I think I was the only one who actually wore one. I remember feeling like a dork, until I smashed the heck out of it on a low-hanging bolt while being the "test boy" on a new tunnel.
"When being incredibly stupid, always think SAFETY." LOL.
And since the entire revolution will occur in the form of/. posts, the revolution will slide off "most viewed" in a few days and post-revolutionary Earth will look much the same as pre-revolutionary Earth, with just a few geeks giving each other knowing glances and whispering "dude, we made a DIFFERENCE that day!"
Nonsense, it could be a extension of the current Law:
"In electrical circuits, Ohms' law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference or voltage across the two points, and inversely proportional to the resistance between them. In data anonymity, the law states that the general usefulness of any set of data that originally contained personally-identifiable information is inversely proportional to the degree of anonymity applied to said data."
See, on simple law to memorize, and now data analysts learn just a teensy bit about electricity and EEs learn just a teensy bit about data anonymization.
Right, I'm assuming that it's complicated enough that I'd need a 12-year-old to do it. In reality, it'll probably be a 6-year-old.;)
Probably what they'll do with burn-to-disc is consider that a permanent transfer of the playkey to playable media. How they'd then prevent the rip is an exercise in futility.
But eventually new CD players will not be able to play CDs without a playkey. It'll be sold to you as "rights enablement" because you can then do nearly everything you already could do before this whole DRM nonsense started, only more clumsily and with less freedom.
But we'll protect you, the non-infringing customer, from the evils of infringement!
I'd say that's very "1984", but I had that on my Kindle...;)
I head out of the house and want to listen to the latest Lolcats album, "I cn haz Whyt Album?", which I've paid my $22 for ($1 to the artist, $6 to the studio, $15 to the Centralized Playkey Authority). Because I want to listen to it at the beach, I take my playkey for each song in the album and transfer it to my music player. Let's assume the transfer process is always perfect and you never get a "sent but never received" issue.
So I'm sitting on the beach, and decide to take a swim. Forgetting, in the process, that my MP3 player is in my swimtrunks. Instant flash memory destruction, and the playkeys are no more.
Now I have to go buy the White Album all over again. Or somehow recover those playkeys.
Thanks, but unless they make CDs illegal, I'll stick with those, and rip them as unencumbered MP3. And if they make CDs illegal, I'll just stop buying music. If I started playing the collection I've already legally purchased on CD, I could play it continuously and not hear the same song again for a couple of weeks...
I can imagine a black market in playkeys, except of course that in reality anyone who wants to bypass the system will simply have their neighbor's 12-year-old kid hack the playkey nonsense off the songs.
Agreed. It's the modern-day equivalent of going to the Colosseum and watching the (insert temporally-appropriate minority group here) being fed to the lions.
Given that there are Microsoft drinking games around vulnerabilities, I wonder how many drinking games exist that have you drink in inverse proportion to the time it takes for the first "M$ SUXXORZ! (insert alternative OS here) RULZZ D00D!" post to appear in response to a report of said vulnerability, or in direct proportion to the number of them?
Latency is balanced with packet size. If you can send a single 16GB packet, it may be worth the additional latency, though a lost packet is bad and the delay until you know you need a resend could be counterproductive. Pigeons don't have monthly bandwidth caps - your capacity is constrained only by the amount of data you can fit into a lightweight package and waterproof it, and that combined with the latency relegates pigeons to high-capacity, low-priority data.
As far as security, you'd want to encrypt the data just as you would sending it over the Internet. Anything sent over the Internet passes through a series of routers, and the data could be intercepted at any one of them. The Pigeon is carrying the data in one "hop", but may be intercepted at points along that "hop". But both have the issue of the data being vulnerable enroute.
The advantage of a pigeon is that you can prepare your packet to be tamper- and intercept-evident, so even if someone intercepted it and then sent it along its route again, you'd at least know the data had been compromised. With an Internet packet, someone can just make a copy of it and you'd never know it was intercepted.
Given the fact that this sort of question usually results in two trains colliding, I'd say no.:)
Otherwise, you'd have to add any number of considerations, such as how much of the road was under construction, whether the driver encountered bad chili at a truck stop that necessitated a lot more stops shortly thereafter, and how bumpy the road was (one good solid pothole and you can consider the need for a "resend" request for at least some of the data!)
Actually, with a storm drain like that, getting trapped isn't a likely scenario in a flash flood. I'd think getting flushed out into the maelstrom would be more likely.:)
Caves are cool. My friends and I used to go sledding in them in the winter. There was a runoff drain that ran under an entire golf course, probably about 300 yards long or so, and in the winter the bottom of it would ice up, so you could run your sled through it, in complete darkness and at great speed, with random 2 foot dropoffs as the pipes joined. Watch your head.
Every now and again, someone'd get hurt and end up in the hospital.
Kids do stupid stuff. It's part of being a kid.
I always played it safe - I wore my bike helmet. We also had someone go through first thing every day with a flashlight to make sure there were no obstacles, and he'd climb back up and give a report. Though generally by the time het got back half the kids were tired of waiting and went anyway. (grin)
Hi, I'm also an adult, and I also work as a software engineer.
>>I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.
So to keep you from joining a community, all I need to do is act poorly and pretend to be a member of that community? Wow, there can't be a lot of communities that meet that standard of purity. There are asshats in pretty much every community or movement.
A great number of Linux users, and even contributors, also use Windows, and use both as a tool appropriate to the job at hand. Most Linux project managers and major contributors don't have time to post to slashdot, and don't get into pissing matches over whose digital penis is larger. There are vocal proponents of Linux, and those that like to copy-paste the "Death to M$" meme, but a Linux contributor who seriously wants to kill Microsoft will be out there writing code or documentation, not wasting their time bashing Microsoft on slashdot.
Try Linux or don't - but don't avoid it just because there are a good number of people with lots of free time out there representing "the community" poorly. Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is an organized, centralized movement with some form of control emanating from the center. Linux is not a company. It's not a bureaucracy. It's a movement - with lots of different people moving in lots of different directions with lots of different goals and aspirations. Some go about their business more politely than others.
Most people seriously involved in the Linux movement don't really care one way or the other about Microsoft. It's not that they see Microsoft as irrelevant to the world at large, they are writing what they want. Microsoft really only becomes relevant when they threaten to enforce patents which they have used their majority desktop share to implement as "standards", and you can see they might react with something entirely unlike joy and adulation.:)
If I build my own car, I really don't have any feelings about Ford, unless Ford decides that I cannot implement roundness in my wheels because they hold a patent on round wheels. At that point, I'd probably be pissed and post nasty things on the automotive section of slashdot when Ford is mentioned. (grin)
Given a project of this magnitude, there are inevitably going to be bad scans, and bad data, and other issues.
And, just as inevitably, the problem areas are going to be updated and replaced with good ones when they become available.
"There's no point in having crappy scans with garbage metadata today" would be indisputably true if every book out there was a crappy scan with garbage metadata. Instead, what we have a starting point with some good scans and some bad ones, but there's no point holding back the entire project just because some of the books have bad scans or metadata. You go live with what you have, then add/correct as needed.
Remember, too, that none of these books replace what is available in your local library, they supplement it. If your local library has a copy of a book you want, it's still there. If they don't, Google Books will probably have it. Chances are, their scan will be good, but let's assume it's not. Isn't a barely readable version better than no version whatsoever?
This isn't a NASA mission. If a book ends up being a crappy scan, it won't explode on re-entry killing its reader.
This is, however, a for-profit venture. As such, it cannot wait until every page of every tome is pristine before it goes live.
Sometimes, you go live with what you've got, even if it's not perfect, because it's not only in the best interests of profit, but because there's a benefit to having the product out there. Google Books will start as a supplemental database, and where there are good scans of books with good metadata, this will make books more available and accessible to all. Books will be missing from its catalog, and books will be unreadable at times, and books will be misfiled, but the same is true of any library.
Google Earth went live long before detailed imagery was readily available for a lot of the world, so those who lived in an area of the world that lacked detailed imagery saw low-res imagery (green fuzzies, with a vague idea of where really big things might be) where the pictures should be. As the imagery became available, they added it to the basemap. But Google Earth made detailed cartography available to the masses in a way that it had never been available before. And, hopefully, Google Books will be able to do the same with the written word.
..which is totally irrelevant to my original point, where I said this is the second physical domicile to be vandalized.
I made the point that this was the second house to be damaged, improfane pointed out that "second home" might mean it this couple's second home, which, while true, is not relevant.
The number of homes this couple owns has nothing to do with the fact that this is the second damaged home, which is what I was trying to say.
I can't speak for other states, but in Maine I know the homeschool system is a pretty supportive one, but it also has a stick (standardized testing) to go with the carrot (support, counseling, etc).
I'm sure there's some level of harassing home schoolers going on, but my thought was more a supportive "assess the kid's progress, and if he's faring far worse than a public school, then it's time for an intervention" kind of thing.
But that assumes no hidden agendas, so of course I was being hopelessly naive. LOL.
FWIW I was public schooled, too, and at the time it worked well. But I've served on a few school support committees as a volunteer and seen where the system appears to be going, and decided that I'd rather spend the money for what I hope is a more proper job. I'm sure the public schools are still working here, Maine has a decent track record at 'em, but after researching Waldorf I just like it better.
I use each CD exactly once. To rip it to high-quality MP3. Then it gets cased up in a waterproof rubbermaid bin in the basement. I have lots of them.:)
How do you ensure your kids not only learn the things that interest them, but also some basic-necessity skills that will be common to any job? Do you add more curriculum/direction later on as college and/or employment looms?
Waldorf is frequently seen by public schoolers as an "unschool" because they leverage kids' fascination with things to deepen the curriculum, but there is still a teacher-directed curriculum there - it's just based more on the interests of the children they have, and since the same teacher follows the students from 1st to 8th grade, that teacher really becomes an integral part of the learning experience.
But, still, it's got a directed curriculum, and is geared toward some standardized goals, with as much accommodation as possible toward the interests of the kids to keep them engaged.
So, do you have to direct their interests to an extent, or gear learning opportunities around what fascinates them and keep track of what "needs" to be covered (flowing curriculum based on their interests)?
I'm not criticizing the tech. I'm sorely tempted to put SSD in as a "system" drive just for the peace and quiet, not to mention speed, then put a "spinny" drive as NAS downstairs for my mass-storage needs.:)
Slashdot Mirror
No mod points, but I'd be torn between "Funny" and "Insightful" on that one. Only because there's no option for "Sad because it's true".
So do we need a new acronym for this?
Massively Multiplayer Online Monopoly ? MMOM?
I think I was the only one who actually wore one. I remember feeling like a dork, until I smashed the heck out of it on a low-hanging bolt while being the "test boy" on a new tunnel.
"When being incredibly stupid, always think SAFETY." LOL.
...unless you end up with the book with the bad O-rings.
And since the entire revolution will occur in the form of /. posts, the revolution will slide off "most viewed" in a few days and post-revolutionary Earth will look much the same as pre-revolutionary Earth, with just a few geeks giving each other knowing glances and whispering "dude, we made a DIFFERENCE that day!"
Because everyone knows that EVERYONE in DC lies.
Nonsense, it could be a extension of the current Law:
"In electrical circuits, Ohms' law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference or voltage across the two points, and inversely proportional to the resistance between them. In data anonymity, the law states that the general usefulness of any set of data that originally contained personally-identifiable information is inversely proportional to the degree of anonymity applied to said data."
See, on simple law to memorize, and now data analysts learn just a teensy bit about electricity and EEs learn just a teensy bit about data anonymization.
You just replied to an AC.
No, don't get me wrong, I don't want to make you mad. I live in Maine. It gets COLD up here. And I could use the coal. :)
Right, I'm assuming that it's complicated enough that I'd need a 12-year-old to do it. In reality, it'll probably be a 6-year-old. ;)
Probably what they'll do with burn-to-disc is consider that a permanent transfer of the playkey to playable media. How they'd then prevent the rip is an exercise in futility.
But eventually new CD players will not be able to play CDs without a playkey. It'll be sold to you as "rights enablement" because you can then do nearly everything you already could do before this whole DRM nonsense started, only more clumsily and with less freedom.
But we'll protect you, the non-infringing customer, from the evils of infringement!
I'd say that's very "1984", but I had that on my Kindle... ;)
I head out of the house and want to listen to the latest Lolcats album, "I cn haz Whyt Album?", which I've paid my $22 for ($1 to the artist, $6 to the studio, $15 to the Centralized Playkey Authority). Because I want to listen to it at the beach, I take my playkey for each song in the album and transfer it to my music player. Let's assume the transfer process is always perfect and you never get a "sent but never received" issue.
So I'm sitting on the beach, and decide to take a swim. Forgetting, in the process, that my MP3 player is in my swimtrunks. Instant flash memory destruction, and the playkeys are no more.
Now I have to go buy the White Album all over again. Or somehow recover those playkeys.
Thanks, but unless they make CDs illegal, I'll stick with those, and rip them as unencumbered MP3. And if they make CDs illegal, I'll just stop buying music. If I started playing the collection I've already legally purchased on CD, I could play it continuously and not hear the same song again for a couple of weeks...
I can imagine a black market in playkeys, except of course that in reality anyone who wants to bypass the system will simply have their neighbor's 12-year-old kid hack the playkey nonsense off the songs.
Agreed. It's the modern-day equivalent of going to the Colosseum and watching the (insert temporally-appropriate minority group here) being fed to the lions.
Given that there are Microsoft drinking games around vulnerabilities, I wonder how many drinking games exist that have you drink in inverse proportion to the time it takes for the first "M$ SUXXORZ! (insert alternative OS here) RULZZ D00D!" post to appear in response to a report of said vulnerability, or in direct proportion to the number of them?
Latency is balanced with packet size. If you can send a single 16GB packet, it may be worth the additional latency, though a lost packet is bad and the delay until you know you need a resend could be counterproductive. Pigeons don't have monthly bandwidth caps - your capacity is constrained only by the amount of data you can fit into a lightweight package and waterproof it, and that combined with the latency relegates pigeons to high-capacity, low-priority data.
As far as security, you'd want to encrypt the data just as you would sending it over the Internet. Anything sent over the Internet passes through a series of routers, and the data could be intercepted at any one of them. The Pigeon is carrying the data in one "hop", but may be intercepted at points along that "hop". But both have the issue of the data being vulnerable enroute.
The advantage of a pigeon is that you can prepare your packet to be tamper- and intercept-evident, so even if someone intercepted it and then sent it along its route again, you'd at least know the data had been compromised. With an Internet packet, someone can just make a copy of it and you'd never know it was intercepted.
Given the fact that this sort of question usually results in two trains colliding, I'd say no. :)
Otherwise, you'd have to add any number of considerations, such as how much of the road was under construction, whether the driver encountered bad chili at a truck stop that necessitated a lot more stops shortly thereafter, and how bumpy the road was (one good solid pothole and you can consider the need for a "resend" request for at least some of the data!)
Actually, with a storm drain like that, getting trapped isn't a likely scenario in a flash flood. I'd think getting flushed out into the maelstrom would be more likely. :)
I should have clarified that to say "caves are cool, and a storm drain is a big cave that's unlikely to collapse".
Being kids.
Caves are cool. My friends and I used to go sledding in them in the winter. There was a runoff drain that ran under an entire golf course, probably about 300 yards long or so, and in the winter the bottom of it would ice up, so you could run your sled through it, in complete darkness and at great speed, with random 2 foot dropoffs as the pipes joined. Watch your head.
Every now and again, someone'd get hurt and end up in the hospital.
Kids do stupid stuff. It's part of being a kid.
I always played it safe - I wore my bike helmet. We also had someone go through first thing every day with a flashlight to make sure there were no obstacles, and he'd climb back up and give a report. Though generally by the time het got back half the kids were tired of waiting and went anyway. (grin)
Everyone knows you should use Twitter for that... Duh.... :)
Hi, I'm also an adult, and I also work as a software engineer.
>>I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people.
So to keep you from joining a community, all I need to do is act poorly and pretend to be a member of that community? Wow, there can't be a lot of communities that meet that standard of purity. There are asshats in pretty much every community or movement.
A great number of Linux users, and even contributors, also use Windows, and use both as a tool appropriate to the job at hand. Most Linux project managers and major contributors don't have time to post to slashdot, and don't get into pissing matches over whose digital penis is larger. There are vocal proponents of Linux, and those that like to copy-paste the "Death to M$" meme, but a Linux contributor who seriously wants to kill Microsoft will be out there writing code or documentation, not wasting their time bashing Microsoft on slashdot.
Try Linux or don't - but don't avoid it just because there are a good number of people with lots of free time out there representing "the community" poorly. Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is an organized, centralized movement with some form of control emanating from the center. Linux is not a company. It's not a bureaucracy. It's a movement - with lots of different people moving in lots of different directions with lots of different goals and aspirations. Some go about their business more politely than others.
Most people seriously involved in the Linux movement don't really care one way or the other about Microsoft. It's not that they see Microsoft as irrelevant to the world at large, they are writing what they want. Microsoft really only becomes relevant when they threaten to enforce patents which they have used their majority desktop share to implement as "standards", and you can see they might react with something entirely unlike joy and adulation. :)
If I build my own car, I really don't have any feelings about Ford, unless Ford decides that I cannot implement roundness in my wheels because they hold a patent on round wheels. At that point, I'd probably be pissed and post nasty things on the automotive section of slashdot when Ford is mentioned. (grin)
Given a project of this magnitude, there are inevitably going to be bad scans, and bad data, and other issues.
And, just as inevitably, the problem areas are going to be updated and replaced with good ones when they become available.
"There's no point in having crappy scans with garbage metadata today" would be indisputably true if every book out there was a crappy scan with garbage metadata. Instead, what we have a starting point with some good scans and some bad ones, but there's no point holding back the entire project just because some of the books have bad scans or metadata. You go live with what you have, then add/correct as needed.
Remember, too, that none of these books replace what is available in your local library, they supplement it. If your local library has a copy of a book you want, it's still there. If they don't, Google Books will probably have it. Chances are, their scan will be good, but let's assume it's not. Isn't a barely readable version better than no version whatsoever?
This isn't a NASA mission. If a book ends up being a crappy scan, it won't explode on re-entry killing its reader.
This is, however, a for-profit venture. As such, it cannot wait until every page of every tome is pristine before it goes live.
Sometimes, you go live with what you've got, even if it's not perfect, because it's not only in the best interests of profit, but because there's a benefit to having the product out there. Google Books will start as a supplemental database, and where there are good scans of books with good metadata, this will make books more available and accessible to all. Books will be missing from its catalog, and books will be unreadable at times, and books will be misfiled, but the same is true of any library.
Google Earth went live long before detailed imagery was readily available for a lot of the world, so those who lived in an area of the world that lacked detailed imagery saw low-res imagery (green fuzzies, with a vague idea of where really big things might be) where the pictures should be. As the imagery became available, they added it to the basemap. But Google Earth made detailed cartography available to the masses in a way that it had never been available before. And, hopefully, Google Books will be able to do the same with the written word.
..which is totally irrelevant to my original point, where I said this is the second physical domicile to be vandalized.
I made the point that this was the second house to be damaged, improfane pointed out that "second home" might mean it this couple's second home, which, while true, is not relevant.
The number of homes this couple owns has nothing to do with the fact that this is the second damaged home, which is what I was trying to say.
I can't speak for other states, but in Maine I know the homeschool system is a pretty supportive one, but it also has a stick (standardized testing) to go with the carrot (support, counseling, etc).
I'm sure there's some level of harassing home schoolers going on, but my thought was more a supportive "assess the kid's progress, and if he's faring far worse than a public school, then it's time for an intervention" kind of thing.
But that assumes no hidden agendas, so of course I was being hopelessly naive. LOL.
FWIW I was public schooled, too, and at the time it worked well. But I've served on a few school support committees as a volunteer and seen where the system appears to be going, and decided that I'd rather spend the money for what I hope is a more proper job. I'm sure the public schools are still working here, Maine has a decent track record at 'em, but after researching Waldorf I just like it better.
I use each CD exactly once. To rip it to high-quality MP3. Then it gets cased up in a waterproof rubbermaid bin in the basement. I have lots of them. :)
If you used inflatable chairs, he'd starting throwing them around and you'd have a "Beach Ball-mer Party". (snare drum)
This is not a criticism, but an earnest question.
How do you ensure your kids not only learn the things that interest them, but also some basic-necessity skills that will be common to any job? Do you add more curriculum/direction later on as college and/or employment looms?
Waldorf is frequently seen by public schoolers as an "unschool" because they leverage kids' fascination with things to deepen the curriculum, but there is still a teacher-directed curriculum there - it's just based more on the interests of the children they have, and since the same teacher follows the students from 1st to 8th grade, that teacher really becomes an integral part of the learning experience.
But, still, it's got a directed curriculum, and is geared toward some standardized goals, with as much accommodation as possible toward the interests of the kids to keep them engaged.
So, do you have to direct their interests to an extent, or gear learning opportunities around what fascinates them and keep track of what "needs" to be covered (flowing curriculum based on their interests)?
I'm not criticizing the tech. I'm sorely tempted to put SSD in as a "system" drive just for the peace and quiet, not to mention speed, then put a "spinny" drive as NAS downstairs for my mass-storage needs. :)