Okay. A professor starts marking final exams and realizes that their exam was too difficult because the entire class failed*
That's not how you evaluate whether the test was fair. It's unfair if you included material they were not expected to know. If you taught the material, then anything goes, and it's fair. Just time it so that you give the students about 3x as long as it takes you to solve the test, and then you can be sure that the time was fair too (because even a beginner shouldn't really take three times as you to do calculations).
I don't know what field you TA'd in, but in physics it's bloody hard for a prof to create a "fair" exam. To make a long diatribe short, usually a prof has to either err on the side of making the exam too easy or too difficult, and they always choose "too difficult" because low marks still yield meaningful data about student capabilities. (i.e., it's hard to grade students fairly when everyone scores 100% on the final.)
My field was EE. My idea of fair has nothing to do with easy or difficult. If the material is difficult and the entire class literally fails, then the entire class fails, and there's nothing wrong with that. If the material is easy and the entire class gets A's, then the entire class gets A's and there's nothing wrong with that.
What the professor should ask himself is, "what is the point of this class? When they leave here, what should they be able to do?" If the answer to that results in really easy exams, fine. If the answer to that results in a class where the pass rate is less than 5%, fine. The only thing that's important is that the syllabus says that the students will gain knowledge of a certain subject, and that's what you should be evaluating them on.
Similarly, part of what a professor should be evaluated on by the students is whether or not he covered the material the class was meant to cover. I tended to give bad evaluations to professors who included things in their syllabus they later decided not to cover, because he decided some people weren't getting a particular thing and he therefore wanted to spend more time on it. No. If he's concerned about these people, he can offer to meet with them for additional time, but he shouldn't be screwing up everybody else because of them.
With many students being denied entry into a particular college/university/etc. because they are at their supposed maximum capacity.. I, for one, would think it entirely that college/university's business to say "If you're not going to attend, gtfo - we'd rather have somebody who does." as a deterrent to future students who plan on low/no attendance.
Being bored to death in a classroom setting does not imply a good student. I fully support fair exams which weed out the people who are not learning, giving way to better students. If you already know your material / the class isn't challenging you, but you are still required to take the course in order to get your degree you have a duty of skipping and not wasting your valuable time.
If you think you can skip and make the grade, and then it turns out you can't, it's your own fault for being irresponsible. Then you fail, and if you do that enough times, drop out, leaving room for that good student you're talking about.
If you want to complain about having crappy students taking space, complain about grade inflation, and the propensity of graders to "curve." Why should everyone's grade go up because there were a lot of mediocre grades? Either you think your evaluation was unfair, in which case you need to give them a fair one, or your evaluation was fair and everyone sucked, in which case they need to get the grades they deserve.
In my experience as a TA in grad school, there were an awful lot of people who showed up to all the classes, to all the review sessions, who showed up on office hours asking question, and still could not grasp the material. They're wasting as much space as the dude who's going to fail because he doesn't have the responsibility to do the work. The people who show up and do well are exactly as valuable as the people who don't show up and still do well.
If they're wrong, they'll be punished at exam time.
Or, they turn around and blame the professor (and the school) for failing to teach them. And ask for their money back. If the school can demonstrate, that they have not attended the classes, they can defend themselves.
Fuck that, the service the university is providing is not a guarantee that they will learn. Even if they attended all the classes, no professor can fix stupid. The university makes the material available, and evaluates you to see if you have mastered the material. If they fail on the first one, you've chosen a bad university, if they fail on the second one, employers will learn to not trust graduates from that university. Universities are accredited to make sure that the material being taught corresponds to the degree they are providing. If the University is accredited, there's no case.
It's not that there are no bad professors. You get a bad professor, then you go study on your own time.
Yeah, yeah, it's not PC to imply that people are different, some people are more intelligent than others, some people are incapable of achieving what others can despite trying. Despite not being PC, it's still true.
I think it was a little overboard, but I guess the message was very clearly sent and recieved
Find a job elsewhere?
I mean, I don't blame the investigation, I don't blame firing the dude who was torrenting, but canning half the department for visiting web pages? You could pay me enough to work in a place like that, but the amount we're talking about would have to allow me to retire within 1-3 paychecks.
It will be a small comfort to me, when consumer devices are only shipped with burned in ROM with sealed circuitry, to know that people like you got just what you were asking for.
That's good. I hope that when all vehicles come with no hood you can open it will also be a small comfort to you that people who do their own car maintenance without paying the dealership exorbitant amounts of money got just what they were asking for.
He released knowledge which he acquired by messing with his property. You tell me exactly what gives Sony the right to stop him from doing that. The moral right I mean, since they obviously don't have the legal right to. Tell me what gives Sony the right to stop people from using this third-party knowledge to tinker with their own console. Does the fact that they didn't figure it out themselves make it less their property?
Hmm, I wonder which step Sony cares about more.
My point is precisely that I don't give a shit what Sony cares about, and neither should anyone else. Geohot paid money for his console, part of this money went to Sony. I paid money for my console, part of this money went to Sony. The transaction is completed, and they are no longer the owners of the property.
Geohot is the one who caused this goddamn mess in the first place. If he hadn't decided to poke his nose where it didn't belong we wouldn't be having these problems.
Although I am pissed off that his actions are causing me problems, I don't blame him, I blame Sony. Geohot was doing something with his console, which he acquired legally. It's his right to do whatever he likes with his property, whether or not Sony approves of it.
Which is really the crux of this problem. I don't care what their EULA says, the PS3 promised the ability to both install an alternate OS and play games / connect to their network. Now they want to remove this functionality and make people choose which they want to do, and now they apparently want to avoid people holding back on the updates by automatically updating without asking the user first. They're clearly the ones to be angry at.
But is has already been done. An actual viable plan to get to Mars would be a new exploration, but no one has ever been willing to put up the cash for that.
We're not supposed to step backwards. We've been there, that's been done. We're no longer there, and that's a problem. Thus, before we can move forward, we must do it again.
It's like training to run for 3 miles, achieving that and patting yourself on the back. Then you quit running for 10 years, and tell yourself, "well, I can't train to run 3 miles again, I've already done that. Let me go ahead and go for 6.
We've lost the ability to reach the moon. We can't aim for mars until we get that back.
Personally, I'm looking for 2 things in the answer. The basic, pass fail: "C++ is C with classes". The answer that demonstrates such a keen understanding of good programming that it outweighs almost everything else in the interview if you know it: "with C++ I can automate resource clean up, such as freeing memory and closing files, so that most code just can't have a resource leak and I don't waste time on such bugs".
Eh..."C++ is object-oriented" is the most obvious "pass/fail answer." That said, C++ doesn't really automate resource cleanup that much better than C. Sure, auto_ptr and destructors are nice, but you can still screw yourself up and leak memory in thousands of other ways, so I'm not sure your second answer is really that good. It's not like you can't have a well-organized C code that minimizes your chances of forgetting to clean up resources, in the same way that C++ does it. If you really wanted to, you could write code that mimics object-oriented code very well in C, although you really don't need it. Just a set of best practices is usually enough, and C++ is no replacement for them.
All of that said, I do like C++ a lot. I just don't really agree with your best answer there:)
Talk about having no life. If slashdot doesn't post anything these people like, do they really have that much trouble finding something else to do? At the very least find other sites to visit...for one...fucking...day. The internet is a big place.
You're right. Considering that the tablet in question is about as versatile as the appliances you mentioned, I now have no complaints about it being locked down. Just lock it away somewhere and my joy will be complete.
*YAWN*
Sorry. You were commenting on the versatility of a product you've never, ever, ever, not-even-for-a-second, laid your hands upon. Please continue. Your incredibly-informed opinions on this subject are absolutely riveting!
You're an idiot. How do you decide whether you're going to buy the product in the first place? The company needs to convince you of its capabilities through ads, product description, etc. We've all seen Apple's description of the iPad and what the iPad does. So I'm either supposed to believe that Apple's marketing department sucks and were unable to give me a proper overview of the iPad or believe that my opinion of this product is obviously bullshit unless I go out and purchase one? Maybe I should I wait for somebody I know to purchase one? How in the hell are they ever going to do that unless they know somebody who has purchased one too? Should I go to the Apple Store and play around with one? Are the Apple "geniuses" going to tell me anything about it that hasn't already been listed in the websites? Is Apple hiding functionality in order to surprise their users? I'm also guessing every single person who pre-ordered the iPad is a moron, because they shelled cash when they obviously are incredibly ill-informed since they've "never, ever, ever, not-even-for-a-second, laid [their] hands upon it."
We're all as well-informed about what the device does as possible. We know the specs, we've seen the videos. I have no idea what all the people who pre-ordered it are going to do with it, since I know for a FACT that the damn thing is so limited that it would be of absolutely no use to ME. I'm sure the iPad will have very real uses for many of those people, and they have determined this information through the same sources I've had. I'm also guessing many (perhaps most) of the people who buy it just want to play around with a cool device, and they earn a lot more than I do, so they get to have expensive toys that they will tire of pretty soon.
I've got two game that use this types of system, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. I honestly think this system is good for consumers in the end because it should decrease the cost of used games.
You've fallen into EA's trap. The crap additional "free DLC" that I didn't bother to install even with the game that I bought new is just the first wave, designed to make you accept the state of things. They're moving towards giving you essentially a cd-key in order to play the game at all. And since it's also activated online, you won't be able to sell your game at all.
They're not interested in making used games more attractive, they're interested in killing the market. That's why even in this original iteration, they've carefully designed the price of the "free dlc" to be just over the price difference between a used and new copy.
And those of us who wait a year or so before buying a game, so we can pick it up new for $20? The repackaged 1-year old games won't give you the "free" content, mark my words.
The entire concept of downloadable content is unacceptable, unless you were allowed to sell it and transfer your license to other people, with no restrictions.
Einstein did not find out what he found out by calculatign[sic], first he understood the physics behind it after eh calculated for us the formula E=MC^2
Man, you have no idea what you're talking about. Einstein was having severe problems with General Relativity until his mathematician friend, Mercel Grossman, looked at what he was doing and pointed out, "hey, you need to describe this using these things called tensors.": look here
Before that, Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician, had looked at Einstein's Special Relativity and thought, "hey...if we describe these things in four dimensions, these equations become really elegant." Yes, Minkowski space was derived from the physics, but the math dealing with higher dimensions than just three was around long before.
Which is worse? Something not supposed to be classified NOT being leaked, or something SUPPOSED to be classified being leaked? I, and most people, would say the latter.
Honestly...if Wikileaks got the information, what makes you think foreign spies can't get to it? As far as I'm concerned, if Wikileaks manages to get their hands on missile launch codes and leak it, that's a win for everyone. Now the government knows to change the code as well as start an investigation into how in the hell this information was leaked and who needs to be tried for treason as a result of leaking it.
Why? Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually
Haven't had that problem. I guess don't use ALSA directly, use it through PulseAudio. I know there's a lot of complaints about PulseAudio, but I had problems with audio in linux for a very long time, and PulseAudio made all the problems just go away. So maybe it'd be good for you, or maybe it breaks everything like it does for some other people.
kernel panics from nVidia drivers
Haven't had that problem. If it happens for you, isn't that an nvidia issue, if you're talking about the proprietary drivers, and an issue with whoever makes the open source drivers if not? What about ubuntu would make them work differently?
completely non-orthagonal design, with Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system
Well, Ubuntu is not for you, then. It's designed for people who don't have much Linux experience, so they don't know that they have choices, and aren't expected to make them.
I don't like Gnome at all, and when I tried to remove it, rapidly found that I couldn't.
If you remove gnome, you're going to miss out on a whole bunch of administrative applications they've designed to work really well with gnome (again, because it's aimed for people who have no linux experience, and they never need to drop to the command-line). That said, they don't prevent you from removing it, and never have. I've removed gnome before. It also removes the gnome-desktop meta-package which automatically includes all those applications I was talking about. If you do want all the power of those options, and are annoyed by the choices they make for you, Debian is a better choice for a distro.
Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart, and the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it, such that even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work.
Heh...I guess Debian's not for you, then. Although, I have to say you're insane. What the hell is wrong with upstart? It's backward compatible with init, so you don't even need to do anything differently if you want to do things by hand. And fstab not working? Debian and Ubuntu respect fstab just fine.
Hard drives get mounted some other way, that I wasn't able to find.
It's called udev. Are you still using a 2.4 kernel or something?
Add to that, the "quiet splash," options in GRUB, which remove the ability to debug a faulty installation, leading to the infamous "black screen of death."
No, it does not remove any such ability. If you know enough to debug a faulty installation, you know how to edit the grub menu at bootup and remove those. If you're a normal computer user, the text is just gibberish anyway.
Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?
It's an easy-to-use system and you know where everything is. So you can give it to your computer illiterate friend as a replacement for windows, and when he calls you up with questions about how to get something to work, you don't have to ask, "are you running kde or gnome?" You can just tell him, "what do you want to do? Ah, install an office app? Go to Applications / Add-Remove Software / navigate to Office." I had my parents switch from Windows to Ubuntu years ago, and I don't have to support them nearly as much as I had to in the windows days. Hell, Windows is still installed on their machine as dual-boot, but they've been asking me to remove it next time I'm town, so they can claim the extra disk space.
Choices are great. The first choice you need to make if Ubuntu's default choices are not for you is to choose anot
Since when did the right to self-determination, freedom of expression and thought, freedom to not be oppressed by a fascist state, become wrong?
That only works if you believe morals are universal. In truth, we know that it's relative. You can look at how relative it is without leaving the US: just look at the health care issue. You have the people who say that it's immoral to let people who can't afford health insurance to go without. On the other side you also have the people who say it's immoral to be forced to pay the costs for others, when they may not be taking care of their own bodies and thus being at a higher health risk then their neighbors who are paying for this government mandated care. Who is right?
The truth is that it depends on what morals you personally subscribe to. The solution would be more states rights. This way people who wanted universal health care could live in a state that provides it (and pay the taxes), and those that do not want it could live in a state that does not provide it, and buy their own privately.
Similarly, who are you to say the Chinese are wrong if they want their government to "protect" them on the internet. I certainly wouldn't want it, but if that's what they do, it's their country. Either way, Google isn't doing anything wrong, quite the contrary, they're doing everything right. It's against the ethics of this American company and management to continue to censor websites in China. It's against the ethics of this American company and management to enable human rights abuses. And they told the Chinese government that they can either change the rules or leave. They're not threatening to forcefully impose American morals on China with mighty military power, they're telling them that Chinese morals are not compatible, and that they'll be forced to leave.
According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.
Heh...these apology for bad predictions articles are always funny as hell, so do you know why you don't see more of them, even though "contrarianism helps sell magazines"? It's because the contrarians are usually right and then you don't have the apology article years later, it's just business as usual.
The unwashed masses suck at predicting the future. Think about the future predictions of the 50's and 60's and wonder why you don't have a flying car, a robot maid, and why even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday. However, the world is marvelously different than what it used to be, just in a completely different way than they predicted.
So while self-preservation is important we find that species preservation and preservation of life is also important as these features can be seen throughout the animal kingdom.
You're right that it's important for the preservation of the species, but evolution doesn't care about the individual. If every member of the human species were self-centered the species wouldn't survive. My point is precisely that the lack of survival of the species doesn't affect a single individual living now, so why should I care for the survival of the species.
Sure, that's why we evolved empathy, and if I were placed in a situation where every other human being would die if I didn't kill myself, I'd kill myself. However, these are other human beings living now, for which I do have empathy, and therefore protecting them benefits me, by not making me feel the remorse after the fact, if I chose my life over theirs. I don't have that feeling of empathy to future generations of people that do not yet exist. They're not real, they do not yet exist, I'm never going to meet them. If you feel empathy for them, be my guest in doing whatever you want to make you feel better.
The harm is far more minor than it is being made out to be.
I might agree, except that as I said in point 3, I don't think me shutting off the computer and going through the inconvenience of waiting for it to boot when I need to use it is going to make that big of a difference. Biking instead of using my car? That's much less minor, but there are health benefits, so I might consider it if I'm not going grocery shopping or something. Biking to work? That's a HUGE inconvenience, it'd take me hours, which account for my free time during the week. That would make a serious impact on my quality of life.
True, I suppose the contract is of a form that doesn't normally exist. Being born you were brought into a world that is pretty nice. You are expected to keep it that way. An example of this is parenthood. You were raised and helped through school, got to leech off your parents. You aren't expected to pay them back for this. But you are expected to do the same for children if you have any. (There are real world examples of deals you don't get an option on, being part of society for example.)
I do have the option. I have the option of not having kids, therefore not "paying it forward" as you describe. Actually, that's very similar to the option of just not having future generations of humans.
Human population is to peak soon and shall drop
Yay. Problem solved without me having to give up anything, as long as we drop enough in population to compensate for the increased power usage of third-world countries. Lower usage of energy by the human race without impacting the usage of energy by individuals is fantastic, since it doesn't involve lowering of quality of life.
Nuclear can produce a net 0 carbon output. Next we need to switch cars to electric, this can be mostly done over 20 years. And lastly cement manufacture can be modified fairly easily.
Yay. Real solutions to real problems that don't involve me giving up anything in my day-to-day life. I'm fine with those. In fact, that's what I've always argued for. Instead of asking me to use less energy, we need to produce more energy in anticipation for the increased power usage. If we can do that in a cleaner way, such as with nuclear, that's what we should do. Most environmentalists hate nuclear though, and we can't yet do it with wind turbines and solar cells.
Electric cars are a given. We're all going to switch, it's a given. Oil is more expensive than electricity, and the cost of electric cars are coming down, while their range goes up. It's not even going to be an environmental choice, it's going to be a simple choice of people wanting the better car.
As I enjoy living a good life I can use empathy and see that it is universal...Why choose this as the basis of my ethical rules? Because being purely in it for myself wouldn't satisfy me as much.
My basis for ethical rules are very similar. In fact, the way you described it, you are in it for yourself. Doing good things for others satisfies you because you have empathy for them. That was my point about human emotions not following a logical pattern. If it makes your life better to help out future generations go for it. If I don't feel the same empathy for them, it doesn't make sense for me. If it costs me nothing to help out that's another thing, but that's not the case here.
The problem that I have with decreasing my quality of life by using less energy in order to preserve the Earth for future generations has several parts to it:
It is a form of self-harm. I'm denying myself benefits in order to help future orders.
I believe my ethical responsibilities come from a social contract. I agree that stealing from my neighbor is wrong. By living in a society where everyone agrees to this, I'm safe from my neighbor stealing from me. What are the future generations going to give me in exchange for my agreement to give up certain luxuries for them?
The strategy people are trying to instill make no sense. Look at the human population increase over the last 40 years or so. Assuming we all decrease our energy usage by half (which is completely unrealistic), we're going to be right back where we started (and with a lower quality of life due to using less energy) in another 30 years. That's assuming the third-world countries don't catch up to the first-world ones in energy usage. It's an insane strategy. If you want to really help make a difference have 0-2 kids and stop contributing to population increase. Less humans = lower human impact on our planet without lowering our current energy expenditure and quality of life.
If a dog is keeping you up and you can kill it and get away with it why not?
Are you vegetarian? Because if not, you enjoy the fact that animals are being killed for your benefit all the time. Is the difference the fact that you didn't do it with your hands? Or just that it's not illegal and is in fact part of our accepted society?
When you eat that next juicy steak you should get yourself about the same level of enjoyment as you would get from a good night's sleep after you kill that dog.
That said, no I wouldn't kill the dog, because I like dogs and it would harm me because I would feel bad about it. I don't feel bad about all the cows that die. Do you know what that proves? Human emotions don't follow a logical pattern. And in the same way I don't care about the cows, I don't care about what happens to the human race after I die. I won't be here to see it or regret it, so why should I?
Just because it won't effect[sic] you personally doesn't mean there are no ethical obligations on your part.
That's a very deep discussion, it's not a one-liner. Philosophers have been debating ethics for a very long time and coming up with different answers. We could go down this road if you want, but you'd have to explain why you feel that we, as individuals, have an ethical obligation to protect the species. The discussion is going to boil down to more basic components until we reach essential axioms that form the basis of our individual beliefs, and we won't be able to logically defend those. We're going to disagree on some of these basic beliefs, and there will be no way to move the conversation forward from then on.
If you're infected with even one meme, you should care.
It's not that I don't care about humans now. I still get to enjoy the experience of human culture and all it has to offer. However, once I'm dead and gone, that's no longer the case. Maybe we finally invent the flying car, maybe the world of Star Trek materializes and we're all exploring the galaxy. I'm not here to see it so there's absolutely no benefit for me.
You don't seriously doubt it's going to come, do you? A law has passed the house, a law has passed congress. They're not very far apart, everything that still needs to be done can be passed with simple majorities which the Democrats have with comfortable margins.
I'm for Universal Health Care, but everything I've seen proposed is worse than the situation we have now.
We need a single-payer system available for every citizen, and that's not what I'm seeing the democrats push for. In fact, except for some like Kucinich, they mostly try to distance themselves from the idea and claim that single-payer is the farthest thing from their mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. A professor starts marking final exams and realizes that their exam was too difficult because the entire class failed*
That's not how you evaluate whether the test was fair. It's unfair if you included material they were not expected to know. If you taught the material, then anything goes, and it's fair. Just time it so that you give the students about 3x as long as it takes you to solve the test, and then you can be sure that the time was fair too (because even a beginner shouldn't really take three times as you to do calculations).
I don't know what field you TA'd in, but in physics it's bloody hard for a prof to create a "fair" exam. To make a long diatribe short, usually a prof has to either err on the side of making the exam too easy or too difficult, and they always choose "too difficult" because low marks still yield meaningful data about student capabilities. (i.e., it's hard to grade students fairly when everyone scores 100% on the final.)
My field was EE. My idea of fair has nothing to do with easy or difficult. If the material is difficult and the entire class literally fails, then the entire class fails, and there's nothing wrong with that. If the material is easy and the entire class gets A's, then the entire class gets A's and there's nothing wrong with that.
What the professor should ask himself is, "what is the point of this class? When they leave here, what should they be able to do?" If the answer to that results in really easy exams, fine. If the answer to that results in a class where the pass rate is less than 5%, fine. The only thing that's important is that the syllabus says that the students will gain knowledge of a certain subject, and that's what you should be evaluating them on.
Similarly, part of what a professor should be evaluated on by the students is whether or not he covered the material the class was meant to cover. I tended to give bad evaluations to professors who included things in their syllabus they later decided not to cover, because he decided some people weren't getting a particular thing and he therefore wanted to spend more time on it. No. If he's concerned about these people, he can offer to meet with them for additional time, but he shouldn't be screwing up everybody else because of them.
With many students being denied entry into a particular college/university/etc. because they are at their supposed maximum capacity.. I, for one, would think it entirely that college/university's business to say "If you're not going to attend, gtfo - we'd rather have somebody who does." as a deterrent to future students who plan on low/no attendance.
Being bored to death in a classroom setting does not imply a good student. I fully support fair exams which weed out the people who are not learning, giving way to better students. If you already know your material / the class isn't challenging you, but you are still required to take the course in order to get your degree you have a duty of skipping and not wasting your valuable time.
If you think you can skip and make the grade, and then it turns out you can't, it's your own fault for being irresponsible. Then you fail, and if you do that enough times, drop out, leaving room for that good student you're talking about.
If you want to complain about having crappy students taking space, complain about grade inflation, and the propensity of graders to "curve." Why should everyone's grade go up because there were a lot of mediocre grades? Either you think your evaluation was unfair, in which case you need to give them a fair one, or your evaluation was fair and everyone sucked, in which case they need to get the grades they deserve.
In my experience as a TA in grad school, there were an awful lot of people who showed up to all the classes, to all the review sessions, who showed up on office hours asking question, and still could not grasp the material. They're wasting as much space as the dude who's going to fail because he doesn't have the responsibility to do the work. The people who show up and do well are exactly as valuable as the people who don't show up and still do well.
Or, they turn around and blame the professor (and the school) for failing to teach them. And ask for their money back. If the school can demonstrate, that they have not attended the classes, they can defend themselves.
Fuck that, the service the university is providing is not a guarantee that they will learn. Even if they attended all the classes, no professor can fix stupid. The university makes the material available, and evaluates you to see if you have mastered the material. If they fail on the first one, you've chosen a bad university, if they fail on the second one, employers will learn to not trust graduates from that university. Universities are accredited to make sure that the material being taught corresponds to the degree they are providing. If the University is accredited, there's no case.
It's not that there are no bad professors. You get a bad professor, then you go study on your own time.
Yeah, yeah, it's not PC to imply that people are different, some people are more intelligent than others, some people are incapable of achieving what others can despite trying. Despite not being PC, it's still true.
I think it was a little overboard, but I guess the message was very clearly sent and recieved
Find a job elsewhere?
I mean, I don't blame the investigation, I don't blame firing the dude who was torrenting, but canning half the department for visiting web pages? You could pay me enough to work in a place like that, but the amount we're talking about would have to allow me to retire within 1-3 paychecks.
It will be a small comfort to me, when consumer devices are only shipped with burned in ROM with sealed circuitry, to know that people like you got just what you were asking for.
That's good. I hope that when all vehicles come with no hood you can open it will also be a small comfort to you that people who do their own car maintenance without paying the dealership exorbitant amounts of money got just what they were asking for.
And then released the hack into the wild.
He released knowledge which he acquired by messing with his property. You tell me exactly what gives Sony the right to stop him from doing that. The moral right I mean, since they obviously don't have the legal right to. Tell me what gives Sony the right to stop people from using this third-party knowledge to tinker with their own console. Does the fact that they didn't figure it out themselves make it less their property?
Hmm, I wonder which step Sony cares about more.
My point is precisely that I don't give a shit what Sony cares about, and neither should anyone else. Geohot paid money for his console, part of this money went to Sony. I paid money for my console, part of this money went to Sony. The transaction is completed, and they are no longer the owners of the property.
Geohot is the one who caused this goddamn mess in the first place. If he hadn't decided to poke his nose where it didn't belong we wouldn't be having these problems.
Although I am pissed off that his actions are causing me problems, I don't blame him, I blame Sony. Geohot was doing something with his console, which he acquired legally. It's his right to do whatever he likes with his property, whether or not Sony approves of it.
Which is really the crux of this problem. I don't care what their EULA says, the PS3 promised the ability to both install an alternate OS and play games / connect to their network. Now they want to remove this functionality and make people choose which they want to do, and now they apparently want to avoid people holding back on the updates by automatically updating without asking the user first. They're clearly the ones to be angry at.
But is has already been done. An actual viable plan to get to Mars would be a new exploration, but no one has ever been willing to put up the cash for that.
We're not supposed to step backwards. We've been there, that's been done. We're no longer there, and that's a problem. Thus, before we can move forward, we must do it again.
It's like training to run for 3 miles, achieving that and patting yourself on the back. Then you quit running for 10 years, and tell yourself, "well, I can't train to run 3 miles again, I've already done that. Let me go ahead and go for 6.
We've lost the ability to reach the moon. We can't aim for mars until we get that back.
Personally, I'm looking for 2 things in the answer. The basic, pass fail: "C++ is C with classes". The answer that demonstrates such a keen understanding of good programming that it outweighs almost everything else in the interview if you know it: "with C++ I can automate resource clean up, such as freeing memory and closing files, so that most code just can't have a resource leak and I don't waste time on such bugs".
Eh..."C++ is object-oriented" is the most obvious "pass/fail answer." That said, C++ doesn't really automate resource cleanup that much better than C. Sure, auto_ptr and destructors are nice, but you can still screw yourself up and leak memory in thousands of other ways, so I'm not sure your second answer is really that good. It's not like you can't have a well-organized C code that minimizes your chances of forgetting to clean up resources, in the same way that C++ does it. If you really wanted to, you could write code that mimics object-oriented code very well in C, although you really don't need it. Just a set of best practices is usually enough, and C++ is no replacement for them.
All of that said, I do like C++ a lot. I just don't really agree with your best answer there :)
This is true until/unless all big content bands together.
But that's collusion, and it's illegal.
I like it.
You should just go away.
You're not alone. I'm a fan as well.
Talk about having no life. If slashdot doesn't post anything these people like, do they really have that much trouble finding something else to do? At the very least find other sites to visit...for one...fucking...day. The internet is a big place.
You're right. Considering that the tablet in question is about as versatile as the appliances you mentioned, I now have no complaints about it being locked down. Just lock it away somewhere and my joy will be complete.
*YAWN* Sorry. You were commenting on the versatility of a product you've never, ever, ever, not-even-for-a-second, laid your hands upon. Please continue. Your incredibly-informed opinions on this subject are absolutely riveting!
You're an idiot. How do you decide whether you're going to buy the product in the first place? The company needs to convince you of its capabilities through ads, product description, etc. We've all seen Apple's description of the iPad and what the iPad does. So I'm either supposed to believe that Apple's marketing department sucks and were unable to give me a proper overview of the iPad or believe that my opinion of this product is obviously bullshit unless I go out and purchase one? Maybe I should I wait for somebody I know to purchase one? How in the hell are they ever going to do that unless they know somebody who has purchased one too? Should I go to the Apple Store and play around with one? Are the Apple "geniuses" going to tell me anything about it that hasn't already been listed in the websites? Is Apple hiding functionality in order to surprise their users? I'm also guessing every single person who pre-ordered the iPad is a moron, because they shelled cash when they obviously are incredibly ill-informed since they've "never, ever, ever, not-even-for-a-second, laid [their] hands upon it."
We're all as well-informed about what the device does as possible. We know the specs, we've seen the videos. I have no idea what all the people who pre-ordered it are going to do with it, since I know for a FACT that the damn thing is so limited that it would be of absolutely no use to ME. I'm sure the iPad will have very real uses for many of those people, and they have determined this information through the same sources I've had. I'm also guessing many (perhaps most) of the people who buy it just want to play around with a cool device, and they earn a lot more than I do, so they get to have expensive toys that they will tire of pretty soon.
I've got two game that use this types of system, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. I honestly think this system is good for consumers in the end because it should decrease the cost of used games.
You've fallen into EA's trap. The crap additional "free DLC" that I didn't bother to install even with the game that I bought new is just the first wave, designed to make you accept the state of things. They're moving towards giving you essentially a cd-key in order to play the game at all. And since it's also activated online, you won't be able to sell your game at all.
They're not interested in making used games more attractive, they're interested in killing the market. That's why even in this original iteration, they've carefully designed the price of the "free dlc" to be just over the price difference between a used and new copy.
And those of us who wait a year or so before buying a game, so we can pick it up new for $20? The repackaged 1-year old games won't give you the "free" content, mark my words.
The entire concept of downloadable content is unacceptable, unless you were allowed to sell it and transfer your license to other people, with no restrictions.
Einstein did not find out what he found out by calculatign[sic], first he understood the physics behind it after eh calculated for us the formula E=MC^2
Man, you have no idea what you're talking about. Einstein was having severe problems with General Relativity until his mathematician friend, Mercel Grossman, looked at what he was doing and pointed out, "hey, you need to describe this using these things called tensors.": look here
Before that, Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician, had looked at Einstein's Special Relativity and thought, "hey...if we describe these things in four dimensions, these equations become really elegant." Yes, Minkowski space was derived from the physics, but the math dealing with higher dimensions than just three was around long before.
Which is worse? Something not supposed to be classified NOT being leaked, or something SUPPOSED to be classified being leaked? I, and most people, would say the latter.
Honestly...if Wikileaks got the information, what makes you think foreign spies can't get to it? As far as I'm concerned, if Wikileaks manages to get their hands on missile launch codes and leak it, that's a win for everyone. Now the government knows to change the code as well as start an investigation into how in the hell this information was leaked and who needs to be tried for treason as a result of leaking it.
Why? Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually
Haven't had that problem. I guess don't use ALSA directly, use it through PulseAudio. I know there's a lot of complaints about PulseAudio, but I had problems with audio in linux for a very long time, and PulseAudio made all the problems just go away. So maybe it'd be good for you, or maybe it breaks everything like it does for some other people.
kernel panics from nVidia drivers
Haven't had that problem. If it happens for you, isn't that an nvidia issue, if you're talking about the proprietary drivers, and an issue with whoever makes the open source drivers if not? What about ubuntu would make them work differently?
completely non-orthagonal design, with Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system
Well, Ubuntu is not for you, then. It's designed for people who don't have much Linux experience, so they don't know that they have choices, and aren't expected to make them.
I don't like Gnome at all, and when I tried to remove it, rapidly found that I couldn't.
If you remove gnome, you're going to miss out on a whole bunch of administrative applications they've designed to work really well with gnome (again, because it's aimed for people who have no linux experience, and they never need to drop to the command-line). That said, they don't prevent you from removing it, and never have. I've removed gnome before. It also removes the gnome-desktop meta-package which automatically includes all those applications I was talking about. If you do want all the power of those options, and are annoyed by the choices they make for you, Debian is a better choice for a distro.
Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart, and the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it, such that even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work.
Heh...I guess Debian's not for you, then. Although, I have to say you're insane. What the hell is wrong with upstart? It's backward compatible with init, so you don't even need to do anything differently if you want to do things by hand. And fstab not working? Debian and Ubuntu respect fstab just fine.
Hard drives get mounted some other way, that I wasn't able to find.
It's called udev. Are you still using a 2.4 kernel or something?
Add to that, the "quiet splash," options in GRUB, which remove the ability to debug a faulty installation, leading to the infamous "black screen of death."
No, it does not remove any such ability. If you know enough to debug a faulty installation, you know how to edit the grub menu at bootup and remove those. If you're a normal computer user, the text is just gibberish anyway.
Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?
It's an easy-to-use system and you know where everything is. So you can give it to your computer illiterate friend as a replacement for windows, and when he calls you up with questions about how to get something to work, you don't have to ask, "are you running kde or gnome?" You can just tell him, "what do you want to do? Ah, install an office app? Go to Applications / Add-Remove Software / navigate to Office." I had my parents switch from Windows to Ubuntu years ago, and I don't have to support them nearly as much as I had to in the windows days. Hell, Windows is still installed on their machine as dual-boot, but they've been asking me to remove it next time I'm town, so they can claim the extra disk space.
Choices are great. The first choice you need to make if Ubuntu's default choices are not for you is to choose anot
Since when did the right to self-determination, freedom of expression and thought, freedom to not be oppressed by a fascist state, become wrong?
That only works if you believe morals are universal. In truth, we know that it's relative. You can look at how relative it is without leaving the US: just look at the health care issue. You have the people who say that it's immoral to let people who can't afford health insurance to go without. On the other side you also have the people who say it's immoral to be forced to pay the costs for others, when they may not be taking care of their own bodies and thus being at a higher health risk then their neighbors who are paying for this government mandated care. Who is right?
The truth is that it depends on what morals you personally subscribe to. The solution would be more states rights. This way people who wanted universal health care could live in a state that provides it (and pay the taxes), and those that do not want it could live in a state that does not provide it, and buy their own privately.
Similarly, who are you to say the Chinese are wrong if they want their government to "protect" them on the internet. I certainly wouldn't want it, but if that's what they do, it's their country. Either way, Google isn't doing anything wrong, quite the contrary, they're doing everything right. It's against the ethics of this American company and management to continue to censor websites in China. It's against the ethics of this American company and management to enable human rights abuses. And they told the Chinese government that they can either change the rules or leave. They're not threatening to forcefully impose American morals on China with mighty military power, they're telling them that Chinese morals are not compatible, and that they'll be forced to leave.
even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday.
Judging from the amount of people on Slashdot in the middle of the day, I would say that you are wrong.
Oh, we're all working hard. We just check slashdot while compiling
According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:
Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.
Heh...these apology for bad predictions articles are always funny as hell, so do you know why you don't see more of them, even though "contrarianism helps sell magazines"? It's because the contrarians are usually right and then you don't have the apology article years later, it's just business as usual.
The unwashed masses suck at predicting the future. Think about the future predictions of the 50's and 60's and wonder why you don't have a flying car, a robot maid, and why even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday. However, the world is marvelously different than what it used to be, just in a completely different way than they predicted.
So while self-preservation is important we find that species preservation and preservation of life is also important as these features can be seen throughout the animal kingdom.
You're right that it's important for the preservation of the species, but evolution doesn't care about the individual. If every member of the human species were self-centered the species wouldn't survive. My point is precisely that the lack of survival of the species doesn't affect a single individual living now, so why should I care for the survival of the species.
Sure, that's why we evolved empathy, and if I were placed in a situation where every other human being would die if I didn't kill myself, I'd kill myself. However, these are other human beings living now, for which I do have empathy, and therefore protecting them benefits me, by not making me feel the remorse after the fact, if I chose my life over theirs. I don't have that feeling of empathy to future generations of people that do not yet exist. They're not real, they do not yet exist, I'm never going to meet them. If you feel empathy for them, be my guest in doing whatever you want to make you feel better.
The harm is far more minor than it is being made out to be.
I might agree, except that as I said in point 3, I don't think me shutting off the computer and going through the inconvenience of waiting for it to boot when I need to use it is going to make that big of a difference. Biking instead of using my car? That's much less minor, but there are health benefits, so I might consider it if I'm not going grocery shopping or something. Biking to work? That's a HUGE inconvenience, it'd take me hours, which account for my free time during the week. That would make a serious impact on my quality of life.
True, I suppose the contract is of a form that doesn't normally exist. Being born you were brought into a world that is pretty nice. You are expected to keep it that way. An example of this is parenthood. You were raised and helped through school, got to leech off your parents. You aren't expected to pay them back for this. But you are expected to do the same for children if you have any. (There are real world examples of deals you don't get an option on, being part of society for example.)
I do have the option. I have the option of not having kids, therefore not "paying it forward" as you describe. Actually, that's very similar to the option of just not having future generations of humans.
Human population is to peak soon and shall drop
Yay. Problem solved without me having to give up anything, as long as we drop enough in population to compensate for the increased power usage of third-world countries. Lower usage of energy by the human race without impacting the usage of energy by individuals is fantastic, since it doesn't involve lowering of quality of life.
Nuclear can produce a net 0 carbon output. Next we need to switch cars to electric, this can be mostly done over 20 years. And lastly cement manufacture can be modified fairly easily.
Yay. Real solutions to real problems that don't involve me giving up anything in my day-to-day life. I'm fine with those. In fact, that's what I've always argued for. Instead of asking me to use less energy, we need to produce more energy in anticipation for the increased power usage. If we can do that in a cleaner way, such as with nuclear, that's what we should do. Most environmentalists hate nuclear though, and we can't yet do it with wind turbines and solar cells.
Electric cars are a given. We're all going to switch, it's a given. Oil is more expensive than electricity, and the cost of electric cars are coming down, while their range goes up. It's not even going to be an environmental choice, it's going to be a simple choice of people wanting the better car.
I b
As I enjoy living a good life I can use empathy and see that it is universal...Why choose this as the basis of my ethical rules? Because being purely in it for myself wouldn't satisfy me as much.
My basis for ethical rules are very similar. In fact, the way you described it, you are in it for yourself. Doing good things for others satisfies you because you have empathy for them. That was my point about human emotions not following a logical pattern. If it makes your life better to help out future generations go for it. If I don't feel the same empathy for them, it doesn't make sense for me. If it costs me nothing to help out that's another thing, but that's not the case here.
The problem that I have with decreasing my quality of life by using less energy in order to preserve the Earth for future generations has several parts to it:
If a dog is keeping you up and you can kill it and get away with it why not?
Are you vegetarian? Because if not, you enjoy the fact that animals are being killed for your benefit all the time. Is the difference the fact that you didn't do it with your hands? Or just that it's not illegal and is in fact part of our accepted society?
When you eat that next juicy steak you should get yourself about the same level of enjoyment as you would get from a good night's sleep after you kill that dog.
That said, no I wouldn't kill the dog, because I like dogs and it would harm me because I would feel bad about it. I don't feel bad about all the cows that die. Do you know what that proves? Human emotions don't follow a logical pattern. And in the same way I don't care about the cows, I don't care about what happens to the human race after I die. I won't be here to see it or regret it, so why should I?
Just because it won't effect[sic] you personally doesn't mean there are no ethical obligations on your part.
That's a very deep discussion, it's not a one-liner. Philosophers have been debating ethics for a very long time and coming up with different answers. We could go down this road if you want, but you'd have to explain why you feel that we, as individuals, have an ethical obligation to protect the species. The discussion is going to boil down to more basic components until we reach essential axioms that form the basis of our individual beliefs, and we won't be able to logically defend those. We're going to disagree on some of these basic beliefs, and there will be no way to move the conversation forward from then on.
If you're infected with even one meme, you should care.
It's not that I don't care about humans now. I still get to enjoy the experience of human culture and all it has to offer. However, once I'm dead and gone, that's no longer the case. Maybe we finally invent the flying car, maybe the world of Star Trek materializes and we're all exploring the galaxy. I'm not here to see it so there's absolutely no benefit for me.
You don't seriously doubt it's going to come, do you? A law has passed the house, a law has passed congress. They're not very far apart, everything that still needs to be done can be passed with simple majorities which the Democrats have with comfortable margins.
I'm for Universal Health Care, but everything I've seen proposed is worse than the situation we have now.
We need a single-payer system available for every citizen, and that's not what I'm seeing the democrats push for. In fact, except for some like Kucinich, they mostly try to distance themselves from the idea and claim that single-payer is the farthest thing from their mind.
Until the world is not inhabitable anymore...
Why should I care if humans survive after I'm gone? I honestly don't have an answer for that, so maybe you can enlighten me.