What do you think pays for the testing your child(ren) go through? Where do you think the money comes from for administration to keep your child(ren) are being taught properly by you? Where do you think the money comes from for any books the kids might need?
You have a point here, however as the rest of your post shows, you (like me) are from California. Many school districts here have some sort of program to "support" homeschoolers. The cynic in me wants to point out that by doing this the school districts get state money they otherwise would not get. I was a bit suprised by the books thing. Where I live in California, the homeschool charter school doesn't pay for books, parents have to cover supplies themselves. The program local to you is not universal, nor I imagine is it very common.
From what I saw in the Antelope Valley School District (when I lived in SoCal), I don't believe home schooling is as effective as whatever reports you may point at would say, anyway.
One of the problems with this is you are presenting entirely anecdotal evidence. There is a book by Thomas Gilovich titled "How We Know What Isn't So." I discovered it because I was intrigued why a book like this would be required for a BioChemistry couse at Stanford. Gilovich covers in detail why one should never trust anecdotal evidence, even one's own. What it boils down to is that even the best intentioned of us tend to filter data that supports what we believe. Thus if you had seen cases where home school was as effective or better than what the school district provided, you would unconsciously fail to register it (or register it but assign it far less significance). Not because you are deficient, everybody just does it.
If you think the public school system is so "fucked up", and you believe you know how to fix it, why not spend that time and energy you are putting into your child for the betterment of society as a whole? If you, and all the other "I'm better than you because MY child is home schooled" parents did the same, I firmly believe other parents would join in and society as a whole would be bettered.
I believe that these parents believe that the homeschool environment is superior to systemized schooling. If this is true, they ARE likely doing what they think is the best thing for their child which also happens to be the best thing for society. If the research on the subject is correct, if everyone were homeschooled society would be much better off because violent mal-adjusted kids occur far less frequently in homeschooling than the general population of their peers. (The problem with such a hasty generalization is, of course, that people who homeschool are also a quite different sub-population.)
This is exactly what I suspected (though I don't care to visit the page). Google has a history of giving web sites that have no real content and artificially attempt to manipulate their ranking a 0 page rank. These places do nothing more than leech off of Google and it seems to me it would be in Google's business interest to give them a 0 page rank. What drives people to Google is the quality of the search results.
If most searches turned up link farms, nobody would use Google. Google has every right to protect the quality of its product (search results).
I'm not specifically familiar with encryption algorithms themselves, however I do know that the general number field sieve was designed to locate candidate prime factors of very large numbers. As long as your encryption algorithm depends on the difficulty of prime factorization of large numbers, GNFS should reduce the difficulty of finding your decryption key well below the age of the universe for keys 512bit and smaller keys.
But the such attack still takes longer than what we have left of fuel in our Sun (~5Gy).
Let's not be too hasty. A 320-bit key has about 97 decimal digits. This is less digits than the RSA-129 key that was broken in 1994 in 6-months by a grid of several thousand computers followed by a couple days of super computer time.
A 512-bit key has about 154 decimal digits, which is less than the RSA 193 key that was cracked last November.
See this for a fairly good reference. If you really need your data secured for the next 20 or so years, you had better be using a 1024-bit or better key.
Your calculation assumes the most efficient attack is brute force - that the number of keys to check for a key of n bits is O(2^(n/2)).
Are you sure there is no better way? Would the general number field sieve reduce the keyspace to search? Will a new sieve arise in the coming years that reduces the security of 320 bit keys?
I know others have issues with compulsory schooling. That doesn't strengthen a weak argument. I disagree that avoiding nitpicking "some flaws" is reasonable.
You are saying an 18 year old would do better with a $200K house in New York rather than a diploma, I disagree. He says there was a time when everybody could read, and learning to read was easy even though few went to school, I disagree. He never specifies when this utopian period of time was, so it is hard for me to impeach the statement. He repeatedly lambasts science and statistics, his arguments are woefully misinformed. He likes to point out things like a boy given command of a ship, while neglecting to mention the circumstances surrounding that. He needs to provide an argument that says prodigys (which we still have today) are held back or prevented from fully realizing their capability inside the formal education system. Or more appropriate to this issue, he needs to justify why the hundreds of boys who signed up for ship duty and died or were maimed during the journey make up for one shining example of natural leadership. I could go on, but the end result is everytime I fact-checked something he said that set my BS-alarm off, I was right to approach his referenceless arguments with suspicion.
He cherry-picks history; in some cases taking things completely out of context. He shuns science. He abuses mathematics. But hey, he won teacher of the year more than once. His argument appeals to the disaffected and less educated. That is why I think this supposedly awesome teacher is readily dismissed. His arguments just plain suck.
See John Taylor Gatto's writings for the larger story of how compulsaory schooling was created 150 years ago to turn independent minded US citizens into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers:
I have tried many times to get through Gatto's book. The problem is he seems to think that being an expert teacher somehow makes him an expert at the education system and a whole lot of other things too. If you can read through his book without finding at least 5 serious errors in either fact or logic, you need to study some more.
From the very first page:
The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school.
Oh really? 5x the original amount in 12 years? That's an average return of 14.4% every year. Sign me up! What sort of crazy investments are you going to put this money in and hope for that sort of return? And what exactly is the "real" cost when lost interest on that $200K up front deposit is factored in. He mixed a cost "with lost interest" and converted it to a cost that doesn't consider lost interest. If the state can get a 14.4% return on that money, then the cost of that nest egg, including lost interest, is 1 million dollars. Wow, so instead of spending $200K to educate a child we can spend $1million to not educate him? Pure genius! That was a really, really unintelligent, poorly reasoned argument for him to make. And that's just page 1.
It's compulsory education not compulsory attendance otherwise children wouldn't be homeschooled and more and more children are being homeschooled.
You should check carefully the education code in your locality. Where I live (California) homeschoolers wanting to do things on the legal side must document time spent learning. The state mandates a minimum number of hours per week for education. If you don't want to call that "attendance" fine. I believe at 15 or 16 the child may escape all this by taking a high school equivalency exam (GED).
I learned all this during research thinking I might homeschool my kids, at least through middle school, because I don't have a great deal of faith in the massive public school system and I can't afford private school.
The rights given us by Our Creator are absolute, and recognition of your privacy is acknowleged in the 4th Amendment guarantees.
So, since The Man has no WARRANT for a search, and PROBABLE CAUSE doesn't exist, it's UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
Wow. God gave us the right to participate in school athletics? Which book was this in? I must have been sleeping through the sermon (again) when they mentioned that. No student is being compelled to submit to drug testing arbitrarily. The policy is applied uniformly only to student athletes. What's the problem?
I'm impressed you guys actually think he didn't have a backup. If there was a million dollar deal in the works, surely he had sent the script to somebody to read and say "we might be interested".
I suspect the jury thought much as you do. They completely dismissed his attempt at compensation for the $2.4M deal that was supposedly in progress. The money they awarded him was for the time it took him to research and write the screenplays. And they found him mostly at fault for the permanent loss.
I strongly disagree with the jury however. I find him 95% at fault for not taking the computer THAT DAY to a service place and asking them to recover the files. The guy added over 4000 files AFTER the deletion. He was looking for a payout from the beginning. He knew he had no chance of selling them.
That's another think 5.25" disks got wrong: using a notch taken out to enable writing, which was the opposite of the cassette tapes used previously where breaking off the tab would protect them.
I think this was an economics decision. Back in the day of floppy drives with only one head, manufacturers could sell "double sided" floppies for a premium. Double sided floppies were just like single sided floppies, only they had a notch in the other side so that they could be flipped over and written to on the other side.
I remember I was pro at using a regular hole punch to turn my single sided floppies into double sided ones. Yes, there were specialized tools specifically made for making perfect square punches on the other side... but I already had a paper hole punch.
Every "good deal" I have ever had on ebay came with a snipe bid.
I've made some bad bids before. And some good bids. But no good bid that was placed 2 hours or more before the end of the item's auction has ever won. Those same "good" bids have won if placed less than 10 seconds before the end of auction. If I snipe I often pay *less* than I was willing to pay, but that has never happened when not sniping. I either lose the item, or end up paying more than I should have because I didn't research enough before hand.
There are people who basically "make a living" at playing this game (though I don't know what sort of living you really could make of it). They find the average selling price of an item, and place a snipe bid that is just enough that selling the item for slightly over average will net them positive income after accounting for shipping. If you want to win the auction at a deal, you must out-snipe them. Play the game "rationally" and you will most likely lose.
Any self respecting slashdotter should know that burnable media have a lousy shelf life.
If you were a self-respecting slashdotter, you would know that is only true for cheap burnable media. High quality burnable media has an estimated shelf-life of about 200 years. Which is better than the standard pressed media. And the high quality stuff still costs less than $1 per disc.
Yes, and there are bugs that disappear when you recompile your code with debugging turned on.
And an example of that would be? (Oh, I know they exist, I just want to see an implication that a single stepping debugger is going to be more successful with it than logging.)
You're still mixing your debugging tech. Breakpoints, single step, memory inspection and source view are completely separate issues from edit and continue. Examining your code in real-time would mean watching a million lines per second fly by.
6) Linux continues to step by step become the de facto choice for computing companies to base their hardware on
On server hardware, I'd tend to agree.
On desktop systems... Until installing a new piece of hardware on a Linux system is a 5 minute process regardless of distribution, I just don't see Linux becoming a real desktop player in many organizations. There are still whole classes of hardware for which Linux support is seriously substandard with no improvement in sight. Linux still suffers from positively awful webcam support. I remember having arguments on the v4l list years ago. I was told I didn't get it and some uber-application would eventually emerge and things would be just rosy. Well, it's been 7 years, the app still isn't here.
I'm still holding out hope that OS-X starts running on commodity x86 hardware and becomes the alternative OS when I build a system of my own.
oh, if only this weren't so true. Just before the dot-com bust, I was the only person willing to take on a particularly complex, particularly arcane interface our software needed to support. Management chose me for this because I had a track record of taking on difficult problems and making something useful.
The problem was that while I was off working my ass off on this truly hard stuff, the whole EJB thing sort of came up with little notice on my part. After the dot-com bust I found myself in a very uncomfortable spot trying to convince HR departments (not technical guys) that they should let their technical people interview me even though I hadn't actually done EJB on my last project.
A solid foundation in Computer Science is highly valuable once hired, and useless before then.
What's a real-time debugger? Do you mean a debugger with edit and continue support? If so I find your use of "real-time" somewhat ironic because there are classes of bugs that only show up when run with real time constraints (e.g. a race condition) and are pretty nearly undebuggable when you're trying to single step through.
This "evidence" appears to be fabricated. The IP address 64.233.166.178 is in fact not listed on Spamhaus at all:
The fact that it isn't listed NOW does not mean it wasn't listed THEN.
I have had spamhaus block email from yahoo too. It has been for me quite a conundrum deciding if the the false positives spamhaus gives outweigh the true spam it blocks. They do generally fix these within a couple hours, but it is really frustrating that during those couple hours, all email going to my mail server from yahoo is getting bounced because someone or something at spamhaus caught someone sending spam.
While I don't specifically know much about the Rio-600, this review seems to show functionality sufficient to violate the creative patent. Some of the ID3 data is being pulled out of the file.
I know, it's hilarious, isn't it. Slashdot's moderation is so great. The creative patent broadly covers any menu navigation, not a specific implementation. Yet my comment which refers to the ridiculous issuance of such a broad patent gets modded down, yet yours which muddles in a different direction on specific implementation get modded up.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think pays for the testing your child(ren) go through? Where do you think the money comes from for administration to keep your child(ren) are being taught properly by you? Where do you think the money comes from for any books the kids might need?
You have a point here, however as the rest of your post shows, you (like me) are from California. Many school districts here have some sort of program to "support" homeschoolers. The cynic in me wants to point out that by doing this the school districts get state money they otherwise would not get. I was a bit suprised by the books thing. Where I live in California, the homeschool charter school doesn't pay for books, parents have to cover supplies themselves. The program local to you is not universal, nor I imagine is it very common.
From what I saw in the Antelope Valley School District (when I lived in SoCal), I don't believe home schooling is as effective as whatever reports you may point at would say, anyway.
One of the problems with this is you are presenting entirely anecdotal evidence. There is a book by Thomas Gilovich titled "How We Know What Isn't So." I discovered it because I was intrigued why a book like this would be required for a BioChemistry couse at Stanford. Gilovich covers in detail why one should never trust anecdotal evidence, even one's own. What it boils down to is that even the best intentioned of us tend to filter data that supports what we believe. Thus if you had seen cases where home school was as effective or better than what the school district provided, you would unconsciously fail to register it (or register it but assign it far less significance). Not because you are deficient, everybody just does it.
If you think the public school system is so "fucked up", and you believe you know how to fix it, why not spend that time and energy you are putting into your child for the betterment of society as a whole? If you, and all the other "I'm better than you because MY child is home schooled" parents did the same, I firmly believe other parents would join in and society as a whole would be bettered.
I believe that these parents believe that the homeschool environment is superior to systemized schooling. If this is true, they ARE likely doing what they think is the best thing for their child which also happens to be the best thing for society. If the research on the subject is correct, if everyone were homeschooled society would be much better off because violent mal-adjusted kids occur far less frequently in homeschooling than the general population of their peers. (The problem with such a hasty generalization is, of course, that people who homeschool are also a quite different sub-population.)
This is exactly what I suspected (though I don't care to visit the page). Google has a history of giving web sites that have no real content and artificially attempt to manipulate their ranking a 0 page rank. These places do nothing more than leech off of Google and it seems to me it would be in Google's business interest to give them a 0 page rank. What drives people to Google is the quality of the search results.
If most searches turned up link farms, nobody would use Google. Google has every right to protect the quality of its product (search results).
1) Submitting to a drug test is not selling one's soul.
2) Not becoming a career athlete does not make one mediocre.
I'm not specifically familiar with encryption algorithms themselves, however I do know that the general number field sieve was designed to locate candidate prime factors of very large numbers. As long as your encryption algorithm depends on the difficulty of prime factorization of large numbers, GNFS should reduce the difficulty of finding your decryption key well below the age of the universe for keys 512bit and smaller keys.
But the such attack still takes longer than what we have left of fuel in our Sun (~5Gy).
Let's not be too hasty. A 320-bit key has about 97 decimal digits. This is less digits than the RSA-129 key that was broken in 1994 in 6-months by a grid of several thousand computers followed by a couple days of super computer time.
A 512-bit key has about 154 decimal digits, which is less than the RSA 193 key that was cracked last November.
See this for a fairly good reference. If you really need your data secured for the next 20 or so years, you had better be using a 1024-bit or better key.
Your calculation assumes the most efficient attack is brute force - that the number of keys to check for a key of n bits is O(2^(n/2)).
Are you sure there is no better way? Would the general number field sieve reduce the keyspace to search? Will a new sieve arise in the coming years that reduces the security of 320 bit keys?
I know others have issues with compulsory schooling. That doesn't strengthen a weak argument. I disagree that avoiding nitpicking "some flaws" is reasonable.
You are saying an 18 year old would do better with a $200K house in New York rather than a diploma, I disagree.
He says there was a time when everybody could read, and learning to read was easy even though few went to school, I disagree. He never specifies when this utopian period of time was, so it is hard for me to impeach the statement.
He repeatedly lambasts science and statistics, his arguments are woefully misinformed.
He likes to point out things like a boy given command of a ship, while neglecting to mention the circumstances surrounding that. He needs to provide an argument that says prodigys (which we still have today) are held back or prevented from fully realizing their capability inside the formal education system. Or more appropriate to this issue, he needs to justify why the hundreds of boys who signed up for ship duty and died or were maimed during the journey make up for one shining example of natural leadership.
I could go on, but the end result is everytime I fact-checked something he said that set my BS-alarm off, I was right to approach his referenceless arguments with suspicion.
He cherry-picks history; in some cases taking things completely out of context. He shuns science. He abuses mathematics. But hey, he won teacher of the year more than once. His argument appeals to the disaffected and less educated. That is why I think this supposedly awesome teacher is readily dismissed. His arguments just plain suck.
I have tried many times to get through Gatto's book. The problem is he seems to think that being an expert teacher somehow makes him an expert at the education system and a whole lot of other things too. If you can read through his book without finding at least 5 serious errors in either fact or logic, you need to study some more.
From the very first page:Oh really? 5x the original amount in 12 years? That's an average return of 14.4% every year. Sign me up! What sort of crazy investments are you going to put this money in and hope for that sort of return? And what exactly is the "real" cost when lost interest on that $200K up front deposit is factored in. He mixed a cost "with lost interest" and converted it to a cost that doesn't consider lost interest. If the state can get a 14.4% return on that money, then the cost of that nest egg, including lost interest, is 1 million dollars. Wow, so instead of spending $200K to educate a child we can spend $1million to not educate him? Pure genius! That was a really, really unintelligent, poorly reasoned argument for him to make. And that's just page 1.
The issue here is cell phone data not drug tests.
Wow, you must be a lawyer. You state the correct issue then spend 4 paragraphs not even touching it.
It's compulsory education not compulsory attendance otherwise children wouldn't be homeschooled and more and more children are being homeschooled.
You should check carefully the education code in your locality. Where I live (California) homeschoolers wanting to do things on the legal side must document time spent learning. The state mandates a minimum number of hours per week for education. If you don't want to call that "attendance" fine. I believe at 15 or 16 the child may escape all this by taking a high school equivalency exam (GED).
I learned all this during research thinking I might homeschool my kids, at least through middle school, because I don't have a great deal of faith in the massive public school system and I can't afford private school.
The rights given us by Our Creator are absolute, and recognition of your privacy is acknowleged in the 4th Amendment guarantees.
So, since The Man has no WARRANT for a search, and PROBABLE CAUSE doesn't exist, it's UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
Wow. God gave us the right to participate in school athletics? Which book was this in? I must have been sleeping through the sermon (again) when they mentioned that. No student is being compelled to submit to drug testing arbitrarily. The policy is applied uniformly only to student athletes. What's the problem?
I think the first post on "ironic" had it right.
The paper clip bartering should have led to his happily every after, but in actuality the paperclip (or lack thereof) was his undoing.
irony3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result
I'm impressed you guys actually think he didn't have a backup. If there was a million dollar deal in the works, surely he had sent the script to somebody to read and say "we might be interested".
I suspect the jury thought much as you do. They completely dismissed his attempt at compensation for the $2.4M deal that was supposedly in progress. The money they awarded him was for the time it took him to research and write the screenplays. And they found him mostly at fault for the permanent loss.
I strongly disagree with the jury however. I find him 95% at fault for not taking the computer THAT DAY to a service place and asking them to recover the files. The guy added over 4000 files AFTER the deletion. He was looking for a payout from the beginning. He knew he had no chance of selling them.
Now if you had been running Gentoo, you could have built an optimized version of the spyware specifically tailored to your system.
Quite a number of these cases have been thrown out because of entrapment concerns.
Link? I mean other than this one.
That's another think 5.25" disks got wrong: using a notch taken out to enable writing, which was the opposite of the cassette tapes used previously where breaking off the tab would protect them.
I think this was an economics decision. Back in the day of floppy drives with only one head, manufacturers could sell "double sided" floppies for a premium. Double sided floppies were just like single sided floppies, only they had a notch in the other side so that they could be flipped over and written to on the other side.
I remember I was pro at using a regular hole punch to turn my single sided floppies into double sided ones. Yes, there were specialized tools specifically made for making perfect square punches on the other side... but I already had a paper hole punch.
Okay, then explain to me this:
Every "good deal" I have ever had on ebay came with a snipe bid.
I've made some bad bids before. And some good bids. But no good bid that was placed 2 hours or more before the end of the item's auction has ever won. Those same "good" bids have won if placed less than 10 seconds before the end of auction. If I snipe I often pay *less* than I was willing to pay, but that has never happened when not sniping. I either lose the item, or end up paying more than I should have because I didn't research enough before hand.
There are people who basically "make a living" at playing this game (though I don't know what sort of living you really could make of it). They find the average selling price of an item, and place a snipe bid that is just enough that selling the item for slightly over average will net them positive income after accounting for shipping. If you want to win the auction at a deal, you must out-snipe them. Play the game "rationally" and you will most likely lose.
Any self respecting slashdotter should know that burnable media have a lousy shelf life.
If you were a self-respecting slashdotter, you would know that is only true for cheap burnable media. High quality burnable media has an estimated shelf-life of about 200 years. Which is better than the standard pressed media. And the high quality stuff still costs less than $1 per disc.
Yes, and there are bugs that disappear when you recompile your code with debugging turned on.
And an example of that would be? (Oh, I know they exist, I just want to see an implication that a single stepping debugger is going to be more successful with it than logging.)
You're still mixing your debugging tech. Breakpoints, single step, memory inspection and source view are completely separate issues from edit and continue. Examining your code in real-time would mean watching a million lines per second fly by.
6) Linux continues to step by step become the de facto choice for computing companies to base their hardware on
On server hardware, I'd tend to agree.
On desktop systems... Until installing a new piece of hardware on a Linux system is a 5 minute process regardless of distribution, I just don't see Linux becoming a real desktop player in many organizations. There are still whole classes of hardware for which Linux support is seriously substandard with no improvement in sight. Linux still suffers from positively awful webcam support. I remember having arguments on the v4l list years ago. I was told I didn't get it and some uber-application would eventually emerge and things would be just rosy. Well, it's been 7 years, the app still isn't here.
I'm still holding out hope that OS-X starts running on commodity x86 hardware and becomes the alternative OS when I build a system of my own.
oh, if only this weren't so true. Just before the dot-com bust, I was the only person willing to take on a particularly complex, particularly arcane interface our software needed to support. Management chose me for this because I had a track record of taking on difficult problems and making something useful.
The problem was that while I was off working my ass off on this truly hard stuff, the whole EJB thing sort of came up with little notice on my part. After the dot-com bust I found myself in a very uncomfortable spot trying to convince HR departments (not technical guys) that they should let their technical people interview me even though I hadn't actually done EJB on my last project.
A solid foundation in Computer Science is highly valuable once hired, and useless before then.
What's a real-time debugger? Do you mean a debugger with edit and continue support? If so I find your use of "real-time" somewhat ironic because there are classes of bugs that only show up when run with real time constraints (e.g. a race condition) and are pretty nearly undebuggable when you're trying to single step through.
This "evidence" appears to be fabricated. The IP address 64.233.166.178 is in fact not listed on Spamhaus at all:
The fact that it isn't listed NOW does not mean it wasn't listed THEN.
I have had spamhaus block email from yahoo too. It has been for me quite a conundrum deciding if the the false positives spamhaus gives outweigh the true spam it blocks. They do generally fix these within a couple hours, but it is really frustrating that during those couple hours, all email going to my mail server from yahoo is getting bounced because someone or something at spamhaus caught someone sending spam.
While I don't specifically know much about the Rio-600, this review seems to show functionality sufficient to violate the creative patent. Some of the ID3 data is being pulled out of the file.
I can't believe your comment got modded up.
I know, it's hilarious, isn't it. Slashdot's moderation is so great. The creative patent broadly covers any menu navigation, not a specific implementation. Yet my comment which refers to the ridiculous issuance of such a broad patent gets modded down, yet yours which muddles in a different direction on specific implementation get modded up.