Even if the signs, typically attached to structures like bridges, were bombs, they weren't large enough to damage the infrastructure or placed close enough to human traffic to be anti-personnel mines.
That's one of those glib factoids that people come up with after the fact. Be honest: do you have the background to look at a box that might contain explosives and estimate how much damage it would actually do? I'm guessing not. In any case, it makes more sense for the cops to assume the worst case scenario.
This isn't even a 9-11 thing. Police and security people have been trained to react this way for a long time. Sometimes the results are comic, as when somebody absent-mindedly leaves their lunch in a bank, and comes back to find the bomb squad working on it. But sometimes the results are quite serious. At the 1996 Atlantic Olympics, security people got suspicious about an abandoned backpack and started clearing people away from it. Now, a forgotten backpack is not exactly a rare thing at public event. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the owner shows up looking for it. But this was the thousandth time, and the backpack blew up, spraying shrapnel all over the place. Two people died, and over a hundred were injured. If the security folks had been less paranoid, it would have been a lot worse.
Security and police are supposed to be paranoid. When they're not sufficiently paranoid and people get hurt, we're certainly quick to blame them for it. Their paranoia can be a threat to civil liberties, but we have other institutions to protect people from that. But inconvenience has a lower priority for some strange reason.
I don't know why cops in other cities didn't react as strongly. Maybe they're all ATHF fans. What I do know is that there can be nasty consequences to doing something that will freak out somebody wearing a uniform and carrying a gun. Anyone who doesn't take that into account is an asshole.
I thoroughly agree. What I don't get is why everyone groks that it's wrong to play pranks on heavily armed cops, but thinks that the cops overreacted when ATHF planted mysterious electronic gizmos all over Boston. Both had equal potential for incidental mayhem.
Ah the inevitable "that's not my experience" thread, with lots of posts agreeing and disagreeing, all based on personal experience.
Thing is, a Slashdot geek is not a typical Wii user. The Wii was successful because it reached beyond the traditional gamer audience. Assuming your mom is not a "traditional gamer" (some older folks are!) she's a more valid data point than all the rest of us put together.
By the same token, it might not be that big a deal that nobody but Nintendo has released a successful Wii game. I suspect other game studio don't quite grok the platform. This is a completely different kind of game console — you can't just port traditional twitch-and-jump games to it.
Read TFA carefully. It's an IBM press release! CNN is just passing on content they got from http://marketwire.com/>MarketWire, which is a PR channel, not a news organization.
It's not a question of making up your mind, it's a question of reading the article all the way through before submitting it to Slashdot. Which is really too much to ask of today's busy geek!
I'm not criticizing you for publicizing your efforts (which deserve to be publicized). But please don't portray your work as part of a trend. You need more than one data point to draw a curve. And you're following in the FOSS tradition of claiming your success before it's actually happened — a tradition that is not good for your credibility.
Your graduate studies and my own unschooled intuitions and prejudices seem to have led us both to the same place: an impatience with people who don't grasp the difference between "education" and "training". The one gives you general mental skills that serve you in a variety of situations; the other just teaches you how to perform various tasks. Education is always useful, even in situations you haven't specifically prepared for; training is just useful for the specific situation.
I know a lot of people are considered "computer literate" but are really completely out of their depth if they have to deal with something unusual. They have "training" in how to write a letter or print an envelope, but give them a word processor document with some weird formating and they have no idea what to do.
Serious computer education gets away from "how to do stuff" and gets you thinking about "how stuff works." It teaches you to think about the tech you're using, so you don't get lost the moment you wander off the beaten path. You could actually teach that stuff using a standard Microsoft config (one could learn a lot about how software works by fiddling with Word and Excel macros) but FOSS configurations are better because they're more "hackable".
Nowadays people associate "hacking" with penetrating computer security. (There are still a few linguistically ignorant folks who insist that the "correct" word for this activity is "cracker", but we can safely ignore them.) Hacking is actually a broader range of activities where you fiddle with technology in order to understand it better. Hackers like to say that they're making the tech "work better" (and sometimes they are), but that's just an excuse for intellectual curiosity.
Where Microsoft products expose a few macro engines and APIs, FOSS systems exposes everything. That's why FOSS is popular with technogeeks (who like to know how everything works) and unpopular with the "computer literate" who are afraid their brains will explode if they learn too much.
Kids aren't afraid their brains will explode. But they are terrified of boredom. So they're prime candidates for a computer education that requires thinking skills, as opposed to "job skills".
Sigh. I agree with your low opinion of Wikipedia. But your attack on it is so immature and scatalogical, your post actually works in its favor. Wikipedia folks can point at jerks like you and claim that all Wikipedia criticism is just bigotry.
If you really want to influence people, try talking like a grownup. If you don't want to influence people, and just want folks to know how pissed off you are, go scream out a window or something.
The headline and Christian's summary are pretty misleading. They make it sound like the voucher money is being used for a massive adoption of FOSS in California. But all Christian really knows about is his own efforts to implement FOSS at his own charter school. I suspect that most of the money is actually getting spent as Microsoft thought it would: on Microsoft technology. This would be particularly likely at the non-charter schools that still make up the vast majority of the California system. The educational bureaucracy in these schools in particularly aversive to experimenting with alternative technologies.
Which is not to devalue Christian's hard work bringing FOSS to his charter school students. He's not only saving his school money, he's bringing the kids technology with a greater educational impact. But his story is really a How To item, not news item about Microsoft being hoisted by its own petard.
You're assuming that killing off Urchin was the official game plan. More likely, the plan was to continue running it, gradually merging it into Google Analytics. But inept management and corporate politics prevented that from happening.
The killer was the judges instruction to the jury that merely sharing something on Kazaa was tantamount to distribution, so the plaintiffs did not have to show actual distribution.
I think that's actually a minor point. If the judge had gone the other way, and it resulted in an acquittal, the RIAA would have called it getting off on a technicality. Then for the next case, they would have arranged for somebody to actually download the files, much like drug cops doing a buy-bust.
The really sad thing is the defendant's half-assed attempts to cover her tracks (forgive the pun), which only made things worse for her. Plus the very silly conspiracy theory she came up with to explain how the tracks got shared. You have to wonder why she thought she'd prevail in court. Perhaps she fell into the trap of confusing her sense of self-righteousness with being right. Sound familiar?
Why? Because they convicted somebody based on the facts of the case? Sure, the law's brainless, but a jury's job is determine the facts of a case, not decide whether the law is fair.
Oops, here's comes somebody babbling about "the right to jury nullification". Doesn't exist, except in the overactive imaginations of people who also believe in the "civil flag".
the mere fact that they dont unterstand anything about what they are talking about makes it pseudoscience/voodoo.
There seems to be a fashionable trend among the terminally arrogant: caricature people you disagree with as "unscientific", and yourself as "rational". The irony is that people who talk that way can never be bothered to give their own ideas the same merciless criticism they inflict on everybody else. So they end up being pretty irrational themselves.
Dude, think about it before you say "think about it". Your physics are pre-Newtonian. If weight (or more properly, mass) is what makes a sword deadly, how can a tiny little bullet kill? Kinetic energy is important in both cases, and that's a combination of mass and velocity. So the tiny bullet is deadly because it has a lot of velocity.
Of course, you'd have to swing the plastic sword harder, but it'd be easier to swing hard. I don't actually know if that's a good tradeoff, never having fought with edged weapons (or anything deadlier than a water balloon). But it obvious that you haven't either.
I don't know if there was prior art or not. But if you're going to argue that there was, maybe you should do it in response to a post that argues there wasn't.
Except that you're not supposed to be allowed to patent obvious things.
I've never quite understood what the definition of "obvious" was in patent law. I'm reminded of how Sherlock Holmes would explain his subtle train of reasoning to a mystified Dr. Watson. As soon as Holmes finished his explanation, Watson's mystification would change to complacency, and he'd say, "Well, now that you explain it, it's obvious what happened."
There's all kinds of stuff that we now take for granted that used to be under patent. Did you know that there's an expired patent for the concept of a supermarket? The idea of having customers fetch their own merchandise might seem "obvious" now, but back in 1917, it was original enough to earn patent 1242872.
I don't know what the legal definition of "obvious" is, but in ordinary language, it's just another word for "familiar".
We've been moving away from mechanical storage for 60 years, ever since the first real computer appeared. Things have gotten less and less mechanical ever since then. But it's a slow, incremental process. Old tech doesn't just disappear because somebody invented something kewler. The new tech has to make an economic case for itself. I'd love to replace my hard disks with something solid state. But it has to be affordable and reliable. The closest thing we have is flash RAM, and that's not practical for anything bigger than a couple of gigabytes. And even then, I wouldn't rely on it for mission-critical data.
Technology and economics aside, a paradigm shift would be helpful. As the OLPC's XO demonstrates, you can easily build a useful computer that doesn't have a hard disk. It just won't run all the bloatware that we're all so dependent on. OLPC's second-biggest accomplishment might be to force everyone to rethink the way our overpowered computers are designed.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't even a 9-11 thing. Police and security people have been trained to react this way for a long time. Sometimes the results are comic, as when somebody absent-mindedly leaves their lunch in a bank, and comes back to find the bomb squad working on it. But sometimes the results are quite serious. At the 1996 Atlantic Olympics, security people got suspicious about an abandoned backpack and started clearing people away from it. Now, a forgotten backpack is not exactly a rare thing at public event. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the owner shows up looking for it. But this was the thousandth time, and the backpack blew up, spraying shrapnel all over the place. Two people died, and over a hundred were injured. If the security folks had been less paranoid, it would have been a lot worse.
Security and police are supposed to be paranoid. When they're not sufficiently paranoid and people get hurt, we're certainly quick to blame them for it. Their paranoia can be a threat to civil liberties, but we have other institutions to protect people from that. But inconvenience has a lower priority for some strange reason.
I don't know why cops in other cities didn't react as strongly. Maybe they're all ATHF fans. What I do know is that there can be nasty consequences to doing something that will freak out somebody wearing a uniform and carrying a gun. Anyone who doesn't take that into account is an asshole.
And why?
I thoroughly agree. What I don't get is why everyone groks that it's wrong to play pranks on heavily armed cops, but thinks that the cops overreacted when ATHF planted mysterious electronic gizmos all over Boston. Both had equal potential for incidental mayhem.
Ah the inevitable "that's not my experience" thread, with lots of posts agreeing and disagreeing, all based on personal experience.
Thing is, a Slashdot geek is not a typical Wii user. The Wii was successful because it reached beyond the traditional gamer audience. Assuming your mom is not a "traditional gamer" (some older folks are!) she's a more valid data point than all the rest of us put together.
By the same token, it might not be that big a deal that nobody but Nintendo has released a successful Wii game. I suspect other game studio don't quite grok the platform. This is a completely different kind of game console — you can't just port traditional twitch-and-jump games to it.
Read TFA carefully. It's an IBM press release! CNN is just passing on content they got from http://marketwire.com/>MarketWire, which is a PR channel, not a news organization.
Because it's missing. Might besomewhere on his desk.
It's not a question of making up your mind, it's a question of reading the article all the way through before submitting it to Slashdot. Which is really too much to ask of today's busy geek!
Are you sure those Microsoft certificates are fake? The real ones are absurdly easy to get.
I'm not criticizing you for publicizing your efforts (which deserve to be publicized). But please don't portray your work as part of a trend. You need more than one data point to draw a curve. And you're following in the FOSS tradition of claiming your success before it's actually happened — a tradition that is not good for your credibility.
Not offtopic. Imsabbel actually has a good point. But as usual, his immaturity prevents him from actually getting it across.
Your graduate studies and my own unschooled intuitions and prejudices seem to have led us both to the same place: an impatience with people who don't grasp the difference between "education" and "training". The one gives you general mental skills that serve you in a variety of situations; the other just teaches you how to perform various tasks. Education is always useful, even in situations you haven't specifically prepared for; training is just useful for the specific situation.
I know a lot of people are considered "computer literate" but are really completely out of their depth if they have to deal with something unusual. They have "training" in how to write a letter or print an envelope, but give them a word processor document with some weird formating and they have no idea what to do.
Serious computer education gets away from "how to do stuff" and gets you thinking about "how stuff works." It teaches you to think about the tech you're using, so you don't get lost the moment you wander off the beaten path. You could actually teach that stuff using a standard Microsoft config (one could learn a lot about how software works by fiddling with Word and Excel macros) but FOSS configurations are better because they're more "hackable".
Nowadays people associate "hacking" with penetrating computer security. (There are still a few linguistically ignorant folks who insist that the "correct" word for this activity is "cracker", but we can safely ignore them.) Hacking is actually a broader range of activities where you fiddle with technology in order to understand it better. Hackers like to say that they're making the tech "work better" (and sometimes they are), but that's just an excuse for intellectual curiosity.
Where Microsoft products expose a few macro engines and APIs, FOSS systems exposes everything. That's why FOSS is popular with technogeeks (who like to know how everything works) and unpopular with the "computer literate" who are afraid their brains will explode if they learn too much.
Kids aren't afraid their brains will explode. But they are terrified of boredom. So they're prime candidates for a computer education that requires thinking skills, as opposed to "job skills".
Sigh. I agree with your low opinion of Wikipedia. But your attack on it is so immature and scatalogical, your post actually works in its favor. Wikipedia folks can point at jerks like you and claim that all Wikipedia criticism is just bigotry.
If you really want to influence people, try talking like a grownup. If you don't want to influence people, and just want folks to know how pissed off you are, go scream out a window or something.
The headline and Christian's summary are pretty misleading. They make it sound like the voucher money is being used for a massive adoption of FOSS in California. But all Christian really knows about is his own efforts to implement FOSS at his own charter school. I suspect that most of the money is actually getting spent as Microsoft thought it would: on Microsoft technology. This would be particularly likely at the non-charter schools that still make up the vast majority of the California system. The educational bureaucracy in these schools in particularly aversive to experimenting with alternative technologies.
Which is not to devalue Christian's hard work bringing FOSS to his charter school students. He's not only saving his school money, he's bringing the kids technology with a greater educational impact. But his story is really a How To item, not news item about Microsoft being hoisted by its own petard.
You're assuming that killing off Urchin was the official game plan. More likely, the plan was to continue running it, gradually merging it into Google Analytics. But inept management and corporate politics prevented that from happening.
No, trolling is being insulting just for the fun of it. I was being insulting with malice aforethought.
The really sad thing is the defendant's half-assed attempts to cover her tracks (forgive the pun), which only made things worse for her. Plus the very silly conspiracy theory she came up with to explain how the tracks got shared. You have to wonder why she thought she'd prevail in court. Perhaps she fell into the trap of confusing her sense of self-righteousness with being right. Sound familiar?
Why? Because they convicted somebody based on the facts of the case? Sure, the law's brainless, but a jury's job is determine the facts of a case, not decide whether the law is fair.
Oops, here's comes somebody babbling about "the right to jury nullification". Doesn't exist, except in the overactive imaginations of people who also believe in the "civil flag".
Dude, think about it before you say "think about it". Your physics are pre-Newtonian. If weight (or more properly, mass) is what makes a sword deadly, how can a tiny little bullet kill? Kinetic energy is important in both cases, and that's a combination of mass and velocity. So the tiny bullet is deadly because it has a lot of velocity.
Of course, you'd have to swing the plastic sword harder, but it'd be easier to swing hard. I don't actually know if that's a good tradeoff, never having fought with edged weapons (or anything deadlier than a water balloon). But it obvious that you haven't either.
I don't know if there was prior art or not. But if you're going to argue that there was, maybe you should do it in response to a post that argues there wasn't.
Uh, do you have a point? I mean beyond, "You're an idiot and I have a headache." I think you need to unplug, unwind, and come back when you're sane.
There's all kinds of stuff that we now take for granted that used to be under patent. Did you know that there's an expired patent for the concept of a supermarket? The idea of having customers fetch their own merchandise might seem "obvious" now, but back in 1917, it was original enough to earn patent 1242872.
I don't know what the legal definition of "obvious" is, but in ordinary language, it's just another word for "familiar".
We've been moving away from mechanical storage for 60 years, ever since the first real computer appeared. Things have gotten less and less mechanical ever since then. But it's a slow, incremental process. Old tech doesn't just disappear because somebody invented something kewler. The new tech has to make an economic case for itself. I'd love to replace my hard disks with something solid state. But it has to be affordable and reliable. The closest thing we have is flash RAM, and that's not practical for anything bigger than a couple of gigabytes. And even then, I wouldn't rely on it for mission-critical data.
Technology and economics aside, a paradigm shift would be helpful. As the OLPC's XO demonstrates, you can easily build a useful computer that doesn't have a hard disk. It just won't run all the bloatware that we're all so dependent on. OLPC's second-biggest accomplishment might be to force everyone to rethink the way our overpowered computers are designed.