis on testing and more emphasis on disabling features. The problem is that if they did that, soome customers might go over to other systems from other companies which don't have these vulnerabilities. They choose instead to wait until the full testing cycle is up and until the next convenient patch tuesday. They endanger the rest of us for their profit.
Except that a) cryptome seems to have done fine without demanding nearly as much money and Wikileaks is inherently distracting from that good work and b) (on the same page) there are pretty clear accusations that Wikileaks organisers have been pretty wasteful which could just simply be answered with the statement "Wikileaks has a policy to only ever expense the price of an economy class ticket and always choose the cheapest reasonable travel".
Assange seems to be showing the kind of stupidity that discredits Jimbo Wales. All he has to do is clearly publish his expense policy (not too much) and make sure to distribute most of the documents he has as quickly as possible (e.g. by giving them to cryptome) and he will regain much of his credibility.
We should all remember that quite a bit of this could be a false flag operation. Where have those hundreds of middle east diplomatic messages gone? If you do leak to wikileaks, as with anyone else, make sure they don't know who you are and make sure that the documents you leak won't be identified as coming from you.
B. .
You got this wrong too. What you should attempt is inventing an "on spy" sex position.
Mea kulpa; very sorry please forgive me Mr Khan. I even read the article (to check if I couldn't find a linked torrent to troll the poster with), went back and copied from K Dawson. Oh the irony of having a nick which means I can blame only my own failure. I shall find an appropriate punishment for a troll. Go and read 4chan or dive off a bridge or something ..
P.S. In searching around I have found that
I'd hope that someone starts downloading and manages to put all these up on a traditional download site (ibiblio or something?) and / or torrents.
The scary thing is you are probably right. This is probably about as polite as some people know how to be. The point I realised that is the point I realised I have joined the "get off my lawn" brigade on Slasdot ... at little over thirty.
Is it possible to ask that just a bit nicely???
Is there a place where I can get the videos without a flash wrapper? It would be really appreciated? If not, would someone be willing to set it up so that this Kahn guy doesn't have to spend his time doing it? If not, does someone have 20TB or so of space and a really big connection so I can set up torrents for this.
I mean the guy's obviously put quite a bit of effort into this.. the effort to write a bit more tha.... oh get off my lawn :-)
Possibly; though I'm really not convinced. However, if you just want to hear better music and don't care about the comparison, I think more live musicians would really help. More performers means more chance to discover the greats. Music live just is better, if nothing else because the musician can react to the mood in the venue.
Put another way, Mozart, many of the serious good Jazz musicians and lots of the "best" music came before the entertainment industry. Even most good recent performers tend to be on the edge of that. The hight of the entertainment industry's production is Lady Ga Ga and, perhaps Madonna. I really don't see how that has helped people hear the "best" music.
It might not die, but there would be a whole lot less.
I don't think so. One of the problems most live musicians face is that they don't have to compete with their neighbors; they have to compete with the best in the world. Why listen to some guy who's just "good" at the guitar when you can listen to Jimmy Hendrix? If there was a whole load less recorded music, that would definitely be good for actual live music.
That's somewhere between one and two. At the point where they've started asking for donations to fight us, it's more likely we're laughing at them. They've definitely blown their cool...
In a way this is great news. As long as people are ready to answer them with a good message, this will give great publicity. However, it's really important to point to new things that are produced by the free as in freedom movement. Out of copyright stuff and especially illegally copied stuff isn't stuff we have any right to claim and doesn't show the value of the new approach. Find good artists on Jamendo. Create your own stuff. Talk about how most new things in computing come out of the F/OSS movement.
It seems that a volunteer company (some "Nokia" if you've ever heard of them) has already done that (5th post down). No real need to do it again..
I'm hoping that they keep the open nature of Maemo/Meego on these new phones. The N900 is the first phone I've had in ages which doesn't crash all the time. Not as slick as an iphone yet, but definitely much more flexible. Nothing quite as fun as controlling your phone from it's web server via WiFi...
It's true that javascript is crucial to the web. However, good and important javascript is limited to a handful of sites. What you should do is take a liberal approach at the beginning and e.g. immediately turn on the whole of google.com and the other top ten whole domains that you use regularly. Next, if you find yourself allowing a site a second time, you do it long term. Finally; learn a few alternative sites that are less script dependent. The worst ones are ones which make you use javascript for menus or for content access. This normally means that they have some really nasty advertising (overlay frames with flash or something) which relies on javascript.
Once you have a you will actually find that your browsing experience is better with noscript than without it. You will very occasionally temporarily allow a site and that costs you a second or so, but most of the time you will just not see the various annoyances which take up so much time when web browsing normally.
Comparing browsing with noscript to browsing with lynx really shows you have never tried it properly. Maybe it's not for everybody, and people with no understanding of what a URL is or a server name / DNS name might have difficulties with the interface to start with; however for anyone with either a slight technical knowledge or under the age of 50, browsing with noscript is going to be better than browsing without it. The important thing to know is that you won't achieve this in your first five minutes of noscript.
Well, you go to jail for accidentally killing someone too.
No; actually you don't. You can go to jail for "negligently" killing someone, but not normally for "accidentally" killing someone. There may be special exceptions where the accident was something that could have been avoided by a specific action you failed to take, but these are basically special case of negligence.
N.B. I am of course ignoring miscarriages of justice, but if we included those then you could go to jail for not killing someone.
Wow; what an intellectual tour de force. I just don't know how to respond to your brilliant insight. Your eloquence and brilliant arguments just converted me immediately.
You need to keep a forwarding address table and do that even for inactive subscribers. Not exactly difficult.
I have it; you have it; we have it.
But AOL users who stuck with their AOL address don't have it
you can't keep blaming everything on her.
That's not my point at all. Thatcher was torturous, Major was messy Tony was terrible and Gordon was just gross. None of that changes the fact that the first change to incompetent management happened under Maggie, and the others just continued where she started.
Talking of which
weren't Labour able to sort out the alleged mess and insane manager/useful staff ratio?
Pull the other one. It's got WMDs on it.
Most of the "closed source" stuff is based on "ripped off" FreeBSD. Juniper routers; MPLS switches most of the ATM core etc. etc. If there was no closed source then we'd have a chance that these things were running an OS their owners could audit. The fact that the BSD developers supported this happening is not to their credit.
Only in Fascist states. In the free world you can use DeCSS with no need for a license.
Lots of people who are stuck with their email addresses in AOL. They don't want to change because they are afraid to lose business (the same a people don't like to change their mobile numbers). I wonder; the EU might make email address portability mandatory if we start shouting loud enough about this. Would you like that AOL? Do you really want to annoy us?
Your post has quite a bit right and I hate to pick nits, but you conflate two different things and they are very very different.
[..] every human being deserves the best medical care possible [...] every human being should be provided with ample attention from doctors
We can certainly afford to provide pain relief and basic medical care for every member of humanity. "the best medical care possible" is a completely different thing. There is always one "the best heart surgeon in the world" and he will never be able to see everyone. Hopefully he gives access to people with difficult and interesting cases, but in the end money or pot luck may not be a bad way to control access to him. However, we can ensure that everybody can see a doctor who has a reasonably good chance of being competent.
"The best is the enemy of good." said Voltaire - if we try to pursue perfect care we won't be able to afford to do basic stuff for everyone.
I can't really suggest a solution except to keep science and technology marching along and hope that medicine eventually starts getting cheaper when the remedies we invent finally start outpacing the diseases we discover.
That seems to be the solution we're following so far.. I don't think it has a good track record. Everybody really needs to face up to these kinds of issues. I guess soon we'll have "health care problem denialists" who will claim that spending 90% of GDP on health care is a natural state.
The thing is, that you don't actually have to go as far, politically, from the USA to see a working health care system. Before Margret Thatcher's management reforms crippled it, there used to be one in the UK and to a large extent there still is one in Scotland. The key element is to understand that money is a terrible motivator in health care.
There are always many many treatments and tests possible. For any given patient, most of those tests will either do more harm than good or be unjustifiable financially (costs 100,000, has a 1 in a million chance of helping you). The doctor has to be trustworthy to say "no, it's not worth it". That means that you have to believe that a) he has nothing to gain from not giving the treatment and b) he really has to have nothing to gain from giving the treatment c) he has to be competent and well enough trained to make that judgement.
Unfortunately, as soon as we have insurance companies, financial administrators and ignorant courts involved this breaks down. The insurance means that the doctor is doing the treatment for profit, so the more he gives, the more a non-involved third party pays. The financial administrators (e.g. in UK state care) mean the opposite. Now the patient knows the doctor is under pressure to not deliver treatment and will not leave until they get it (even if they don't need the treatment). The courts mean that the doctor can get away with killing hundreds of people with extra CAT scans, but if he misses one brain tumor by not doing one he goes bankrupt.
We need to take the direct money out of front line medicine, or at least pay it much more cleverly. For example, if you pay doctors by results (percent patients cured) they will only work on easy cases. Almost any such system I can think of can be gamed.
My problem with this, and the reason why I'm willing to accept the policy as it stands is that I'm constantly surprised by the new features in NoScript. However this is in a good way. I find it solving problems I had never even realised I had and that, once I know about them I realise I wanted them solved. Adding features is a good thing. It's very difficult to write a policy which says which features should be allowed and which not. The easiest way is to make sure that those that might have a privacy implication or similar have to be turned off by default. The real problem which remains is that the people chose the software believing that it's license would protect them. They could always tell what software they had and fix it if something bad did happen. Instead a license change took away that right. That's what Mozilla should be protecting against.