Using mobile phones and eating while driving are already banned over here. I'm sure baning lighting up a ciggy while behind the wheel could follow the same logical justification.
Note: I'm not condoning one way or the other, just pointing out what has already been done.
I'm sorry, but saying that trains will inevitably get the same security treatments as planes eventually is absurd. What are you basing that on?
There have already been dozens of terrorist attacks on rail transport, and there has never been any drive in any form to tighten security beyond essentially the same measures as were introduced by the Victorian rail pioneers. Why do you assume that the contruction of a single, slightly faster railway in the US would drastically change anything? It's not even going to be the first high-speed line, nor (as far as I've heard) neccessarily any faster or technologically different from what already exists.
I mean it MIGHT, but then anything MIGHT happen. We might finally have flying cars by then, and this whole debate would be moot.
The reason plane-based attacks are treated so much more seriously is because of the uncanny similarity between a hijacked passenger jet and a cruise missile.
In the UK, we have "Freeview"- basically about 50 digital channels through your normal aerial (and so through regular coax). GPs suggestion would be nice for that. Plus obviously internet video (iPlayer, YouTube) and streaming from your personal collection.
While true "mens rae" doesn't neccessarily have to mean that you understand the law you're breaking, only that you intended the action that broke the law. Ignorance is not an excuse, as they say.
So for examble, shooting someone with a gun. If it's a complete accident, and no-one is to blame, that's OK. If you are to blame, that's negligence. If you aimed at someone and fired, that's GBH/murder. Even if you were completely and honestly unaware that shooting people was illegal, it'd still be GBH/murder if you shot the person on purpose.
So in the case we're talking about- invasion of privacy is a crime. The school intentionally invaded the pupils' privacy by, very deliberately, rigging up a remote camera activation programme and activating it. It doesn't matter one jot whether the school knew there was a law against this- only that they did it on purpose.
The only valid defense based on "intent" would be if they had not intended to put this intrusive software on these mandatory laptops, and had definitely not intended to activate it. As far as I'm aware, this is not their defense.
On my fiber connection, I'm advertised 10MBps. I usually get 9.something, so am generally pretty happy.
Some family of mine (over copper) were paying for 8MBps, but always complaining about how "their computer was so slow". I tested the speed- 0.04MBps. I've tested it since, and never ever ever seen it reach 1MBps. We called their provider, they poppedtheir post code into their database, and sure enough "oh, you're too far away from the exchange, etc.".
Now I wouldn't expect them to magically have a beter connection, laws of physics being what they are, but it raises this point- if the ISP can tell roughly by post code how fast your connection will be (that is, they have method of predicting your maximum possible connection speed) how can they get away with selling the internet with a vastly inflated "up to" value?
Surely they are not only admitting that they cannot give you "up to" 8MBps, but also demonstrating that they knew this, in principal, all along?
Yes, technically. But you probably don't want to know how far down the priority list customers are when it comes to bankruptcy creditors.
Roughly (IIRC, IANAL etc.), it goes 1) cost of administering the bankruptcy, 2) taxes, 3) secured debt (property and what have you), 4) employee wages and such, 5) everything else.
Customer debts come under everything else,along with, well, everything else.
I'm sorry, but doing the same as everyone else, only smaller size and bigger storage, is not ground breaking innovation. It's an incremental improvement. A welcome one, one which was extremely successful, but nothing out of the blue. Try patenting "same a existing products only smaller and better" and see if that patent gets granted (actually don't, knowing the patent office...).
Same can be said of the iPhone and iPad. Neither did anything that hadn't been done 100 times by their predecessors- they've just debatably) done it better. Nothing wrong with that, and it's why they're very successful, but it is still only incremental improvement.
No idea why iTunes is supposed to be ground breaking. It's a mediocre media player tied to a digital music shop- neither of which are new. Napster (in it's later guise) beat them to both. I would argue that iTunes (the software) isn't even an improvement- it wouldn't have any market share if it weren't tied in to all of Apple's successful products.
In defence of all that is holy, it may just be the formatting choice of whoever typed the summary/article, to represent something that made more sense in the exam paper.
For example, it might have been formatted (for a low age or ability group): 4 + 3 + 2 = [_____] + 2 Where the pupil is expected to complete the equation correctly by filling in the box.
I vaguely remember questions in that format from my early maths education.
If you want to get really pedantic, you could argue that the inhabitants of the Irish Republic are also British (in that Ireland is on of the archipelago generally referred to as the British Isles) or that the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are NOT British (in that it is located on the island of Ireland, not the island of Great Britain).
On balance, it is far easier if we don't look too closely at the logic behind our naming schemes.
You see, it's North America or South America, not America.
That depends on where you were educated. Whether "the Americas" are one continent with a narrow centre or two continents with a land bridge is entirely debatable (and really just meaningless semantics, seeing as the word "continent" has meant all manner of different things throughout the ages).
Because while ReiserFS was interesting, it was little more than an incremental improvement over far more mature FS projects? And that it had only a relatively small rate of take up?
And because it was egotistically self named by an unpleasant convicted murderer?
Yeah, there was an article here in the spring on atomic computing, where I did a little math on it. I was surprised, but it worked out that in roughly a decade Moore's Law would get down to atomic transitors if reducing the part size was the method employed.
Which raises the perfectly relevant point that reducing transistor size is not the only method of increasing processing speed, and so keeping up with Moore and his Law.
Fundamental changes to the architecture would be a nice place to start. Just because Intel feel irrevocably tied to i86 it doesn't make it the only option. Maybe when the last of the other tricks have been exhausted (in the best possible way- clinging to i86 has caused Intel to advance the chip fabrication industry to the limits of modern science) we might finally be forced to abandon this giant tombstone of an architecture that has been hanging so around our collective necks.
Ah, but there are more of us now. If it took 1 billion people 3650 years to solve, it should take 6 billion people a mear 60 years. The fact it has take 70 already clearly shows the added cycles this calculation requires.
Humanity follows basically the same logic as massively parallel supercomputers.
The irony being that every child is expected to have sex once they're an adult- all people are expected by society to become interested in sex, find a partner, and have babies.
Whereas NO child is expected to grow up violent. If a child becomes an adult and attacks ANY other adult (or child that is not theirs) they'll go to prison.
Yet while we're happy to let kids watch violent TV shows (Power Rangers, say), play video games, or give them a "smack" when they misbehave, any TV program with softcore sex scenes or any incline to sexual behaviour with the child is considered the worst form of inappropriate evil.
Compared to Germany's army of slave labour and failing Nationalised industries draining the government coffers, right? (/sarcasm)
It's very fashionable to compare with China and Taiwan and whatnot and say "we're failing because we can't compete with that". But plenty of other western countries have got healthy manufacturing bases which compete, to a greater or lesser extent, with the new tiger economies.
Lets face it- UK went from being one of the world's top manufacturers to a country with nearly no manufacturing base at all, while our closest national relatives suffered no such fate (or in some cases even worse fates...). The only plausible people to blame are the governments that presided over this change- from both sides of the political spectrum.
All laptops have some form of monitor output. Most modern TVs have some sort of corresponding input (my relatively cheap no-brand telly does). And if it doesn't (like, apparently, yours), you can buy converters for not very much money.
If you were to buy a modern non-laptop "all in the keyboard" PC, you'd have exactly the same problem.
It's nowhere near as impressive, agreed, but it is still basically making a $20 million donation to the space travel industry on no other grounds than it being something you're passionate about. That still gets a smile out of me.
It takes huge skill to do what Musk is doing. not everyone CAN do that. But people doing what they can is still worth a nod.
My employer provides Nokias for low-end smartphones and Blackberries for the high-end.
In terms of user-owned phones, it's a pretty varied mix. There are an awful lot of iPhones, but also BBs, Nokias and lots of Androids in the mix too. It's tough to say what is actually the majority considering all the distortion (iPhone users tend to be the most vocal, while BBs are pretty distinctive, and Androids and WinMo tend to be tricky to spot at a glance).
The upside of making your pocket money programming (e.g., making websites on your weekends) is that it can feed into your later career.
Getting into decent courses or bottom-rung jobs can be a lot easier if you're already boasting some small subset of related skills. And passing those courses/succeeding in those jobs is a lot easier if you're already well versed in the bare-bones basics.
Not to mention that it's better to earn your pocket money doing something you like versus something you don't. Propping up the fryer at Burger King might earn you more money per hour, but why tolerate that unless you're desperate?
I wish. The game shops in my town are packed out bustling high-street affairs, packed full of screaming kids and bored parents and staff who really wish they were just about anywhere else.
I think it has about as much appeal as a place to socialise as a supermarket or high-street bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Using mobile phones and eating while driving are already banned over here. I'm sure baning lighting up a ciggy while behind the wheel could follow the same logical justification.
Note: I'm not condoning one way or the other, just pointing out what has already been done.
I'm sorry, but saying that trains will inevitably get the same security treatments as planes eventually is absurd. What are you basing that on?
There have already been dozens of terrorist attacks on rail transport, and there has never been any drive in any form to tighten security beyond essentially the same measures as were introduced by the Victorian rail pioneers. Why do you assume that the contruction of a single, slightly faster railway in the US would drastically change anything? It's not even going to be the first high-speed line, nor (as far as I've heard) neccessarily any faster or technologically different from what already exists.
I mean it MIGHT, but then anything MIGHT happen. We might finally have flying cars by then, and this whole debate would be moot.
Globally, plenty of trains have been blown up before. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_March_2004_Madrid_train_bombings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2005_London_bombings
The reason plane-based attacks are treated so much more seriously is because of the uncanny similarity between a hijacked passenger jet and a cruise missile.
In the UK, we have "Freeview"- basically about 50 digital channels through your normal aerial (and so through regular coax). GPs suggestion would be nice for that. Plus obviously internet video (iPlayer, YouTube) and streaming from your personal collection.
While true "mens rae" doesn't neccessarily have to mean that you understand the law you're breaking, only that you intended the action that broke the law. Ignorance is not an excuse, as they say.
So for examble, shooting someone with a gun. If it's a complete accident, and no-one is to blame, that's OK. If you are to blame, that's negligence. If you aimed at someone and fired, that's GBH/murder. Even if you were completely and honestly unaware that shooting people was illegal, it'd still be GBH/murder if you shot the person on purpose.
So in the case we're talking about- invasion of privacy is a crime. The school intentionally invaded the pupils' privacy by, very deliberately, rigging up a remote camera activation programme and activating it. It doesn't matter one jot whether the school knew there was a law against this- only that they did it on purpose.
The only valid defense based on "intent" would be if they had not intended to put this intrusive software on these mandatory laptops, and had definitely not intended to activate it. As far as I'm aware, this is not their defense.
Anecdote time.
On my fiber connection, I'm advertised 10MBps. I usually get 9.something, so am generally pretty happy.
Some family of mine (over copper) were paying for 8MBps, but always complaining about how "their computer was so slow". I tested the speed- 0.04MBps. I've tested it since, and never ever ever seen it reach 1MBps. We called their provider, they poppedtheir post code into their database, and sure enough "oh, you're too far away from the exchange, etc.".
Now I wouldn't expect them to magically have a beter connection, laws of physics being what they are, but it raises this point- if the ISP can tell roughly by post code how fast your connection will be (that is, they have method of predicting your maximum possible connection speed) how can they get away with selling the internet with a vastly inflated "up to" value?
Surely they are not only admitting that they cannot give you "up to" 8MBps, but also demonstrating that they knew this, in principal, all along?
Yes, technically. But you probably don't want to know how far down the priority list customers are when it comes to bankruptcy creditors.
Roughly (IIRC, IANAL etc.), it goes 1) cost of administering the bankruptcy, 2) taxes, 3) secured debt (property and what have you), 4) employee wages and such, 5) everything else.
Customer debts come under everything else,along with, well, everything else.
I'm sorry, but doing the same as everyone else, only smaller size and bigger storage, is not ground breaking innovation. It's an incremental improvement. A welcome one, one which was extremely successful, but nothing out of the blue. Try patenting "same a existing products only smaller and better" and see if that patent gets granted (actually don't, knowing the patent office...).
Same can be said of the iPhone and iPad. Neither did anything that hadn't been done 100 times by their predecessors- they've just debatably) done it better. Nothing wrong with that, and it's why they're very successful, but it is still only incremental improvement.
No idea why iTunes is supposed to be ground breaking. It's a mediocre media player tied to a digital music shop- neither of which are new. Napster (in it's later guise) beat them to both. I would argue that iTunes (the software) isn't even an improvement- it wouldn't have any market share if it weren't tied in to all of Apple's successful products.
Ah, a circle you say. In ASCII, I would represent a circle with an O. Ironically causing the exact same confusion from an entirely different approach.
In defence of all that is holy, it may just be the formatting choice of whoever typed the summary/article, to represent something that made more sense in the exam paper.
For example, it might have been formatted (for a low age or ability group):
4 + 3 + 2 = [_____] + 2
Where the pupil is expected to complete the equation correctly by filling in the box.
I vaguely remember questions in that format from my early maths education.
If you want to get really pedantic, you could argue that the inhabitants of the Irish Republic are also British (in that Ireland is on of the archipelago generally referred to as the British Isles) or that the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are NOT British (in that it is located on the island of Ireland, not the island of Great Britain).
On balance, it is far easier if we don't look too closely at the logic behind our naming schemes.
You see, it's North America or South America, not America.
That depends on where you were educated. Whether "the Americas" are one continent with a narrow centre or two continents with a land bridge is entirely debatable (and really just meaningless semantics, seeing as the word "continent" has meant all manner of different things throughout the ages).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number_of_continents
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity
Scotland, I'm told, is second in the world if treated as separate from the rest of the UK. Second to the US, that is.
Because while ReiserFS was interesting, it was little more than an incremental improvement over far more mature FS projects? And that it had only a relatively small rate of take up?
And because it was egotistically self named by an unpleasant convicted murderer?
Yeah, there was an article here in the spring on atomic computing, where I did a little math on it. I was surprised, but it worked out that in roughly a decade Moore's Law would get down to atomic transitors if reducing the part size was the method employed.
Which raises the perfectly relevant point that reducing transistor size is not the only method of increasing processing speed, and so keeping up with Moore and his Law.
Fundamental changes to the architecture would be a nice place to start. Just because Intel feel irrevocably tied to i86 it doesn't make it the only option. Maybe when the last of the other tricks have been exhausted (in the best possible way- clinging to i86 has caused Intel to advance the chip fabrication industry to the limits of modern science) we might finally be forced to abandon this giant tombstone of an architecture that has been hanging so around our collective necks.
Ah, but there are more of us now. If it took 1 billion people 3650 years to solve, it should take 6 billion people a mear 60 years. The fact it has take 70 already clearly shows the added cycles this calculation requires.
Humanity follows basically the same logic as massively parallel supercomputers.
The irony being that every child is expected to have sex once they're an adult- all people are expected by society to become interested in sex, find a partner, and have babies.
Whereas NO child is expected to grow up violent. If a child becomes an adult and attacks ANY other adult (or child that is not theirs) they'll go to prison.
Yet while we're happy to let kids watch violent TV shows (Power Rangers, say), play video games, or give them a "smack" when they misbehave, any TV program with softcore sex scenes or any incline to sexual behaviour with the child is considered the worst form of inappropriate evil.
Very weird.
Compared to Germany's army of slave labour and failing Nationalised industries draining the government coffers, right? (/sarcasm)
It's very fashionable to compare with China and Taiwan and whatnot and say "we're failing because we can't compete with that". But plenty of other western countries have got healthy manufacturing bases which compete, to a greater or lesser extent, with the new tiger economies.
Lets face it- UK went from being one of the world's top manufacturers to a country with nearly no manufacturing base at all, while our closest national relatives suffered no such fate (or in some cases even worse fates...). The only plausible people to blame are the governments that presided over this change- from both sides of the political spectrum.
All laptops have some form of monitor output. Most modern TVs have some sort of corresponding input (my relatively cheap no-brand telly does). And if it doesn't (like, apparently, yours), you can buy converters for not very much money.
If you were to buy a modern non-laptop "all in the keyboard" PC, you'd have exactly the same problem.
It's nowhere near as impressive, agreed, but it is still basically making a $20 million donation to the space travel industry on no other grounds than it being something you're passionate about. That still gets a smile out of me.
It takes huge skill to do what Musk is doing. not everyone CAN do that. But people doing what they can is still worth a nod.
My employer provides Nokias for low-end smartphones and Blackberries for the high-end.
In terms of user-owned phones, it's a pretty varied mix. There are an awful lot of iPhones, but also BBs, Nokias and lots of Androids in the mix too. It's tough to say what is actually the majority considering all the distortion (iPhone users tend to be the most vocal, while BBs are pretty distinctive, and Androids and WinMo tend to be tricky to spot at a glance).
The upside of making your pocket money programming (e.g., making websites on your weekends) is that it can feed into your later career.
Getting into decent courses or bottom-rung jobs can be a lot easier if you're already boasting some small subset of related skills. And passing those courses/succeeding in those jobs is a lot easier if you're already well versed in the bare-bones basics.
Not to mention that it's better to earn your pocket money doing something you like versus something you don't. Propping up the fryer at Burger King might earn you more money per hour, but why tolerate that unless you're desperate?
You mean "who read TFA"?
This is slashdot. Presumably there are some things they don't teach at hacking school.
I wish. The game shops in my town are packed out bustling high-street affairs, packed full of screaming kids and bored parents and staff who really wish they were just about anywhere else.
I think it has about as much appeal as a place to socialise as a supermarket or high-street bank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_shall_not_murder