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User: LienRag

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  1. Re:Assuming Your Time is Worthless on Are High MOOC Failure Rates a Bug Or a Feature? · · Score: 1

    The correspondance boom you're referring to may have faded, but correspondance courses are still around and very useful for who has time (and the right skills) to devote to them.
    MOOCs are not a magic ticket to universal academic success, but they are at least highly improved correspondance courses.

  2. Re:Eventually people will look up... on US Customs Destroys Virtuoso's Flutes Because They Were "Agricultural Items" · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately after 10 years they've realized that secret prisons are really messy from a human rights perspective so they've decided to use summary executions instead which is why they killed an unarmed Bin Laden at point blank range.

    They claim to have killed an unarmed Bin Laden at point blank range.
    Ever saw the movie The Siege? Which, by the way, was shot a few years before 9/11...

  3. Re:Well... on Ask Slashdot: What Are the Books Everyone Should Read? · · Score: 1

    Actually, no.
    Karl Marx was a philosophe, and considered that he needed to understand economy to further his philosophical goals of emancipation.
    Anyway, the communist manifesto is highly dated; The Capital is obviously a book of his time, but being observational and analytical rather than programmatic, it is an excellent description of the industrial revolution.

  4. Roger Gentis on Ask Slashdot: Working With Others, As a Schizophrenic Developer? · · Score: 1

    I would highly recommend reading Roger Gentis's work, especially maybe "Les murs de l'asile".
    It's quite old indeed, but still very interesting.

  5. Re:Cry me a river: try 56K on Surviving the Internet On Low Speed DSL · · Score: 1

    This is what I came for when I've read low-speed...
    I have a better bandwith here than your 56k modem, but not that much (usually around 20 ko/s).

    The technical solutions on your link are interesting, but a bit more extreme that what I would need.
    Actually, I'm particularly interested in understanding what's non-optimal in bandwith allowance and usage (both from the tower to my computer, and inside my computer, between applications).
    There are some behaviours (pages refusing to load at random times) that show that the problem is not only poor bandwith, but bad usage of it too.

  6. Background on How Asimov's Three Laws Ran Out of Steam · · Score: 1

    Asimow was a jew.
    Jewish intellectuals have a sense of community and an ethic of responsability*, and so loyalty towards humanity and the general good trumps loyalty to the state or the corporation.
    So Asimov imagined a future where engineers would have an ethic of responsability and some sort of loyalty towards humanity.
    That's the reason for the Three Laws being unrelevant to the actual world.


    (*) Non-zionist ones at least.

  7. Re:Political theater on US Spying Costs Boeing Military Jet Deal With Brazil · · Score: 1

    What seems to be the situation is that for ten years, the Brazil government did not want to buy american jets, but had not enough power to say a definitive "no" to such a "caring friend" as the American government.
    Now the Snowden scandal gives Rousseff a good reason to go for the better plane without risking too much of political backlash from both US governement and Boing and US Army friends in Brazil.

  8. It seems that the real problem is that allowing people to share creation freely would end in people actually choosing what they want to watch and read.
    Which would mean that Big Entertainment would not anymore being able to force-feed product-placement crap through false choice like "Ow my balls!" on Channel 1 and "Ouch my thingies!" on Channel 2.
    Which would be not only the end of Big Entertainement, but the end too of consumer-driven capitalism, which works well towards an idiocracy-like utopia only because the consumers are advertisement-driven.

    If you don't control anymore what the people watch and read, you lose control both of what people think and of what they buy (they might even think before buying - oh the humanity!), so it's the end of civilisation as we know it.

  9. Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number on Swedish Man Fined $650,000 For Sharing 1 Movie, Charged Extra For Low Quality · · Score: 1

    And some people consider that the content-owners should die a painful death and let the content-makers and content-users find together a honest way to keep creation flowing...

  10. Re:Back up... on NSA Head Asks How To Spy Without Collecting Metadata · · Score: 1

    There's an interesting explanation at the end of Dennis Lehane's "Sacred": basically, because you could not live on what you actually produce, so you have to steal your income from other people and other countries.
    Stealing from poor people on a long-term basis cannot be established without submitting them to a reign of terror, so you end living in fear of them retaliating somehow.

  11. Re:Anti-vaxxers on U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013 · · Score: 1

    Getting the measles is a vaccine, so what's wrong with that?

  12. Re:It is actually rather a danerous thing. on Google Wants To Write Your Social Media Responses For You · · Score: 1

    Interesting article on French site Reflets on this topic...
    The Korean candidate seems like amateur work comparing to what can be done with such modern technology.

  13. Re:On a scale of 10... on Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health · · Score: 1

    It's not a problem, it's a solution...

    The problem would be getting rid of the people who try to trick other human beings back in unhealthy eating habits.

  14. Re:Finally! on Have 100GB Free? Host Your Own Copy of Wikipedia, With Images · · Score: 1

    I didn't actually believe it either when I first saw it on Slashdot.

    And then I read the webcomic Namesake, and went to Wikipedia to check one thing about Alice Liddel which was featured on the webcomic (which is very good by the way, and is quite famous now).
    I noticed that there was a section of the wikipedia notice called "Alice Liddel in fiction" and which didn't feature Namesake, so I added Namesake.

    It was immediately reverted, citing "no link".

    So I reverted the revert and added a link.
    It was immediately reverted.

    I reverted the revert and went to the user page of the reverter, asking the reason of his vandalism. He actually answered me in quite a polite way, with bad arguments, and reverted again.

    You can guess that an average Wikipedia user will not go so far (I usually don't even check that my inputs are not reverted), so yes these people are actually destroying public participation in wikipedia, slowly but surely.

  15. Re:Skynet on Military Robots Expected To Outnumber Troops By 2023 · · Score: 1

    Actually and as Marshall Brain's "Manna" has demonstrated, the real threat is not some fantasy AI supercomputer but human beings learning to leave their decisions to algorithms and then obey said algorithms...

  16. Re:Booze Bus on Texas Drivers Stopped At Roadblock, Asked For Saliva, Blood · · Score: 1

    . I agree that drink driving is senselessly taking lives of people who would still be alive is drunks were more responsible, but heavy-handed enforcement of arbitrary restrictions doesn't help anyone.

    Well, if drunks were more responsible, there wouldn't be a need for booze buses in the first place...
    Or maybe they are responsible persons that happen to be at the moment, well, a bit drunk?

  17. Re:An enormously bold move... on Inside South Africa's First Fully Digital Government School · · Score: 1

    In the mid-eighties France launched a big program to give all schools Thomson PC computers (making people joke about computer helped education: in France it was the education which helped computer industry - Thomson being a state-owned industry at the time).
    Without any real thought about how to use them in schools nor teachers' involvement in the decision making, nor even a real formation effort for the teachers themselves, most computers ended on shelves and it was one of the big failures of the old-style socialist government.

    Though, many Freinet schools did (at the time and much more after the start of the internet) bring computers in the classroom - AFTER careful thinking and experiments about what they can be used for - and they had (and still have) extraordinary results.


    So yes, stupid decisions are stupid. And you don't fix bad teachers by giving them more tools to be bad with.

    That doesn't mean that technology isn't of any use in school.

  18. Re:Not Surprising on A Ray of Hope For Americans and Scientific Literacy? · · Score: 1

    Mostly they just want centralized government to do less. You like your computer networks decentralized, why not your government? Local is better.

    That's called "autogestion", is what Saul Alinsky's work was all about, and I'm not sure that Tea Party is really embracing it.

  19. Re:Geopolitics on US Now Produces More Oil and Gas Than Russia and Saudi Arabia · · Score: 1

    We'd still support the Saudis because Europe and China still use Mideast oil. We might not have been independent of Middle East oil, but we've always used much less of it than other places do.

    You got this right.

    If the Saudis suddenly stopped selling oil to Europe, the US would be mostly okay, but it would trash our allies and seriously destabilize the world picture.

    That's probably right, but it's not the main problem. The real thing that the US fear is what happens if an independant Mideast government starts selling oil directly in euros, without asking for US approval. That would show the Emperor dollar having no clothes, and this can't happen.

  20. Re:Missing the reality of what kids do to insects on Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate · · Score: 1

    Actually yes, the bullies in my school used to do that.
    I never did or thought of doing it (and yes, I kill mosquitoes and sometime cockroaches, though I try to do it quickly rather than let them suffer).

  21. Re:We've already lost ... on Newly Discovered Meltwater Streams Flow Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet · · Score: 1

    Really, the right is just better at explaining, in terms that everyone can understand, what they think.

    You're making an interesting point, but you got this wrong: it is very rare, and when it occurs a fascinating thing to observe, that they explain what they really think.
    I guess you can't be believing that they actually buy the gibberish nonsense that they sell to their audiences?
    They explain what they want you to think, certainly not what they actually think - I mean, maybe some people very low on the Tea Party food chain do believe in the Tea Party ideology, but you can't accuse these people of thinking.

    That makes the problem very hard for scientific minds or any honest thinker, not only the left: they have to explain why they think what they think, not make things up to maximize the propaganda effect.


    And making this so that anyone can understand is really not easy - yes,whatever is well conceived is clearly said... and the words to say it flow with ease indeed, but things are to be explained in the simplest possible way, and not any simpler - that's a challenging task to see the difference.

  22. Re:Evidently not that vulnerable on Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps · · Score: 1

    From what I understand (I don't have the link, but François Leclerc has an interesting survey of Fukushima in Paul Jorion's blog), the pool where the rods are is at risk of fracturation from an earthquake, which would then makes the rods uncoolable and self-burning (no chain reaction, but creation of a cloud of radioactive particles) in two weeks - that's why the USA advised all americans to evacuate the Tokyo area at first, before they could check how the rods were behaving.

  23. Re:Utter Nonsense! on How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business · · Score: 1

    I feel compelled to notice that after she stopped suffering, Tracy Chapman never made really good music anymore...

    There's technique in her last albums, but there's nothing really moving.

  24. Re:Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace on Ask Slashdot: High-School Suitable Books On How Computers Affect Society? · · Score: 1

    Actually, I'm supposed to make a small presentation about "code is law" (the concept, not the book) and I found that Lessig's conference is not really relevant to my public (too much stress on privacy, which we haven't here anyway, and nearly nothing on how code embeds decisions that are not democratically discussed). Is there some other text or video or book about this question?

  25. Re:What will replace Maize in 50 years? on "Dramatic Decline" Warning For Plants and Animals · · Score: 1

    True, but plants (and even most small animal) do not move fast enough to follow such a change of geographic conditions.