The average user is now more than ever dependent on a fragile link of software-service-supplier chain, locking him in totally
The "average user" is completely dependent on that chain, since the average user doesn't know diddly-squat about coding. Or care. To the average user, software is a no-user-serviceable-parts-inside black box.
The only people who care are very far out at the end of the bell curve.
It's due to the fact that the very people in charge of messing up so badly they needed government help - are getting bonuses as though they had done exceptionally well.
Except that's not what these bonuses are. These are retention bonuses, not any sort of performance bonus.
Retention bonuses aren't so uncommon in the tech industry, either. There should be plenty of people here who have received retention bonuses at one time or another. You know, the kind where you start a new job and one of the benefits is, "Stay here XXX months and we'll give you a one-time check for $$$$." The idea is to prevent churn and keep someone new around long enough to start being useful to the company. As a worker I'd be plenty pissed if the company told me, "Sorry, we had a bad quarter and we're not going to pay you what you were promised." The money is not predicated on the well-being of the company; it's a well-defined value negotiated as a condition of taking the job.
Maybe the bonuses shouldn't be paid. Hell, maybe AIG should have an across-the-board pay cut. But it's not a case where people are getting bonuses for screwing up; this is just part of their regular compensation. It needs to be treated as such.
This particular outrage is really petty and misplaced. If you want to be outraged, don't obsess about the petty details. Be outraged that the bailout was given in the first place. Be outraged that the situation got to the point of needing a bailout. Be outraged that such a huge portion of our economy is dependent upon the collective delusion that all these secondary, tertiary, and quaternary "financial instruments" actually have some intrinsic value.
It still shares the Internet Explorer "Internet Options". Maybe, just maybe, I'd like to use different options for different programs. Until there's some way to quickly switch between proxies, I'm going to have to pass.
What I did do was set up transparent proxying through Squid on the Linux box that runs as our house firewall so I could scan the logs from time to time and see where she was going. She knew that her usage was being logged, but beyond that I did nothing at all.
I have two boys, 16 and 11. This is the solution I use, too. I just set up a Squid proxy and let them know I monitor the logs. Except for a few visits early on to sites with names like "tentacleporn.com" this has been sufficient. Very few kids want to explain to their parents what they're doing on a hentai site...
I also have Squid ACLs set up to allow or deny their computers access based on time of day. After bedtime their net access is cut off. This is actually important in my case, because the older one would get up in the middle of the night to surf the web. This, rather than content, was the motivating factor in setting up the proxy.
I initially had the firewall set up to deny their MAC addresses any access to the outside world. Everything *had* to go through the proxy. I removed that restriction a year or two ago, because of some apps which didn't play nice with a proxy. I've actually been hoping that they'd find the loophole, it would at least show some proficiency. Sadly, neither of them have figured out yet that Dad isn't using magic incantations to control the computer. Just commands that they, too, could learn if they desired...
Anyway, the original question wasn't about keeping the daughter from going to porn sites on purpose, just about keeping her from seeing them by accident. I'd say, don't worry about accidental stuff. If she does stumble upon something that she doesn't like, she'll figure out how to get it off her screen. And let her know that there's no penalty for coming to you and saying, "Help me get rid of this" for the times when she can't figure it out on her own.
I think I'd second this. I've been a Cub Scout leader with kids in this same age group, and from my experience they don't have a lot of patience with purely academic exercises like programming. Especially not when they're in a group! They want to see results immediately.
Turtle bots should be a good solution. They're simple to build and easy to program. And they produce a tangible result -- ink on paper. When they start to get tired of making simple designs give the bots different colored pens and have the kids program them to work together to make a multi-colored drawing. (A good but tricky project might be a waving American flag. Have one or two bots making the stripes, another making the star field. Try it one bot at a time, then see if they can get it so all the bots are working at once without bumping into each other.)
Lego sounds like a good idea, but these kids are really much too young for the Lego robotics kits. They take a good deal of patience, both in building and in programming. Some kids will take to it early, but I really wouldn't start a group of random kids on it until they were around 12 years old.
Or, put another way, "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." --N. Bonaparte
I generally agree with that statement, but I'm really having a hard time figuring out how anyone could be that incompetent. What does a voting machine need to do? Count ballots, and keep a record of the count. That's about it. Oh, sure, you put a nice GUI and a touch screen on it, but at its core you're simply doing "candidate++; write_log(candidate);" over and over again. And the numbers you're counting aren't even that big, relatively speaking. They're certainly not going to overflow a 32-bit integer, so you don't have to worry about roll-over.
How can anyone be incompetent enough to screw that up? That's truly creative incompetence.
I think there is a good telephone analogy: you cannot hold any telephone company employees guilty of assisting someone who has been making obscene phone calls.
Unless, of course, the phone company in question was named something like "The Obscene Call Bay", in which case it's pretty obvious that the company intends to attract and cater to people who make such calls.
Maybe you're suggesting that the word "Pirate" is just a historical reference to those lovable scamps of the Caribbean? In that case, I think you could also justify "Hooters" as being an owl-themed restaurant. God only knows why all their waitresses run around wearing clothing two sizes too small for them...
And maybe someday we will have games that run in resizable areas that take less than the full screen, so that one can run any arbitrary application (or even applications!) in the remaining space. Wow! Wouldn't that be something!
Well legally they can't ask the student to leave (where would they ask her to go?
Teachers can certainly ask the child to leave the classroom. The principal's office is always a good choice for a disruptive student. A friend of mine is a 7th grade teacher. She sometimes asks a kid to move thier desk out to the hallway; that they weren't welcome in her classroom until they stopped doing {whatever}.
What teacher's can't do is touch the kids. Even in classrooms for kids with behavioral problems the principal needs to be called in to restrain a violent child. (The teachers can of course protect themselves and other students, but the prinicpal had better get called at the same time.) BTW, I have some experience in this area; my kid was almost kicked out of that class for being too disruptive.
I know that some teachers handle this sort of thing better than others, and that some cops are tripping on power. But where I live, I find the vast majority of school personnel and police officers to be reasonable people. I can easily imagine situations in which the kid's behavior would finally get to the point where it's necessary to call in someone who *can* physically remove them from the room. As a parent, unless I know that the teacher, principal, and cops involved are all real jerks, I'm willing to cut them some slack. If the same situation occurred with my kids, I'd question the need for police but it wouldn't be hard for the school to justify it to me. Sometimes a kid really needs to be hit with a *BIG* cluestick.
No, no. They're only terrorists when they're your enemies doing something to you. When you do it to them you get to call yourselves "patriotic freedom fighters".
"short-first last" -- 311,000 hits. The first page is mostly politicians. Must be a good all-American-sounding name.
"full-first last" -- 627,000 hits. My full first name is pronounced the same as that of a celebrity, but spelled differently. Top hits are all for him.
"full-first middle-initial last" -- 1,070 hits. One hit on the second page is actually about me!
"full-first full-middle last" -- 4 hits. Two are in the membership list of some trade organization I've never heard of. The other two are entries in different genealogical databases. One of those is actually me.
Plausible deniability, that's the name of the game!
When I throw out gear like that tho...It rarely makes it into the garbage truck. I put it out at night....usually on top of the trash pile...during the night, most of the time..someone comes by and takes it themselves.
That's just raccoons. Nasty things, always getting into garbage cans...
EPUB is pretty useful. It's an outgrowth of the Open eBook (OEB) format. If you have something in that form I expect all you'd need to do is change the filename to get an EPUB reader to open it. It's essentially XHTML plus some metadata, so it's pretty easy to convert existing HTML docs to the format. Likewise, Microsoft LIT files (non-DRM'd, anyway) can be pretty trivially translated to EPUB.
It would be nice if Baen supported EPUB directly. It would also be nice if they were consistent with their metadata... At least their HTML is reasonably clean, and fairly consistently formatted. It's not hard to automate conversion of their stuff to EPUB.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, distributes utter crap for HTML. It's not as bad as what MS Word produces, but it's close. (I think he uses OpenOffice and just dumps the doc to an HTML file.) No consistency whatsoever. No use of header tags. Lots of <font> tags and paragraphs with embedded style attributes. Hellish to try to convert to anything other than the malformed tag soup that it is. It took me 2 hours the other night to convert Little Brother to something useful, even with HTML Tidy and a good working knowledge of regular expressions.
The Swedish public service television [CC] announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation.
I haven't visited SLC in a few years, but last time I was there I found a couple of pretty ridiculous laws. #1, I had an inch of beer left in my glass when the waitress brought me another. "Just put it down", I said. She said, "I can't. State law says you have to finish one drink before I can give you another." #2, I tried to order a medium-rare hamburger. Nope. State law doesn't let them serve ground beef cooked less than medium.
Perhaps you would like Amarok, or KOffice, or something.
Yes, I would. So imagine my disappointment when I got to the KDE download page and read...
Windows and Mac OS X
KDE under these Operating Systems is experimental state. Things might, or might not work properly at this point in time.
An installer for KDE applications on Windows is available on windows.kde.org. These are experimental packages. On TechBase you can find detailed installation instructions.
For Apple's OSX, there are technology previews of some applications available on mac.kde.org.
Okay, pop over to mac.kde.org. Oh, look, "Official support for Mac OS X is targeted for KDE 4.1.0." Wasn't that a while ago now? Isn't this supposed to be the 4.2.0 release? What's on the download page? Looks like 4.1.2. Well now, isn't that special?
Doesn't look to me like it's time yet to include either Windows or Mac in the phrase "KDE, the desktop environment for Linux, Windows, Mac, and (Open)Solaris, [...]".
Don't worry, I've already read this story. We're perfectly safe from the artificial black holes as long as someone is already working on a time machine.
In so far as "TV will never be the same", the summary was too far into hyperbole. But I also don't choose what I watch based on viewership numbers.
No, it's quite literally true. TV will never be the same after that episode. That episode will divide TV history into "pre-final episode" and "post-final episode". TV will never again be able to go back to the "pre-final episode" state. It'll CHANGE FOREVER, don't you SEE!?
Not that anyone would be able to tell the difference, of course.
I have a few of those. Nice little paper notebooks embossed with the Google logo, given away as promotional items. You can use them anywhere, no computer needed!
But I believe that GraphiteCube was talking about when you're not using your own computer. That is, you're using someone else's, or a public terminal or something. But personally, I'd just send email to myself in that case. Or use my paper Google notebook.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The "average user" is completely dependent on that chain, since the average user doesn't know diddly-squat about coding. Or care. To the average user, software is a no-user-serviceable-parts-inside black box.
The only people who care are very far out at the end of the bell curve.
Except that's not what these bonuses are. These are retention bonuses, not any sort of performance bonus.
Retention bonuses aren't so uncommon in the tech industry, either. There should be plenty of people here who have received retention bonuses at one time or another. You know, the kind where you start a new job and one of the benefits is, "Stay here XXX months and we'll give you a one-time check for $$$$." The idea is to prevent churn and keep someone new around long enough to start being useful to the company. As a worker I'd be plenty pissed if the company told me, "Sorry, we had a bad quarter and we're not going to pay you what you were promised." The money is not predicated on the well-being of the company; it's a well-defined value negotiated as a condition of taking the job.
Maybe the bonuses shouldn't be paid. Hell, maybe AIG should have an across-the-board pay cut. But it's not a case where people are getting bonuses for screwing up; this is just part of their regular compensation. It needs to be treated as such.
This particular outrage is really petty and misplaced. If you want to be outraged, don't obsess about the petty details. Be outraged that the bailout was given in the first place. Be outraged that the situation got to the point of needing a bailout. Be outraged that such a huge portion of our economy is dependent upon the collective delusion that all these secondary, tertiary, and quaternary "financial instruments" actually have some intrinsic value.
There haven't been many times he's needed Internet access after hours, but when he has I've removed the restriction for that night.
Getting him to do the homework in the first place is another issue...
It still shares the Internet Explorer "Internet Options". Maybe, just maybe, I'd like to use different options for different programs. Until there's some way to quickly switch between proxies, I'm going to have to pass.
Dear Harlan,
You didn't like the final script. You threatened to take your name off of it. That was 45 years ago. In short, bite me.
Signed, everyone.
I have two boys, 16 and 11. This is the solution I use, too. I just set up a Squid proxy and let them know I monitor the logs. Except for a few visits early on to sites with names like "tentacleporn.com" this has been sufficient. Very few kids want to explain to their parents what they're doing on a hentai site...
I also have Squid ACLs set up to allow or deny their computers access based on time of day. After bedtime their net access is cut off. This is actually important in my case, because the older one would get up in the middle of the night to surf the web. This, rather than content, was the motivating factor in setting up the proxy.
I initially had the firewall set up to deny their MAC addresses any access to the outside world. Everything *had* to go through the proxy. I removed that restriction a year or two ago, because of some apps which didn't play nice with a proxy. I've actually been hoping that they'd find the loophole, it would at least show some proficiency. Sadly, neither of them have figured out yet that Dad isn't using magic incantations to control the computer. Just commands that they, too, could learn if they desired...
Anyway, the original question wasn't about keeping the daughter from going to porn sites on purpose, just about keeping her from seeing them by accident. I'd say, don't worry about accidental stuff. If she does stumble upon something that she doesn't like, she'll figure out how to get it off her screen. And let her know that there's no penalty for coming to you and saying, "Help me get rid of this" for the times when she can't figure it out on her own.
Once again, web comics get it right...
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I think I'd second this. I've been a Cub Scout leader with kids in this same age group, and from my experience they don't have a lot of patience with purely academic exercises like programming. Especially not when they're in a group! They want to see results immediately.
Turtle bots should be a good solution. They're simple to build and easy to program. And they produce a tangible result -- ink on paper. When they start to get tired of making simple designs give the bots different colored pens and have the kids program them to work together to make a multi-colored drawing. (A good but tricky project might be a waving American flag. Have one or two bots making the stripes, another making the star field. Try it one bot at a time, then see if they can get it so all the bots are working at once without bumping into each other.)
Lego sounds like a good idea, but these kids are really much too young for the Lego robotics kits. They take a good deal of patience, both in building and in programming. Some kids will take to it early, but I really wouldn't start a group of random kids on it until they were around 12 years old.
I generally agree with that statement, but I'm really having a hard time figuring out how anyone could be that incompetent. What does a voting machine need to do? Count ballots, and keep a record of the count. That's about it. Oh, sure, you put a nice GUI and a touch screen on it, but at its core you're simply doing "candidate++; write_log(candidate);" over and over again. And the numbers you're counting aren't even that big, relatively speaking. They're certainly not going to overflow a 32-bit integer, so you don't have to worry about roll-over.
How can anyone be incompetent enough to screw that up? That's truly creative incompetence.
Unless, of course, the phone company in question was named something like "The Obscene Call Bay", in which case it's pretty obvious that the company intends to attract and cater to people who make such calls.
Maybe you're suggesting that the word "Pirate" is just a historical reference to those lovable scamps of the Caribbean? In that case, I think you could also justify "Hooters" as being an owl-themed restaurant. God only knows why all their waitresses run around wearing clothing two sizes too small for them...
And maybe someday we will have games that run in resizable areas that take less than the full screen, so that one can run any arbitrary application (or even applications!) in the remaining space. Wow! Wouldn't that be something!
Teachers can certainly ask the child to leave the classroom. The principal's office is always a good choice for a disruptive student. A friend of mine is a 7th grade teacher. She sometimes asks a kid to move thier desk out to the hallway; that they weren't welcome in her classroom until they stopped doing {whatever}.
What teacher's can't do is touch the kids. Even in classrooms for kids with behavioral problems the principal needs to be called in to restrain a violent child. (The teachers can of course protect themselves and other students, but the prinicpal had better get called at the same time.) BTW, I have some experience in this area; my kid was almost kicked out of that class for being too disruptive.
I know that some teachers handle this sort of thing better than others, and that some cops are tripping on power. But where I live, I find the vast majority of school personnel and police officers to be reasonable people. I can easily imagine situations in which the kid's behavior would finally get to the point where it's necessary to call in someone who *can* physically remove them from the room. As a parent, unless I know that the teacher, principal, and cops involved are all real jerks, I'm willing to cut them some slack. If the same situation occurred with my kids, I'd question the need for police but it wouldn't be hard for the school to justify it to me. Sometimes a kid really needs to be hit with a *BIG* cluestick.
No, no. They're only terrorists when they're your enemies doing something to you. When you do it to them you get to call yourselves "patriotic freedom fighters".
"short-first last" -- 311,000 hits. The first page is mostly politicians. Must be a good all-American-sounding name.
"full-first last" -- 627,000 hits. My full first name is pronounced the same as that of a celebrity, but spelled differently. Top hits are all for him.
"full-first middle-initial last" -- 1,070 hits. One hit on the second page is actually about me!
"full-first full-middle last" -- 4 hits. Two are in the membership list of some trade organization I've never heard of. The other two are entries in different genealogical databases. One of those is actually me.
Plausible deniability, that's the name of the game!
That's just raccoons. Nasty things, always getting into garbage cans...
EPUB is pretty useful. It's an outgrowth of the Open eBook (OEB) format. If you have something in that form I expect all you'd need to do is change the filename to get an EPUB reader to open it. It's essentially XHTML plus some metadata, so it's pretty easy to convert existing HTML docs to the format. Likewise, Microsoft LIT files (non-DRM'd, anyway) can be pretty trivially translated to EPUB.
It would be nice if Baen supported EPUB directly. It would also be nice if they were consistent with their metadata... At least their HTML is reasonably clean, and fairly consistently formatted. It's not hard to automate conversion of their stuff to EPUB.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, distributes utter crap for HTML. It's not as bad as what MS Word produces, but it's close. (I think he uses OpenOffice and just dumps the doc to an HTML file.) No consistency whatsoever. No use of header tags. Lots of <font> tags and paragraphs with embedded style attributes. Hellish to try to convert to anything other than the malformed tag soup that it is. It took me 2 hours the other night to convert Little Brother to something useful, even with HTML Tidy and a good working knowledge of regular expressions.
Yeah, but this is completely passive packet sniffing! It doesn't get the packets all sticky like the other tools do.
I haven't visited SLC in a few years, but last time I was there I found a couple of pretty ridiculous laws. #1, I had an inch of beer left in my glass when the waitress brought me another. "Just put it down", I said. She said, "I can't. State law says you have to finish one drink before I can give you another." #2, I tried to order a medium-rare hamburger. Nope. State law doesn't let them serve ground beef cooked less than medium.
Bunch of killjoys.
Or Jim Baen's Universe, a darned fine science-fiction and fantasy magazine published in electronic format only.
Yes, I would. So imagine my disappointment when I got to the KDE download page and read...
Okay, pop over to mac.kde.org. Oh, look, "Official support for Mac OS X is targeted for KDE 4.1.0." Wasn't that a while ago now? Isn't this supposed to be the 4.2.0 release? What's on the download page? Looks like 4.1.2. Well now, isn't that special?
Doesn't look to me like it's time yet to include either Windows or Mac in the phrase "KDE, the desktop environment for Linux, Windows, Mac, and (Open)Solaris, [...]".
Don't worry, I've already read this story. We're perfectly safe from the artificial black holes as long as someone is already working on a time machine.
No, it's quite literally true. TV will never be the same after that episode. That episode will divide TV history into "pre-final episode" and "post-final episode". TV will never again be able to go back to the "pre-final episode" state. It'll CHANGE FOREVER, don't you SEE!?
Not that anyone would be able to tell the difference, of course.
I have a few of those. Nice little paper notebooks embossed with the Google logo, given away as promotional items. You can use them anywhere, no computer needed!
But I believe that GraphiteCube was talking about when you're not using your own computer. That is, you're using someone else's, or a public terminal or something. But personally, I'd just send email to myself in that case. Or use my paper Google notebook. :-)
I'd love to viddy an FPS game called "Milk and Droogies." With a bit of the old Ludwig Van as the soundtrack. Real horrorshow, that would be.