Actually, last I heard, women *still* stay a few points ahead of men. On the other hand, the vast majority of "outliers" on both sides are men. You get a few standard deviations out in either direction, and the population is overwhelmingly male. You look a few points above "norm", and it's mostly female.
I seem to recall that someone established that testosterone changed the way neurons branch. Not always for the better, mind you...
Let me get this straight, you have people who have "poor access to educational materials", in other words, they are not as well educated as people with better access, and you want to send them straight into college?
Why don't we send them into a year of decent schooling with real books to *properly* prepare them for college, if that's all that's wrong?
I'd hate to think we were pushing people to overcommit to try to catch up with other students.
BOY are you gonna look stupid in about two or three days.;-)
As I said, I *really* wish I could be at this one.
(I can't discuss internals in any real detail, but I can say that "pending bankruptcy" has not been an issue in living memory.)
As to the "support rep" thing: At the end of the day, I can say that I know of a concrete way in which my job has made the world a better place for my customers. I don't have to be up until 10AM, I don't commute, I get 3 weeks paid vacation, I get paid trips to standards committee meetings, I get however many sick leave days I end up needing, I get all the "normal" bennies you expect from a modern job... And did I mention that I don't have to commute, at all, ever? It takes me 25-30 *SECONDS* to get to work in the morning if I oversleep.;-)
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I think it's important that people know that support is *not* as sucky as some people think it is.
Commonly quoted, but not as accurate as they like to make it sound. SAT's, etc., have fairly strong correlation to college performance. They *also* have correlation to your "socioeconomic background".
This doesn't mean "ah-hah, they're really measuring your background". It might mean "your background and your chances in college are related".
If you were a social darwinist, you'd claim that poor people are poor because they're stupid.
If you believe in nurture over nature, you might argue that the majority of poor kids were *ALREADY* denied a good education when their parents didn't read to them enough.
Either way, the tests *do* correlate to your chances of doing well in school. Someone's gonna try to offer a "counterexample".
That's not how correlation works. Correlation measures *tendencies*. Not absolute causal relationships.
SAT scores are a pretty good indicator for future college performance. Doesn't matter if they're measuring intelligence, or amount of exposure to books in the home, or what - they measure how well you are likely to do in a specific, relevant real world situation, and that's the end of the story.
I do agree about the flaw in the test with the "throw money at it" option. A friend of mine had a similar one; you find a wallet in a store.
Keep it: 0 points Give it to the store management: 1 point Give it to the police: 2 points
Frankly, my responses are: 1. Call the person if I can find any ID. I have a cell phone. 2. If that fails, give it to the store management, knowing that, if he comes back soon, he'll get it, and otherwise, they'll forward it to the police.
As to the "non-white" vs. "poor" thing: Not really. Part of the problem is that white kids from ghettos *DO* perform better than black kids from the same ghettos... Not all *that* much better, but enough to be socially unacceptable.
Still, your point is well taken; some of the tests are *horribly* misleading. However: Those tests aren't, generally, things like the math section of the SAT's.:)
I'm a BSDI support rep, so in a way, I oughta be able to go, but I guess I can just hear about anything exciting from here. Sure wouldn't wanna miss this one, though.
Pretty hard to justify, though, given that, as I recall, one of the concerns is that inner-city whites don't test the same as inner-city blacks.
Culture *is* a problem in tests - but it's also a problem in education. You have to understand how people talk, and how they write, and you have to pick up their allusions. Good? Bad? Who knows, but it's the way people communicate, and you *have* to pick it up sooner or later.
I fought the need to be aware of the world around me for years; I eventually realized that it was important.
I don't buy it. You have a group of people that consistently underperform on certain tests, and you assert that it *MUST* be the tests which are bad.
WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE?
This is science. Yeah, people may feel bad. Fuck 'em. WE HAVE TO KNOW, DAMMIT. If the answer is "sorry, seebs, you're just never gonna be able to write decent poetry, you haven't the right kind of brain", I'd rather know than be given a "special" test that lets me feel good.
Frankly, let me say this:
"The way non-white people think" IS ABSOLUTE FUCKING BULLSHIT.
Math is math. The way it works does *NOT* depend on what you think, or how you think. If your brain isn't good at math, *that is a thing you are not good at*.
I happen to have a brain which is very good at math. I also happen to have a brain which is absolutely *horrible* at day-to-day activities and basic "common sense". I have a strength, and I have a weakness.
Saying that a test of common sense is a "bad test for me" is stupid. It's a very good test, *showing something I'm not good at*.
I don't buy this thing about "white people designing tests that non-white people aren't good at."
You honestly believe that a black person growing up in suburban America is less like me than a Japanese kid? The Japanese kid will wipe the floor with my test results.
It's not about white or non-white. It's about a test which measures something, and people who either don't have it, or just haven't learned it. Either way, putting them in an environment which *requires* that attribute will screw them.
As long as you're making excuses, saying "well, they have a different way of thinking, we can't compare these", you've got the most severe kind of prejudice and racism imaginable, the one that says that *NO* black person can ever be quite "up to" white standards. You can phrase it however you want, but you're saying that there are things white people can do that black people can't.
I say it's bullshit. Maybe, *MAYBE*, we'll find out that, statistically, black people aren't as good at some particular kind of symbol manipulation as white people, but that's *statistics* - we can still believe that any *INDIVIDUAL* can be anything, and can take any test.
You believe that there are tests that these people shouldn't take because it'll hurt their feelings. Fuck that.
Standardized testing is much more accurate than interviews. That doesn't mean it's accurate, it just means that interviews are *LESS* accurate.
They *do* use interviews, once they've established that some raw skill is available.
For that matter, once you have the "give candidates an objective" test, and you observe hundreds of them, YOU'RE RIGHT BACK TO STANDARDIZED TESTING!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've taken standardized tests which had "prove this" or "calculate this" questions with open-ended answers. They are a pain to grade, but, they're still standardized tests. If you don't know your calculus, you *can't* get the answer.
FWIW, a friend of mine grew up in inner-city DC, with people getting shot, and came out of it well educated through some kind of pilot program... but honestly, she woulda been well-educated if the nearest library had been five miles away.
How do they "fix" the standardized tests? How do we demonstrate that the tests are even broken?
God forbid, *WHAT IF THE DIFFERENCES MEASURED ARE REAL!*
That would suck. But it would *not* suck as much as trying to skew a test to make it stop measuring a difference that really existed.
If a yardstick tells you that asians are generally a little shorter than whites, do you "fix" the yardstick, or do you say "okay, that's a difference between ethnic groups"?
The good part of the "lego test" is the idea of trying to measure skills other than the ones we've traditionally measured. The bad part is trying to make sure that these measurements are applied only to certain people. If you want to have a test which shows "something these people are good at", you need norms, and those norms need to be control groups from other populations.
It may turn out that different ethnic groups have different strengths. It may even turn out that, say, Asians just *always* do better than whites on any intelligence test we can come up with.
But as long as it's easier for people to be emotionally okay with "Asians, as a group, do better than whites" than it is for them to deal with "blacks, as a group, do worse than whites", we have a much bigger problem than we're admitting.
After all, if whites can be worse than someone else, why can't someone else be worse than whites? We have too much politics, and too little science.
Mostly, people forget that attributes of groups are not transferrable to individuals. I have met tall Chinese people - and, when I was in China, I also met about two hundred thousand of them that were shorter than me. But the tall ones exist, and any test which tries to "fix" things will end up screwing those people.
>actually, SAT scores are poorly correlated with >college grades, particularly for women (on >average, women score lower than men on the SAT, >but earn higher grades, at least at MIT, which is >the sample pool i know best)
Interesting. Higher grades in same classes, or higher grades, different selection of classes? It'd be interesting to compare inputs.
Also interesting would be to see whether there's, say, social issues involved. At the college I went to, a lot more of the guys had wild drinking parties... Which can't possibly have helped grades.
But they wouldn't have *TESTED* your roommate with the lego test! They would only have tested him *if they thought he would do badly on the SAT's or ACT's*.
As to motivation, I don't think the Lego Test tests for that. That's what the interview is supposed to be for - and it won't always work, because some people *change* when they get to college.
As to "kinds of intelligence" - when I was doing my psych work (B.A. only), it was 120 kinds, and they had a little 3-D graph. It's all guesses, still. We know that certain tests model the ability to do well in school. That's about it; we really don't know what the other things are, or how to model them, or how they work.
More importantly, when we speak of a person being "intelligent", we normally mean that they have a broad base of aptitudes. Someone who's brilliant at one of those things, and bad at the others, isn't "intelligent" - he's "an idiot savant".
Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that there are "multiple kinds of intelligence" (certainly not implausible), and that standardized tests are really testing only one or two of them.
Item 1: College, in general, is *AIMED* at those one or two kinds; these tests measure *ability to do well in college*, for the most part. Giving people a test of something else just sets them up to fail later.
Item 2: Why is it that these people are assuming that the minorities "can't" do well on standardized tests? Isn't that sort of like saying they think the minorities are "stupid"? Frankly, I don't know whether or not racial groups have differences in brain structure, or whatever - but if they do, we'd damn well better start facing it head on, or we're going to wreck a lot of people's lives trying to push them into something they aren't. (Admittedly, it's no better to assert that an entire group will behave in the same way.)
Item 3: Why don't they give *EVERYONE* the lego test, and see how it pans out? If you give it only to the students you think won't do well on the other test, you aren't learning much. Let's be fair; make *EVERYONE* take the lego test, have their results graded by people who don't know which color people did which projects, and find out what the lego test tells you.
Item 4: "Kinds of intelligence" is probably meaningless anyway. "intelligence" is supposed to refer to the generalized set of "kinds of intelligence". Sure, the tests don't measure them all, but the lego test doesn't *MEASURE* anything, it just gives you a platform to balance your prejudice on.
Honestly, I think it comes down to this: There uexist people who are not "disadvantaged" in any way, and who feel guilty about this, and who will seek out "disadvantaged" people, and try to "help" them, in a way that makes it absolutely clear that the people doing the helping are in charge, and the "disadvantaged" people oughta be grateful for the help. These people are just as racist as the overt racists, they've just found a better way to sublimate it. Better for them, anyway. Not sure it's any better to be talked down to than openly hated.
This is a joke. With any luck, they will realize it, and start trying to do something useful - for instance, if the "different kinds of intelligence" thing pans out, start building a real curriculum for them, not just excuses to shove them into a curriculum that doesn't match them.
The net has not destroyed the idea of censorship. The net has not even made it especially hard to censor. Harder, yes, but the fact is, people with guns can still make you stop talking about their government.
Jon, your understanding of the issue does not surpass that shown by the MPAA press statements. You happen to be right, but not through understanding, just through knowing people who do.
Go away. Stop preaching at us. Stop pretending you're part of "us". You've got wayyy too much political agenda to be a hacker.;)
53,000,000 people spammed every time they did a mailing run.
You betcha we want them dead.
How about we all go support free stuff like free-expression.org, which is supposed to create a compatible but *free* streaming media server and player?
Actually, logic doesn't dictate that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. That's a *premise* you have, or perhaps isomorphic to a premise you have.
Logic only tells you that, if B follows from A, and A, then B. It doesn't tell you that B necessarily follows whether or not A.
Why would a potential underwriter share the information about the complaint *with the company*? If I'd given him permission to share my name with colleagues, I would *NOT* expect him to share it with the company under suspicion, but rather, with other people who might be affected if the suspicions were correct.
JonKatz reads like Sokal's parody of postmodern "research". Big words, frequently used correctly, but sometimes a bit off. Some of them are made up. Some of them are used because they have emotional connotations, not because their meanings really apply. And, of course, The Agenda.
This is getting really frustrating. Why the hell does this guy get to post articles on slashdot? He has no argumentation for his thesis. All he has is the belief that corporations are somehow intrinsically incompatible with a free life.
Jon, I have news for you.
They are us. We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are. Maybe no better, either, but they're not worse. Mr. Case is not evil. He does not hate freedom. He has different priorities than you do. I do too.
It is no more wrong that Steve Case has his position of power than it's wrong that JonKatz can post the equivalent of a gigantic post that will always be permanently moderated as if it were "+5, Insightful".
I think Jon is a waste of slashdot time, and I will continue to think so until he *JUSTIFIES* these psychotic episodes with some actual arguments. Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Or shut up.
Or, at the very least, STOP PRETENDING YOU SPEAK FOR ME. You do not have my *permission* to claim you represent the opinions, goals, or beliefs of educated geeks, hackers, or whatever we're calling ourselves this week. Eric Raymond may pontificate, but he's at least *DONE* something.
Reading the patent someone posted, it says TAPE. Tape. You know, magnetized plastic?
In other words, I can't see how this patent can apply. Tivo is not recording the guide, or the programs, to a cassette tape. That's what the patent says.
If you aren't doing what the patent describes, it can't *possibly* apply.
I heard *NOTHING* about removing the fix for NDA reasons, and I was in support at the time. From the moment we had a fix up, there was a fix available all day every day until we got our "final" fix.
The original one was "M310-hangfix", I believe; the !@#*! bug came out days after 3.1 shipped.
I believe we didn't ship source for the fix until we had a "final" patch - that may have been the NDA deal.
I do know that the reengineering work was pretty much internal; we were aware of flaws in the initial patch (performance hits, however minor), but we wanted a fix out so people's systems would stay up long enough for them to get the newer fix.
But yes, the fact that BSDI and Intel engineers were on a first-name basis probably helped immensely in getting the fix out.
The question this raises is, why did it take longer for Windows to get a fix than it took BSDI? They certainly have their hooks in over at Intel.
FWIW, BSDI had a fix on day one or two of the F00F bug announcements. Sources reported that the BSDI fix was reverse-engineered to make a Linux fix. Days later, BSDI came up with improvements to their fix (first enabling it only on Pentium chips, later improving performance even on those systems affected). I assume the Linux folks did too.
Solaris and MS took weeks, plural, as I recall.
Conclusion? Competent engineers who care make for faster code fixes too.
(Disclaimer: I work for BSDI, but honestly, if I didn't really think their engineers were that good, I wouldn't work here either.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, last I heard, women *still* stay a few points ahead of men. On the other hand, the vast majority of "outliers" on both sides are men. You get a few standard deviations out in either direction, and the population is overwhelmingly male. You look a few points above "norm", and it's mostly female.
I seem to recall that someone established that testosterone changed the way neurons branch. Not always for the better, mind you...
Let me get this straight, you have people who have "poor access to educational materials", in other words, they are not as well educated as people with better access, and you want to send them straight into college?
Why don't we send them into a year of decent schooling with real books to *properly* prepare them for college, if that's all that's wrong?
I'd hate to think we were pushing people to overcommit to try to catch up with other students.
Social promotion, all over again.
Uhm. Pending bankruptcy?
;-)
;-)
BOY are you gonna look stupid in about two or three days.
As I said, I *really* wish I could be at this one.
(I can't discuss internals in any real detail, but I can say that "pending bankruptcy" has not been an issue in living memory.)
As to the "support rep" thing: At the end of the day, I can say that I know of a concrete way in which my job has made the world a better place for my customers. I don't have to be up until 10AM, I don't commute, I get 3 weeks paid vacation, I get paid trips to standards committee meetings, I get however many sick leave days I end up needing, I get all the "normal" bennies you expect from a modern job... And did I mention that I don't have to commute, at all, ever? It takes me 25-30 *SECONDS* to get to work in the morning if I oversleep.
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I think it's important that people know that support is *not* as sucky as some people think it is.
Commonly quoted, but not as accurate as they like to make it sound. SAT's, etc., have fairly strong correlation to college performance. They *also* have correlation to your "socioeconomic background".
This doesn't mean "ah-hah, they're really measuring your background". It might mean "your background and your chances in college are related".
If you were a social darwinist, you'd claim that poor people are poor because they're stupid.
If you believe in nurture over nature, you might argue that the majority of poor kids were *ALREADY* denied a good education when their parents didn't read to them enough.
Either way, the tests *do* correlate to your chances of doing well in school. Someone's gonna try to offer a "counterexample".
That's not how correlation works. Correlation measures *tendencies*. Not absolute causal relationships.
SAT scores are a pretty good indicator for future college performance. Doesn't matter if they're measuring intelligence, or amount of exposure to books in the home, or what - they measure how well you are likely to do in a specific, relevant real world situation, and that's the end of the story.
I do agree about the flaw in the test with the "throw money at it" option. A friend of mine had a similar one; you find a wallet in a store.
:)
Keep it: 0 points
Give it to the store management: 1 point
Give it to the police: 2 points
Frankly, my responses are:
1. Call the person if I can find any ID. I have a cell phone.
2. If that fails, give it to the store management, knowing that, if he comes back soon, he'll get it, and otherwise, they'll forward it to the police.
As to the "non-white" vs. "poor" thing: Not really. Part of the problem is that white kids from ghettos *DO* perform better than black kids from the same ghettos... Not all *that* much better, but enough to be socially unacceptable.
Still, your point is well taken; some of the tests are *horribly* misleading. However: Those tests aren't, generally, things like the math section of the SAT's.
I'm a BSDI support rep, so in a way, I oughta be able to go, but I guess I can just hear about anything exciting from here. Sure wouldn't wanna miss this one, though.
Pretty hard to justify, though, given that, as I recall, one of the concerns is that inner-city whites don't test the same as inner-city blacks.
Culture *is* a problem in tests - but it's also a problem in education. You have to understand how people talk, and how they write, and you have to pick up their allusions. Good? Bad? Who knows, but it's the way people communicate, and you *have* to pick it up sooner or later.
I fought the need to be aware of the world around me for years; I eventually realized that it was important.
I don't buy it. You have a group of people that consistently underperform on certain tests, and you assert that it *MUST* be the tests which are bad.
WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE?
This is science. Yeah, people may feel bad. Fuck 'em. WE HAVE TO KNOW, DAMMIT. If the answer is "sorry, seebs, you're just never gonna be able to write decent poetry, you haven't the right kind of brain", I'd rather know than be given a "special" test that lets me feel good.
Frankly, let me say this:
"The way non-white people think" IS ABSOLUTE FUCKING BULLSHIT.
Math is math. The way it works does *NOT* depend on what you think, or how you think. If your brain isn't good at math, *that is a thing you are not good at*.
I happen to have a brain which is very good at math. I also happen to have a brain which is absolutely *horrible* at day-to-day activities and basic "common sense". I have a strength, and I have a weakness.
Saying that a test of common sense is a "bad test for me" is stupid. It's a very good test, *showing something I'm not good at*.
I don't buy this thing about "white people designing tests that non-white people aren't good at."
You honestly believe that a black person growing up in suburban America is less like me than a Japanese kid? The Japanese kid will wipe the floor with my test results.
It's not about white or non-white. It's about a test which measures something, and people who either don't have it, or just haven't learned it. Either way, putting them in an environment which *requires* that attribute will screw them.
As long as you're making excuses, saying "well, they have a different way of thinking, we can't compare these", you've got the most severe kind of prejudice and racism imaginable, the one that says that *NO* black person can ever be quite "up to" white standards. You can phrase it however you want, but you're saying that there are things white people can do that black people can't.
I say it's bullshit. Maybe, *MAYBE*, we'll find out that, statistically, black people aren't as good at some particular kind of symbol manipulation as white people, but that's *statistics* - we can still believe that any *INDIVIDUAL* can be anything, and can take any test.
You believe that there are tests that these people shouldn't take because it'll hurt their feelings. Fuck that.
Standardized testing is much more accurate than interviews. That doesn't mean it's accurate, it just means that interviews are *LESS* accurate.
They *do* use interviews, once they've established that some raw skill is available.
For that matter, once you have the "give candidates an objective" test, and you observe hundreds of them, YOU'RE RIGHT BACK TO STANDARDIZED TESTING!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've taken standardized tests which had "prove this" or "calculate this" questions with open-ended answers. They are a pain to grade, but, they're still standardized tests. If you don't know your calculus, you *can't* get the answer.
FWIW, a friend of mine grew up in inner-city DC, with people getting shot, and came out of it well educated through some kind of pilot program... but honestly, she woulda been well-educated if the nearest library had been five miles away.
Raw intelligence will make up for poor resources.
How do they "fix" the standardized tests? How do we demonstrate that the tests are even broken?
God forbid, *WHAT IF THE DIFFERENCES MEASURED ARE REAL!*
That would suck. But it would *not* suck as much as trying to skew a test to make it stop measuring a difference that really existed.
If a yardstick tells you that asians are generally a little shorter than whites, do you "fix" the yardstick, or do you say "okay, that's a difference between ethnic groups"?
The good part of the "lego test" is the idea of trying to measure skills other than the ones we've traditionally measured. The bad part is trying to make sure that these measurements are applied only to certain people. If you want to have a test which shows "something these people are good at", you need norms, and those norms need to be control groups from other populations.
It may turn out that different ethnic groups have different strengths. It may even turn out that, say, Asians just *always* do better than whites on any intelligence test we can come up with.
But as long as it's easier for people to be emotionally okay with "Asians, as a group, do better than whites" than it is for them to deal with "blacks, as a group, do worse than whites", we have a much bigger problem than we're admitting.
After all, if whites can be worse than someone else, why can't someone else be worse than whites? We have too much politics, and too little science.
Mostly, people forget that attributes of groups are not transferrable to individuals. I have met tall Chinese people - and, when I was in China, I also met about two hundred thousand of them that were shorter than me. But the tall ones exist, and any test which tries to "fix" things will end up screwing those people.
>actually, SAT scores are poorly correlated with
>college grades, particularly for women (on
>average, women score lower than men on the SAT,
>but earn higher grades, at least at MIT, which is
>the sample pool i know best)
Interesting. Higher grades in same classes, or higher grades, different selection of classes? It'd be interesting to compare inputs.
Also interesting would be to see whether there's, say, social issues involved. At the college I went to, a lot more of the guys had wild drinking parties... Which can't possibly have helped grades.
But they wouldn't have *TESTED* your roommate with the lego test! They would only have tested him *if they thought he would do badly on the SAT's or ACT's*.
As to motivation, I don't think the Lego Test tests for that. That's what the interview is supposed to be for - and it won't always work, because some people *change* when they get to college.
As to "kinds of intelligence" - when I was doing my psych work (B.A. only), it was 120 kinds, and they had a little 3-D graph. It's all guesses, still. We know that certain tests model the ability to do well in school. That's about it; we really don't know what the other things are, or how to model them, or how they work.
More importantly, when we speak of a person being "intelligent", we normally mean that they have a broad base of aptitudes. Someone who's brilliant at one of those things, and bad at the others, isn't "intelligent" - he's "an idiot savant".
Standardized testing doesn't measure *worth*, but it can very likely measure a relevant kind of *ability*.
Since that's what you'll need to make it through college...
Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that there are "multiple kinds of intelligence" (certainly not implausible), and that standardized tests are really testing only one or two of them.
Item 1: College, in general, is *AIMED* at those one or two kinds; these tests measure *ability to do well in college*, for the most part. Giving people a test of something else just sets them up to fail later.
Item 2: Why is it that these people are assuming that the minorities "can't" do well on standardized tests? Isn't that sort of like saying they think the minorities are "stupid"? Frankly, I don't know whether or not racial groups have differences in brain structure, or whatever - but if they do, we'd damn well better start facing it head on, or we're going to wreck a lot of people's lives trying to push them into something they aren't. (Admittedly, it's no better to assert that an entire group will behave in the same way.)
Item 3: Why don't they give *EVERYONE* the lego test, and see how it pans out? If you give it only to the students you think won't do well on the other test, you aren't learning much. Let's be fair; make *EVERYONE* take the lego test, have their results graded by people who don't know which color people did which projects, and find out what the lego test tells you.
Item 4: "Kinds of intelligence" is probably meaningless anyway. "intelligence" is supposed to refer to the generalized set of "kinds of intelligence". Sure, the tests don't measure them all, but the lego test doesn't *MEASURE* anything, it just gives you a platform to balance your prejudice on.
Honestly, I think it comes down to this: There uexist people who are not "disadvantaged" in any way, and who feel guilty about this, and who will seek out "disadvantaged" people, and try to "help" them, in a way that makes it absolutely clear that the people doing the helping are in charge, and the "disadvantaged" people oughta be grateful for the help. These people are just as racist as the overt racists, they've just found a better way to sublimate it. Better for them, anyway. Not sure it's any better to be talked down to than openly hated.
This is a joke. With any luck, they will realize it, and start trying to do something useful - for instance, if the "different kinds of intelligence" thing pans out, start building a real curriculum for them, not just excuses to shove them into a curriculum that doesn't match them.
Hyperbolize much?
;)
The net has not destroyed the idea of censorship. The net has not even made it especially hard to censor. Harder, yes, but the fact is, people with guns can still make you stop talking about their government.
Jon, your understanding of the issue does not surpass that shown by the MPAA press statements. You happen to be right, but not through understanding, just through knowing people who do.
Go away. Stop preaching at us. Stop pretending you're part of "us". You've got wayyy too much political agenda to be a hacker.
They have contact info; you have to call to get it, so far as I can tell, but I got it. Use it wisely.
Email 'em. Go ahead.
And BTW, they *ADMIT* that it's not about copying, it's about "licensed players".
53,000,000 people spammed every time they did a mailing run.
You betcha we want them dead.
How about we all go support free stuff like free-expression.org, which is supposed to create a compatible but *free* streaming media server and player?
Actually, logic doesn't dictate that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. That's a *premise* you have, or perhaps isomorphic to a premise you have.
;-)
Logic only tells you that, if B follows from A, and A, then B. It doesn't tell you that B necessarily follows whether or not A.
Sorry, pet peeve.
Why would a potential underwriter share the information about the complaint *with the company*? If I'd given him permission to share my name with colleagues, I would *NOT* expect him to share it with the company under suspicion, but rather, with other people who might be affected if the suspicions were correct.
Am I just crazy?
JonKatz reads like Sokal's parody of postmodern "research". Big words, frequently used correctly, but sometimes a bit off. Some of them are made up. Some of them are used because they have emotional connotations, not because their meanings really apply. And, of course, The Agenda.
This is getting really frustrating. Why the hell does this guy get to post articles on slashdot? He has no argumentation for his thesis. All he has is the belief that corporations are somehow intrinsically incompatible with a free life.
Jon, I have news for you.
They are us. We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are. Maybe no better, either, but they're not worse. Mr. Case is not evil. He does not hate freedom. He has different priorities than you do. I do too.
It is no more wrong that Steve Case has his position of power than it's wrong that JonKatz can post the equivalent of a gigantic post that will always be permanently moderated as if it were "+5, Insightful".
I think Jon is a waste of slashdot time, and I will continue to think so until he *JUSTIFIES* these psychotic episodes with some actual arguments. Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Or shut up.
Or, at the very least, STOP PRETENDING YOU SPEAK FOR ME. You do not have my *permission* to claim you represent the opinions, goals, or beliefs of educated geeks, hackers, or whatever we're calling ourselves this week. Eric Raymond may pontificate, but he's at least *DONE* something.
Reading the patent someone posted, it says TAPE. Tape. You know, magnetized plastic?
In other words, I can't see how this patent can apply. Tivo is not recording the guide, or the programs, to a cassette tape. That's what the patent says.
If you aren't doing what the patent describes, it can't *possibly* apply.
NDA?
I heard *NOTHING* about removing the fix for NDA reasons, and I was in support at the time. From the moment we had a fix up, there was a fix available all day every day until we got our "final" fix.
The original one was "M310-hangfix", I believe; the !@#*! bug came out days after 3.1 shipped.
I believe we didn't ship source for the fix until we had a "final" patch - that may have been the NDA deal.
I do know that the reengineering work was pretty much internal; we were aware of flaws in the initial patch (performance hits, however minor), but we wanted a fix out so people's systems would stay up long enough for them to get the newer fix.
But yes, the fact that BSDI and Intel engineers were on a first-name basis probably helped immensely in getting the fix out.
The question this raises is, why did it take longer for Windows to get a fix than it took BSDI? They certainly have their hooks in over at Intel.
FWIW, BSDI had a fix on day one or two of the F00F bug announcements. Sources reported that the BSDI fix was reverse-engineered to make a Linux fix. Days later, BSDI came up with improvements to their fix (first enabling it only on Pentium chips, later improving performance even on those systems affected). I assume the Linux folks did too.
Solaris and MS took weeks, plural, as I recall.
Conclusion? Competent engineers who care make for faster code fixes too.
(Disclaimer: I work for BSDI, but honestly, if I didn't really think their engineers were that good, I wouldn't work here either.)