Sorry, I couldn't resist. Seriously however the article was very unclear. What is it that asexual organisms aren't able to do? Surely it isn't that they can't diversify into different species. After all every organism on earth is descended from the same intial life form and some organisms are still asexual hence establishing that the initial lifeform diversified into some progenitor sexual organism as well as branches that remained asexual.
My best guess as to the claim made in the article is that multi-celluar organisms require sexual reproduction to select for organism wide traits. Not sure why it would be true (maybe different cells don't have enough incentive to look out for the whole organism) but that's my best guess.
Anyway saying that the organism doesn't have sex isn't very clear. Many bacteria exchange genetic material without having sex. Such a system might let this creature gain some of the benefits of sexual selection.
Does anyone understand what this article is actually trying to say? I know it's a funny title but some info would be nice too.
This is much like the theory of art that motivated that french dude (forget his name) to write the whole book without using the letter e. His theory was something like artistic value came from dealing with boundaries and conditions.
By the way if anyone doubts that boundaries and requirements often make a problem more difficult to solve just consider problems in CS or mathematics. Frequently the right solutions come from solving special cases that add more constraints to the problem and then generalizing. Trying to deal with all the possible variables in a problem at once can be just too daunting but boundaries and conditions limit the number of possibilities one must consider and often the solution to the restricted problem can later be generalized.
I very much doubt the support issue is the problem. If enough people would buy it Dell could just start the Dell Computer Expert line and make it damn clear that you don't order one unless you know what your doing and their is no support on anything but the hardware. Hell if they were worried enough about their name they could just sell them under some name other than Dell.
I suspect the problem is economic.
For starters I bet people demanding linux are far more willing to voice demands than they are to put up money. I bet tons of the people who asked dell to offer a linux PC wouldn't really buy one. They might like linux but when it comes time to buy a new computer they decide to dull boot and realize it's cheaper just to buy the computer preloaded with windows. Even if this isn't the case the possibility that linux advocates make more noise than they would buy computers is something Dell must consider.
Secondly Dell doesn't have apps to sell people who buy linux only boxes printer ink and all sorts of other high margin items. If anything the problem is they realize the people who buy linux boxes wouldn't buy extended support, at least not the sort of support it was economical to offer. Dell probably has a nearly zero margin on the basic PC and makes up their money on the extras. Why bother selling a linux PC if the purchasers are smart enough not to buy any of the high margin extras?
Finally there is the concern of pissing off MS. Whatever anti-trust rulings MS is constrained by why risk pissing them off unless it would bring you a high margin business?
The issue isn't offering support it is making money!
This isn't really all that exciting. What is going on is that light has several velocities. There is the speed the actual stuff making it up can move at (signalling speed) and there are also several other velocities.
What they are talking about here is if you watched the crest of the electric field how fast that would appear to move. If you set things up very carefully that seems to move faster than any of the particles in the light.
Ughh, yet another huge slashdot discussion where a bunch of people who won't take the time to read the actual science think they should be able to evaluate the evidence for global warming. Invariably analogizing the acceptance of the consensus opinion among climate scientists with religious belief.
Now these climate change skeptics are right when they point out that scientific consensus means nothing against the evidence. It doesn't matter if every single person on earth disagrees with you, if the evidence is on your side you have the better case. However, it is a mistake to infer from this that in practice scientific consensus is irrelevant.
The situation with climate science is much like that of a complicated high-profile murder trial with no smoking gun. We all recognize that it would be a mistake to judge the defendant based on the evidence we see presented in the media. All sorts of biases affect what the media reports but most importantly is the fact that news comes in byte sized chunks. If the prosecution's case is simple (he was found with the gun) while the defense has a long list of little details then the information in the media won't give a fair view of the evidence. This is why we have juries who actually listen to all the evidence rather than having the public vote on the matter.
Now it is the *evidence* which determines what we should think about someone's guilt or innocent and if we sat on the jury no consensus in the public should sway us from what the evidence says. However if we just read some accounts in the media and the jury said, "Yeah we considered those but there was a huge amount of little points that outweighed that" then we would be smart to believe them. If we replace a jury with a group selected to be experts in the field the point is even more clear.
So sure this study may be *evidence* against anthropogenic global warming but whenever a psychic gets lucky that is evidence for telepathy too. The only important question is what the balance of the evidence says. Now if you think that evidence in murder trials can be detailed and long it has nothing on climate science and there is just no way a mass media article can convey the results from thousands of scientific papers and arguments.
But just like with a trial if you really care you can go straight to the source (scientific journals/trial transcripts) and look for yourself. However, if you aren't willing to spend the time to look for yourself then it's just idiotic to try and second guess trustworthy people of good reputation who have.
This article is total BS. I have no doubt that keys that pass the LOCAL validation can be pretty easily guessed. However, this is irrelevant to the issue of key collision which is all about WGA and validation through MS's servers.
MS can easily keep a second smaller list of the keys that have actually been given out. Then maybe once a day check to see if the key your brute force hack found is a real valid key or just a possible but non-issued key. If so then reset your software to non-genuine.
In short because the real security mechanism is the online verification MS has complete control over throttling requests and monitoring people who try many keys so this worry just doesn't stand up.
As far as very young children I agree this sounds like a good approach. Young children will listen to the teacher and actually want their approval and want to avoid their disapproval. This desire to please makes them ready to accept the teacher's direction about how to behave and when they should feel good or bad about what they have done.
However, it is totally useless for older students, e.g., middle schoolers. Once kids gets to middle school the absolute worst thing you can do is make demands of them or tell them things are wrong if you can't back up your demands with punishment. At this age rebellion is the name of the game and the kids are smart enough to know what the teacher is trying to accomplish in respect to bullying. Any attempt to modify the kids behavior that isn't backed up with real authority will backfire.
I saw two teachers in middle school who didn't follow this rule and their classrooms became impossible to control. The first was just generally unwilling to seriously discipline kids or send them to the principle. He would get very mad and yell at the class but as students soon learned that he was all bark and no bite his authority evaporated and no one ever did what he said. A second teacher was generally fine but students started making noises behind her back and she made the mistake of ineffectually spinning around and yelling about what she was going to do to the kids when she caught them. Once the kids realized they could do this without actually getting punished they continued until she was eventually replaced as the teacher.
This is generally true with child raising. When young you usually just want to explain to them why what they did was wrong and help them understand what they should and shouldn't do (tho they still must be punished when they violate the simplest rules you lay down). As they get older they understand how they should behave but deliberately choose to do otherwise at times and need to be shown that this won't be tolerated.
To be clear I don't mean this technology will not have any useful applications. Rather it is more like those clear TFTs that have found use in plasma TVs. Useful in some areas but a sideline to the development of the computer industry or in this case the 3d printer industry.
Despite the bad description of why this is important it actually is pretty interesting. This sort of approach is much more efficient for creating 2d sheets with varied 3d geometry than traditional 3d printing which would have to build them up layer by layer and might not even have sufficient structural stability to make the object if it's too bendy.
What would really make this technique useful is if there was some way to combine it with more traditional 3d printing technologies. For instance if you could start with a nice curved surface like this and add layers that would be really cool. However, there are such serious problems with doing this that I think it is unlikely.
Frankly, while interesting I suspect this is just a sidelight in the development of 3d printing technology. What I want to know is why it is taking so long. When will we all have our own 3d printers? When can we shut down those vast numbers of assembly lines that make nothing but strangely shaped 3d objects?
I could care less about whose 'fault' it might be. The reason we punish children is not because they deserve it or we are happy to make them suffer but to deter bad behavior and encourage good behavior. Hell, if it would stop bullying I'd be happy to punish the kid who was being bullied.
As for discussing it with the class this seems fine if we are talking about a fight that broke out between friends or even enemies but not when one kid is being picked on by many others. From my experience this discussion just humiliates the child being picked on while the others mock him from behind pretend masks of concern.
When I was in school the teachers (to my dismay I knew not to complain to them) tried several times to talk to everyone about what had happened or help them see their behavior wasn't right. Every time it just encouraged the bullies further but they made sure to be more careful about being seen.
Kid's aren't nice altruistic creatures who will be good if you just explain things to them. Lord of the Flies gets it pretty much right.
Your 'solution' has exactly the same problems you critisize.
It would be nice to believe that bullies would leave people alone once they showed a backbone or the like but often the goal is exactly to provoke a reaction. Once people get it in their head that it is a game to provoke someone or make them reveal how upset they are no amount of standing up for yourself or trying to ignore them or anything of the kind will fix the situation.
I mean just look at the way racial minorities are treated in many places. This in some sense is an organized version of bullying. Stopping racial epitaphs and persecution is not something that the minority can do simply by not 'being submissive' or standing up for themselves.
All kids tell their parents they were just defending themselves. The bullies tell their parents the teacher was being unfair and punishing them when the other kid started it.
Crying to the teacher may make things worse but fighting back will NEVER be a solution for everyone. Bullies are someone's kids too and the more kids we teach to fight the better bullies will be at fighting. SOMEONE is always weaker, slower or able to take less pain. Everyone should be free of bullying not just the strong or fast.
Just ignoring the comments is perhaps the stupidest thing you could say about bullying. It's like telling an alcoholic "just don't drink." It's good advice to head off the problem but totally useless once it starts. Everyone has a breaking point where their expression if nothing else will show how upset they are and once bullies realize that they can provoke some sort of reaction they will keep trying till they do it again. Once you've reached this point not reacting just makes the whole thing a game to them.
Trust me people gave me exactly this advice when I was a kid but trying not to react just encouraged more people to tease and ridicule me because it was a challenge to see if they could make me break. Unfortunately if you are persistent enough and know their soft spots you can make almost any adult react much less a child. Try telling this to a black kid and putting him in a classroom of white kids who call him nigger, slave and laugh at him every day. He will react eventually and just because it isn't racial doesn't mean that others don't have equally soft spots.
This attitude is exactly why bullying is such a problem in the US. Repeatedly while I was a child teachers choose not to intervene to stop bullies on the theory that kids should take care of themselves.
I mean why not take this same attitude for sexual harrasment. Sure kids at school are calling your daughter a slut and a whore and suggesting in class that she blow them but she should just stand up for herself and take care of it. If the white guys at school are calling the black kid nigger and slave or the jew a kike the minority kids should just stand up for themselves right?
What I find most abhorrent about this attitude is that most people who hold it wouldn't dream of applying it in situations like sexual or racial harassment. It isn't a real solution to bullying it is just a way to say that it isn't important or a big deal. If you wouldn't tell the one black kid at school to just take it like a man when all the white kids called him a nigger why would you try to tell that to the nerd everyone hates?
Trust me trying to fight back isn't always a good solution. Sometimes other people are bigger or come in greater numbers than you. Or for instance in my case everyone else could run faster than I and just laughed and taunted me while staying out of reach whenever teachers weren't around. The idea that every kid should have to engage in a rocky like training program or be subject to repeated physical violence not to be persecuted is absurd. Things like Columbine happen BECAUSE of attitudes like this. If your tormentors are all big jocks on the football team the very attitude that says you should take care of yourself and the feeling of powerlessness drives one toward guns to even the score.
Complaining to the teacher may not be productive but that is a totally different question than whether the teacher should do something about it on their own accord. It's the same way that it might not be a good idea to report your neighbor to the authorities for serious fire code violations or for shooting guns into the air but the authorities should surely try and enforce these rules.
The problem is that parents want to believe their little johnny is a good boy.
Most of the people who bullied me in school were kids who came from nice families got reasonable grades and otherwise had reasonable parents. Like not brushing your teeth or not being impolite bullying and teasing are natural temptations for children who must be taught not to do them.
Even good kids are ungrateful sometimes when grandma gives them a present but by punishing/scolding them they learn not to do it. Something similar must be done to stop bullying.
The problem is that no parents are around to see the bullying and the teachers rarely witness it directly but instead just see enough to know what is going on. The problem then is that the parent goes home and little johnny explains that he wasn't doing anything bad it was just his friends and when the teacher has no direct evidence to contradict this the parent sides with their little johnny. Because of course he would never do something that mean and bad.
I certainly have sentiments in this direction. However, I'm not sure I see the huge problem with the funeral. It was social pressure that compelled you not to ask if you could leave. No teacher threatened you with discipline if you didn't hug the parent, you could have just walked up and looked and left.
Also one has to remember that there is a trade off between a school's power over it's children and it's ability to stop bullying. The problem with zero tolerance is it's inflexibility requiring teachers to punish who they see do something rather than who they know is the real trouble maker. If you want to stop bullying teachers MUST be able to punish people for things they didn't see or for behavior that is simple talk (in school).
Yet their seems to be a fundamental tension between giving teachers the power to punish kids for having 'bad attitudes', e.g., teasing or harassing behavior, and being free of the sort of coercion you mention at the funeral. If the teacher can punish for bullies sneering and saying provocative things then how do you draw the line that prevents them from punishing for engaging in mean/provocative behavior toward the parents of the dead child?
Yes, and what they need to do is to punish ANY and ALL bullying severely whether they observed the incident or not.
Trying to keep the bullied kid apart from the bullies (pulling him from a class as they did with me) or telling him just to ignore the bullies doesn't cut it. Bullying may happen when the teacher isn't looking but they damn well know it is going on and need to do something about it.
It is the parents that are the problem. If the teacher had a free hand to punish when they knew bullying was going on much more could be done. But parents always believe their little johnny when he tells them he did nothing wrong and because they are allowed to put pressure on the teacher it makes it very uncomfortable for them to punish behavior they didn't actually see.
Yet if all the teacher does is lecture, or talk or anything similar it just encourages the bullies. Doing things the teacher can't control is a thrill all on it's own to young kids.
We need structural reforms to fix these problems but I don't know what they are.
This is the most awful idea I've ever heard. The free speech implications are quite troubling and you know that in reality these sort of laws get used preferentially against people with unpopular views. But worse than this is the fact that it won't help any kids out and might make their lives worse.
I suspect other people on slashdot were bullied as children as well and you know the one thing guaranteed to make it worse is ineffective appeals for help from authorities. If the kids at your school find out you went to the police over some Items things are likely to get much worse. Everything and more than can happen to you online can just happen to you in school.
Disgustingly our schools can't even (or won't) control real physical teasing and picking on. Why not start with trying to deal with bullying in the context where the school has much greater control and knowledge rather than online? Ohh right, it's because this law is less about making children's lives better as it is about soothing adult consciences. They can pretend the bullying isn't happening if they don't see it but if it's on a web page they feel guilty.
If you want to fix (mitigate really) the problem of bullying and teasing you need to change some fundamental structural features of teacher/parent incentives. Right now there is strong disincentive for the teachers to really do anything about bullying. Even though the teachers might know who is doing the bullying they rarely have proof and punishing the offenders without it risks great flak from their parents or maybe even a lawsuit. Also once they involve themselves in the situation they create all sorts of problems for themselves (potential lawsuit if things go bad b/c they have shown they knew about the issue). Even with the best intentions in the world teachers, being only human like the rest of us, will ignore or 'not notice' bullying they know is happening but can't see or worse ineffectively impose minor punishments that, like this law, just make the situation worse.
Not bullying/teasing is like being polite. Any attempt to teach it by legalistic formal rules will just encourage the bad behavior elsewhere. However, just as parents can teach politeness by punishing for sassy tones and other subtle types of impoliteness that violate no legalistic rule bullying could be prevented by punishing the bullies whenever you knew they had done wrong, whether you caught them in the act or not.
In order to deter bullying teachers need to fear parental complaints less and have a stronger incentive to stop the behavior. Basically we need a change in attitude where teachers are held just for the bullying that happens in their classes as for any punishment they might dish out. If we can't stop the pressure on teachers from outrage parents of punished children maybe we should make teachers legally liable for bullying that happens in their classroom to even things out despite the obvious problems with this idea. Perhaps instead we should remove local control of schools short circuiting the influence of parents on the school and hence teachers?
Frankly I'm not sure how to change the current incentive balance toward stopping bullies. I just know that something needs to be done and it isn't more ineffective legalistic attempts to clamp down on one aspect of the problem.
Uhh, that sounds reasonable except it seems incompatible with the wiki model.
The point of wikipedia is that the readers ARE the contributors. If I don't go to wikipedia to see wikipedia content then when I see an error or a oversight I can't correct the original content.
Sure you might try and set up a situation where the content is distributed but the edits all get sent back to the original but one has both legal and technical issues in trying to require your distributers do this.
There are a lot of interesting non-invasive techniques that can be used to analyze the frog for now. Sure no DNA but the frog has made it 25 million years, I'm sure the DNA isn't going to get much worse in the next thousand years or so.
Right now DNA technology is in its infancy. Eventually someone who inherits or buys the frog will let the more advanced DNA technology of the day at the frog and we will find out about it then.
Nothing is being lost we just need a bit of patience.
Also I should remark that most of the objections I have heard to ads on wikipedia center around the annoyance of seeing ads or some other supposed cost to making the visitors see ads. Now if you don't donate to wikipedia yourself even a little I don't think you really have much standing to object to ads but whether you do or not consider the following point.
The question should not be whether wikipedia is better with or without ads. Obviously no one favors hosting ads for free on wikipedia. The question is whether the cost of having ads is more than the benefits ad money can buy.
Can anyone here really say they would take a million dollars from other needy open source/content projects or other worthwhile charity (cancer research etc..) just so people didn't have to see (opt out?) ads on wikipedia? Yet a million dollars is at the low end of the ad revenue wikipedia might generate, the potential to benefit the community is huge. Can you really say that not seeing ads is worth denying the community that much benefit?
What possible reason could you have to oppose opt out ads for wikipedia? If you don't like them you could turn them off and wikipedia would get lots of money it could use for hosting and potentially even enough to fund other projects.
Frankly I don't see any good reason not to put even mandatory small tasteful text ads on wikipedia. I think it's silly enough for public radio/TV not to support themselves by ads but at least they do short sponsorship bits and they at least have the argument that they need to maintain the appearance of not being influenced by corporate money but wikipedia, by it's very nature doesn't need to worry about appearing to tailor its information to advertisers.
As far as Wale's claim that the decision isn't up to him it's up to the community it is correct but may not be the right point. My understanding is the default position is that wikipedia will remain without ads and the community would have to get up and make a demand for it to change. It is Wales (and other foundation members) decision to set the default policy and I think it should be the opposite.
Still, having said all that if other people care enough about wikipedia being ad free to donate money to keep it running then that's their prerogative. At one point I donated money for wikipedia but I won't do so again. I have no problem viewing ads to keep wikipedia afloat but since wikipedia could damn well support itself with zero detrimental effect my money could accomplish a great deal more being donated to projects that actually need it.
The author of this piece takes about meritocratic search as if it were some real fixed ordering of the search results that we just have to be smart enough to uncover. This is anything but the case. For instance is the recipe for apple pie that makes better tasting pie but is too complicated for the inexperienced chief to make better or worse than the one which is extremely easy to follow but isn't as good? When talking about pie this sort of issue might not be a big deal but what happens when we start talking about things like climate science. Is the best result some sort of environmental activists site, a mass media story, a global warming skeptic's site or the actual scientific results that are too technical for most of the public to understand?
Sure, wikipedia makes these compromises quit well but the idea of content neutral encyclopedia entries provides a well defined goal. The second that we get to a search engine we can no longer cling to content neutrality because we must choose how to rank the advocacy sites on both sides of the spectrum. Unlike wikipedia where one can neutrally remark that some people believe X and others Y in a search engine the community has to decide if "unwanted pregnancy" is going to take someone to the planned parenthood site, an abortion clinic or an anti-abortion site.
In short there is no notion of the meritocratic search order, there are just tradeoffs between different sorts of searchers. Google is already navigating this maze of tradeoffs, including looking at what users like, so I fail to see the argument that a community search will obviously make better tradeoffs than Google.
In fact anyone who has spent much time on the Internet realizes that every community tends to develop its own prejudices and biases pushing away those who disagree and attracting those who agree. Slashdot attracts open source zealots and repels the technically inept. Whatever community develops this search engine will have its own biases which will discourage participation by those who don't agree. This is just human nature.
Likely I might enjoy the results returned by such a search since I suspect the participants are likely to be technically sophisticated nerds and others who have similar views as I do. However, it seems doubtful that they will provide the results people who are very different than those who run the search engine will appreciate.
Besides, this whole project just smells hokey to me. It sounds like Wales is drunk on his success with wikipedia and advocating it as THE solution to any problem. Problems are pragmatic things and they shouldn't be solved by ideologies.
Slashdot Mirror
It was discovered wearing a ratty linux t-shirt.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Seriously however the article was very unclear. What is it that asexual organisms aren't able to do? Surely it isn't that they can't diversify into different species. After all every organism on earth is descended from the same intial life form and some organisms are still asexual hence establishing that the initial lifeform diversified into some progenitor sexual organism as well as branches that remained asexual.
My best guess as to the claim made in the article is that multi-celluar organisms require sexual reproduction to select for organism wide traits. Not sure why it would be true (maybe different cells don't have enough incentive to look out for the whole organism) but that's my best guess.
Anyway saying that the organism doesn't have sex isn't very clear. Many bacteria exchange genetic material without having sex. Such a system might let this creature gain some of the benefits of sexual selection.
Does anyone understand what this article is actually trying to say? I know it's a funny title but some info would be nice too.
This is much like the theory of art that motivated that french dude (forget his name) to write the whole book without using the letter e. His theory was something like artistic value came from dealing with boundaries and conditions.
By the way if anyone doubts that boundaries and requirements often make a problem more difficult to solve just consider problems in CS or mathematics. Frequently the right solutions come from solving special cases that add more constraints to the problem and then generalizing. Trying to deal with all the possible variables in a problem at once can be just too daunting but boundaries and conditions limit the number of possibilities one must consider and often the solution to the restricted problem can later be generalized.
I very much doubt the support issue is the problem. If enough people would buy it Dell could just start the Dell Computer Expert line and make it damn clear that you don't order one unless you know what your doing and their is no support on anything but the hardware. Hell if they were worried enough about their name they could just sell them under some name other than Dell.
I suspect the problem is economic.
For starters I bet people demanding linux are far more willing to voice demands than they are to put up money. I bet tons of the people who asked dell to offer a linux PC wouldn't really buy one. They might like linux but when it comes time to buy a new computer they decide to dull boot and realize it's cheaper just to buy the computer preloaded with windows. Even if this isn't the case the possibility that linux advocates make more noise than they would buy computers is something Dell must consider.
Secondly Dell doesn't have apps to sell people who buy linux only boxes printer ink and all sorts of other high margin items. If anything the problem is they realize the people who buy linux boxes wouldn't buy extended support, at least not the sort of support it was economical to offer. Dell probably has a nearly zero margin on the basic PC and makes up their money on the extras. Why bother selling a linux PC if the purchasers are smart enough not to buy any of the high margin extras?
Finally there is the concern of pissing off MS. Whatever anti-trust rulings MS is constrained by why risk pissing them off unless it would bring you a high margin business?
The issue isn't offering support it is making money!
This isn't really all that exciting. What is going on is that light has several velocities. There is the speed the actual stuff making it up can move at (signalling speed) and there are also several other velocities.
What they are talking about here is if you watched the crest of the electric field how fast that would appear to move. If you set things up very carefully that seems to move faster than any of the particles in the light.
Ughh, yet another huge slashdot discussion where a bunch of people who won't take the time to read the actual science think they should be able to evaluate the evidence for global warming. Invariably analogizing the acceptance of the consensus opinion among climate scientists with religious belief.
Now these climate change skeptics are right when they point out that scientific consensus means nothing against the evidence. It doesn't matter if every single person on earth disagrees with you, if the evidence is on your side you have the better case. However, it is a mistake to infer from this that in practice scientific consensus is irrelevant.
The situation with climate science is much like that of a complicated high-profile murder trial with no smoking gun. We all recognize that it would be a mistake to judge the defendant based on the evidence we see presented in the media. All sorts of biases affect what the media reports but most importantly is the fact that news comes in byte sized chunks. If the prosecution's case is simple (he was found with the gun) while the defense has a long list of little details then the information in the media won't give a fair view of the evidence. This is why we have juries who actually listen to all the evidence rather than having the public vote on the matter.
Now it is the *evidence* which determines what we should think about someone's guilt or innocent and if we sat on the jury no consensus in the public should sway us from what the evidence says. However if we just read some accounts in the media and the jury said, "Yeah we considered those but there was a huge amount of little points that outweighed that" then we would be smart to believe them. If we replace a jury with a group selected to be experts in the field the point is even more clear.
So sure this study may be *evidence* against anthropogenic global warming but whenever a psychic gets lucky that is evidence for telepathy too. The only important question is what the balance of the evidence says. Now if you think that evidence in murder trials can be detailed and long it has nothing on climate science and there is just no way a mass media article can convey the results from thousands of scientific papers and arguments.
But just like with a trial if you really care you can go straight to the source (scientific journals/trial transcripts) and look for yourself. However, if you aren't willing to spend the time to look for yourself then it's just idiotic to try and second guess trustworthy people of good reputation who have.
This article is total BS. I have no doubt that keys that pass the LOCAL validation can be pretty easily guessed. However, this is irrelevant to the issue of key collision which is all about WGA and validation through MS's servers.
MS can easily keep a second smaller list of the keys that have actually been given out. Then maybe once a day check to see if the key your brute force hack found is a real valid key or just a possible but non-issued key. If so then reset your software to non-genuine.
In short because the real security mechanism is the online verification MS has complete control over throttling requests and monitoring people who try many keys so this worry just doesn't stand up.
I know it's been awhile but here's my reply.
As far as very young children I agree this sounds like a good approach. Young children will listen to the teacher and actually want their approval and want to avoid their disapproval. This desire to please makes them ready to accept the teacher's direction about how to behave and when they should feel good or bad about what they have done.
However, it is totally useless for older students, e.g., middle schoolers. Once kids gets to middle school the absolute worst thing you can do is make demands of them or tell them things are wrong if you can't back up your demands with punishment. At this age rebellion is the name of the game and the kids are smart enough to know what the teacher is trying to accomplish in respect to bullying. Any attempt to modify the kids behavior that isn't backed up with real authority will backfire.
I saw two teachers in middle school who didn't follow this rule and their classrooms became impossible to control. The first was just generally unwilling to seriously discipline kids or send them to the principle. He would get very mad and yell at the class but as students soon learned that he was all bark and no bite his authority evaporated and no one ever did what he said. A second teacher was generally fine but students started making noises behind her back and she made the mistake of ineffectually spinning around and yelling about what she was going to do to the kids when she caught them. Once the kids realized they could do this without actually getting punished they continued until she was eventually replaced as the teacher.
This is generally true with child raising. When young you usually just want to explain to them why what they did was wrong and help them understand what they should and shouldn't do (tho they still must be punished when they violate the simplest rules you lay down). As they get older they understand how they should behave but deliberately choose to do otherwise at times and need to be shown that this won't be tolerated.
To be clear I don't mean this technology will not have any useful applications. Rather it is more like those clear TFTs that have found use in plasma TVs. Useful in some areas but a sideline to the development of the computer industry or in this case the 3d printer industry.
Oh wait we already have those.
Despite the bad description of why this is important it actually is pretty interesting. This sort of approach is much more efficient for creating 2d sheets with varied 3d geometry than traditional 3d printing which would have to build them up layer by layer and might not even have sufficient structural stability to make the object if it's too bendy.
What would really make this technique useful is if there was some way to combine it with more traditional 3d printing technologies. For instance if you could start with a nice curved surface like this and add layers that would be really cool. However, there are such serious problems with doing this that I think it is unlikely.
Frankly, while interesting I suspect this is just a sidelight in the development of 3d printing technology. What I want to know is why it is taking so long. When will we all have our own 3d printers? When can we shut down those vast numbers of assembly lines that make nothing but strangely shaped 3d objects?
I could care less about whose 'fault' it might be. The reason we punish children is not because they deserve it or we are happy to make them suffer but to deter bad behavior and encourage good behavior. Hell, if it would stop bullying I'd be happy to punish the kid who was being bullied.
As for discussing it with the class this seems fine if we are talking about a fight that broke out between friends or even enemies but not when one kid is being picked on by many others. From my experience this discussion just humiliates the child being picked on while the others mock him from behind pretend masks of concern.
When I was in school the teachers (to my dismay I knew not to complain to them) tried several times to talk to everyone about what had happened or help them see their behavior wasn't right. Every time it just encouraged the bullies further but they made sure to be more careful about being seen.
Kid's aren't nice altruistic creatures who will be good if you just explain things to them. Lord of the Flies gets it pretty much right.
Your 'solution' has exactly the same problems you critisize.
It would be nice to believe that bullies would leave people alone once they showed a backbone or the like but often the goal is exactly to provoke a reaction. Once people get it in their head that it is a game to provoke someone or make them reveal how upset they are no amount of standing up for yourself or trying to ignore them or anything of the kind will fix the situation.
I mean just look at the way racial minorities are treated in many places. This in some sense is an organized version of bullying. Stopping racial epitaphs and persecution is not something that the minority can do simply by not 'being submissive' or standing up for themselves.
That's great but totally irrelevant.
All kids tell their parents they were just defending themselves. The bullies tell their parents the teacher was being unfair and punishing them when the other kid started it.
Crying to the teacher may make things worse but fighting back will NEVER be a solution for everyone. Bullies are someone's kids too and the more kids we teach to fight the better bullies will be at fighting. SOMEONE is always weaker, slower or able to take less pain. Everyone should be free of bullying not just the strong or fast.
Just ignoring the comments is perhaps the stupidest thing you could say about bullying. It's like telling an alcoholic "just don't drink." It's good advice to head off the problem but totally useless once it starts. Everyone has a breaking point where their expression if nothing else will show how upset they are and once bullies realize that they can provoke some sort of reaction they will keep trying till they do it again. Once you've reached this point not reacting just makes the whole thing a game to them.
Trust me people gave me exactly this advice when I was a kid but trying not to react just encouraged more people to tease and ridicule me because it was a challenge to see if they could make me break. Unfortunately if you are persistent enough and know their soft spots you can make almost any adult react much less a child. Try telling this to a black kid and putting him in a classroom of white kids who call him nigger, slave and laugh at him every day. He will react eventually and just because it isn't racial doesn't mean that others don't have equally soft spots.
This attitude is exactly why bullying is such a problem in the US. Repeatedly while I was a child teachers choose not to intervene to stop bullies on the theory that kids should take care of themselves.
I mean why not take this same attitude for sexual harrasment. Sure kids at school are calling your daughter a slut and a whore and suggesting in class that she blow them but she should just stand up for herself and take care of it. If the white guys at school are calling the black kid nigger and slave or the jew a kike the minority kids should just stand up for themselves right?
What I find most abhorrent about this attitude is that most people who hold it wouldn't dream of applying it in situations like sexual or racial harassment. It isn't a real solution to bullying it is just a way to say that it isn't important or a big deal. If you wouldn't tell the one black kid at school to just take it like a man when all the white kids called him a nigger why would you try to tell that to the nerd everyone hates?
Trust me trying to fight back isn't always a good solution. Sometimes other people are bigger or come in greater numbers than you. Or for instance in my case everyone else could run faster than I and just laughed and taunted me while staying out of reach whenever teachers weren't around. The idea that every kid should have to engage in a rocky like training program or be subject to repeated physical violence not to be persecuted is absurd. Things like Columbine happen BECAUSE of attitudes like this. If your tormentors are all big jocks on the football team the very attitude that says you should take care of yourself and the feeling of powerlessness drives one toward guns to even the score.
Complaining to the teacher may not be productive but that is a totally different question than whether the teacher should do something about it on their own accord. It's the same way that it might not be a good idea to report your neighbor to the authorities for serious fire code violations or for shooting guns into the air but the authorities should surely try and enforce these rules.
The problem is that parents want to believe their little johnny is a good boy.
Most of the people who bullied me in school were kids who came from nice families got reasonable grades and otherwise had reasonable parents. Like not brushing your teeth or not being impolite bullying and teasing are natural temptations for children who must be taught not to do them.
Even good kids are ungrateful sometimes when grandma gives them a present but by punishing/scolding them they learn not to do it. Something similar must be done to stop bullying.
The problem is that no parents are around to see the bullying and the teachers rarely witness it directly but instead just see enough to know what is going on. The problem then is that the parent goes home and little johnny explains that he wasn't doing anything bad it was just his friends and when the teacher has no direct evidence to contradict this the parent sides with their little johnny. Because of course he would never do something that mean and bad.
I certainly have sentiments in this direction. However, I'm not sure I see the huge problem with the funeral. It was social pressure that compelled you not to ask if you could leave. No teacher threatened you with discipline if you didn't hug the parent, you could have just walked up and looked and left.
Also one has to remember that there is a trade off between a school's power over it's children and it's ability to stop bullying. The problem with zero tolerance is it's inflexibility requiring teachers to punish who they see do something rather than who they know is the real trouble maker. If you want to stop bullying teachers MUST be able to punish people for things they didn't see or for behavior that is simple talk (in school).
Yet their seems to be a fundamental tension between giving teachers the power to punish kids for having 'bad attitudes', e.g., teasing or harassing behavior, and being free of the sort of coercion you mention at the funeral. If the teacher can punish for bullies sneering and saying provocative things then how do you draw the line that prevents them from punishing for engaging in mean/provocative behavior toward the parents of the dead child?
Yes, and what they need to do is to punish ANY and ALL bullying severely whether they observed the incident or not.
Trying to keep the bullied kid apart from the bullies (pulling him from a class as they did with me) or telling him just to ignore the bullies doesn't cut it. Bullying may happen when the teacher isn't looking but they damn well know it is going on and need to do something about it.
It is the parents that are the problem. If the teacher had a free hand to punish when they knew bullying was going on much more could be done. But parents always believe their little johnny when he tells them he did nothing wrong and because they are allowed to put pressure on the teacher it makes it very uncomfortable for them to punish behavior they didn't actually see.
Yet if all the teacher does is lecture, or talk or anything similar it just encourages the bullies. Doing things the teacher can't control is a thrill all on it's own to young kids.
We need structural reforms to fix these problems but I don't know what they are.
This is the most awful idea I've ever heard. The free speech implications are quite troubling and you know that in reality these sort of laws get used preferentially against people with unpopular views. But worse than this is the fact that it won't help any kids out and might make their lives worse.
I suspect other people on slashdot were bullied as children as well and you know the one thing guaranteed to make it worse is ineffective appeals for help from authorities. If the kids at your school find out you went to the police over some Items things are likely to get much worse. Everything and more than can happen to you online can just happen to you in school.
Disgustingly our schools can't even (or won't) control real physical teasing and picking on. Why not start with trying to deal with bullying in the context where the school has much greater control and knowledge rather than online? Ohh right, it's because this law is less about making children's lives better as it is about soothing adult consciences. They can pretend the bullying isn't happening if they don't see it but if it's on a web page they feel guilty.
If you want to fix (mitigate really) the problem of bullying and teasing you need to change some fundamental structural features of teacher/parent incentives. Right now there is strong disincentive for the teachers to really do anything about bullying. Even though the teachers might know who is doing the bullying they rarely have proof and punishing the offenders without it risks great flak from their parents or maybe even a lawsuit. Also once they involve themselves in the situation they create all sorts of problems for themselves (potential lawsuit if things go bad b/c they have shown they knew about the issue). Even with the best intentions in the world teachers, being only human like the rest of us, will ignore or 'not notice' bullying they know is happening but can't see or worse ineffectively impose minor punishments that, like this law, just make the situation worse.
Not bullying/teasing is like being polite. Any attempt to teach it by legalistic formal rules will just encourage the bad behavior elsewhere. However, just as parents can teach politeness by punishing for sassy tones and other subtle types of impoliteness that violate no legalistic rule bullying could be prevented by punishing the bullies whenever you knew they had done wrong, whether you caught them in the act or not.
In order to deter bullying teachers need to fear parental complaints less and have a stronger incentive to stop the behavior. Basically we need a change in attitude where teachers are held just for the bullying that happens in their classes as for any punishment they might dish out. If we can't stop the pressure on teachers from outrage parents of punished children maybe we should make teachers legally liable for bullying that happens in their classroom to even things out despite the obvious problems with this idea. Perhaps instead we should remove local control of schools short circuiting the influence of parents on the school and hence teachers?
Frankly I'm not sure how to change the current incentive balance toward stopping bullies. I just know that something needs to be done and it isn't more ineffective legalistic attempts to clamp down on one aspect of the problem.
It was on digg.
Uhh, that sounds reasonable except it seems incompatible with the wiki model.
The point of wikipedia is that the readers ARE the contributors. If I don't go to wikipedia to see wikipedia content then when I see an error or a oversight I can't correct the original content.
Sure you might try and set up a situation where the content is distributed but the edits all get sent back to the original but one has both legal and technical issues in trying to require your distributers do this.
There are a lot of interesting non-invasive techniques that can be used to analyze the frog for now. Sure no DNA but the frog has made it 25 million years, I'm sure the DNA isn't going to get much worse in the next thousand years or so.
Right now DNA technology is in its infancy. Eventually someone who inherits or buys the frog will let the more advanced DNA technology of the day at the frog and we will find out about it then.
Nothing is being lost we just need a bit of patience.
Who noticed that the net effect of this lawsuit is to get apple free media coverage for apple's iPhone?
Maybe apple, or both apple and cisco have some incentive to put off settlement for awhile?
Should have made it clear that the million dollars is for three-four months of wikipedia without ads.
Also I should remark that most of the objections I have heard to ads on wikipedia center around the annoyance of seeing ads or some other supposed cost to making the visitors see ads. Now if you don't donate to wikipedia yourself even a little I don't think you really have much standing to object to ads but whether you do or not consider the following point.
The question should not be whether wikipedia is better with or without ads. Obviously no one favors hosting ads for free on wikipedia. The question is whether the cost of having ads is more than the benefits ad money can buy.
Can anyone here really say they would take a million dollars from other needy open source/content projects or other worthwhile charity (cancer research etc..) just so people didn't have to see (opt out?) ads on wikipedia? Yet a million dollars is at the low end of the ad revenue wikipedia might generate, the potential to benefit the community is huge. Can you really say that not seeing ads is worth denying the community that much benefit?
What possible reason could you have to oppose opt out ads for wikipedia? If you don't like them you could turn them off and wikipedia would get lots of money it could use for hosting and potentially even enough to fund other projects.
Frankly I don't see any good reason not to put even mandatory small tasteful text ads on wikipedia. I think it's silly enough for public radio/TV not to support themselves by ads but at least they do short sponsorship bits and they at least have the argument that they need to maintain the appearance of not being influenced by corporate money but wikipedia, by it's very nature doesn't need to worry about appearing to tailor its information to advertisers.
As far as Wale's claim that the decision isn't up to him it's up to the community it is correct but may not be the right point. My understanding is the default position is that wikipedia will remain without ads and the community would have to get up and make a demand for it to change. It is Wales (and other foundation members) decision to set the default policy and I think it should be the opposite.
Still, having said all that if other people care enough about wikipedia being ad free to donate money to keep it running then that's their prerogative. At one point I donated money for wikipedia but I won't do so again. I have no problem viewing ads to keep wikipedia afloat but since wikipedia could damn well support itself with zero detrimental effect my money could accomplish a great deal more being donated to projects that actually need it.
The author of this piece takes about meritocratic search as if it were some real fixed ordering of the search results that we just have to be smart enough to uncover. This is anything but the case. For instance is the recipe for apple pie that makes better tasting pie but is too complicated for the inexperienced chief to make better or worse than the one which is extremely easy to follow but isn't as good? When talking about pie this sort of issue might not be a big deal but what happens when we start talking about things like climate science. Is the best result some sort of environmental activists site, a mass media story, a global warming skeptic's site or the actual scientific results that are too technical for most of the public to understand?
Sure, wikipedia makes these compromises quit well but the idea of content neutral encyclopedia entries provides a well defined goal. The second that we get to a search engine we can no longer cling to content neutrality because we must choose how to rank the advocacy sites on both sides of the spectrum. Unlike wikipedia where one can neutrally remark that some people believe X and others Y in a search engine the community has to decide if "unwanted pregnancy" is going to take someone to the planned parenthood site, an abortion clinic or an anti-abortion site.
In short there is no notion of the meritocratic search order, there are just tradeoffs between different sorts of searchers. Google is already navigating this maze of tradeoffs, including looking at what users like, so I fail to see the argument that a community search will obviously make better tradeoffs than Google.
In fact anyone who has spent much time on the Internet realizes that every community tends to develop its own prejudices and biases pushing away those who disagree and attracting those who agree. Slashdot attracts open source zealots and repels the technically inept. Whatever community develops this search engine will have its own biases which will discourage participation by those who don't agree. This is just human nature.
Likely I might enjoy the results returned by such a search since I suspect the participants are likely to be technically sophisticated nerds and others who have similar views as I do. However, it seems doubtful that they will provide the results people who are very different than those who run the search engine will appreciate.
Besides, this whole project just smells hokey to me. It sounds like Wales is drunk on his success with wikipedia and advocating it as THE solution to any problem. Problems are pragmatic things and they shouldn't be solved by ideologies.