So much of this can be combated with a foundation in the scientific method and skeptical inquiry. They try to make that the corner stone of 6th grade science education, but it's forgotten by the time you get to the 11th grade. I'd like to see it reinforced all the way through college.
Truer words haven't been spoke on Slashdot for a long while. Part of the problem is that our science teachers don't really understand the scientific method and skeptical inquiry (to many of them it's just a bunch of words in a textbook, and they'd rather the students parrot back the definition rather than understand and practice it), since an actual scientific outlook seems to be increasingly rare among science teachers. Another problem is that there's such pressure to make students learn specific facts; since science education is so lacking in general, we wind up with 11th grade science teachers struggling to get students to understand the difference between velocity and acceleration and losing scientific inquiry by the wayside.
Then by college, we wind up with students who don't know how to formulate ways of discovering answers on their own. Asking a bunch of Physics 103 students "So, how would you test this?" will get you more blank stares than anything I know.
I have had the displeasure of working with a 7th grade science teacher who dropped sodium into water into an ordinary glass beaker in front of her classroom. The resulting explosion destroyed the beaker and embedded a very large glass shard 2cm from a student's eye. She is the "best" science teacher at the middle school in question. *This* is what we're fighting against to improve science education.
Microsoft has already done things far more worthy of prohibition than this, and were convicted in court for it... and then the Bush administration conveniently dropped the case when they were appointed. I wish legislators would get off their ass and enforce the judgments that already exist.
Sell the OS at a fair price. I'd wager that some games have had a whole lot more dev work put into them, and have higher quality code, than Vista. Some also have free online play requiring infrastructure from the company (see Guild Wars). Yet your average game is $50, and Vista is $hundreds?
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.
Been there, tried that. Sorry, not my cup of tea. I have no time to tweak here and there. And I need to run my games and my visual studio, amd my autocad natively.
That's exactly why I use Ubuntu: because I don't have time to tweak things. My laptop came with a dodgy wireless driver in WinXP. It didn't come with a lot of things that you'd expect a new system to have: a vorbis decoder, for one, or ssh/sftp clients, or a working shell, or a compiler, or a web browser*, or an office suite.
Sure, I can download all those things, but it's constantly a pain under Windows to have to fiddle with things. Want subpixel rendering for LCD screens? Have to download some MS thing and fiddle with it. Want to *install* it? Get ready to reboot, a lot. (Ubuntu requires one reboot, and you can use all the apps while it's reinstalling.)
Autoupdating of things? Oh god. Windows is always trying to push dodgy Windows Media-type updates, and every program has its own updater. In Ubuntu I get upgrade notifications for all sorts of random packages, and can trust that they're not malicious.
I've seen a lot of games that say things like "System requirements: 1GB RAM, 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent. Vista: 2GB RAM, 3GHz Pentium 4, dual core recommended."
I imagine that 95% of those people could also use WinXP on a daily basis and not have problems either, and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.
As I understand it the main purpose of robots.txt is to prevent crawlers from consuming excessive amounts of network resources, not to "protect content". It's not a contract; it's not legally-binding; it's a request that automated web agents choose to follow if they want to be polite, or rather a description of how to be polite in the context of a certain site. (Nobody wants crawlers to be indexing dynamically-generated pages, for instance.) As an example, the physics preprint archive arXiv.org has a rather sternly-worded warning: "Follow our robots.txt file or you'll wander off into terabytes of dynamically-generated files, chewing up lots of our bandwidth, and we'll have to ban you to protect our bandwidth bill." That's what it's for, not "protecting content".
Banning Google from visiting a page and then summarizing its result on a search page is pretty much equivalent to Slashdot banning me from saying "There's this article at goatpron.slashdot.org/whatever that has a description of goat bestiality that I think you might find interesting".
As long as the summaries are sufficiently short so that they fall under the fair use exception (which Google search results surely do), Google can keep on doing what they're doing.
I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona, a Research-1 institution with a bunch of top-ranked programs (Eller College of Management, Lunar and Planetary Labs, Steward Observatory, the architecture program, and lots of others). It's certainly not a Cracker-Jack-Box degree.
45 grand per year? I think you dropped an order of magnitude somewhere.
That sucks that your parents screwed up your ability to get a pell grant; the assumption that parents' have their children's best interests at heart is taken for granted by the people doing financial aid, and sadly it's not always the case. This is a flaw in the system.
Does this still prevent you from getting a student loan?
A more sophisticated thing to do might be to see what sort of email virus scanning they have and saturate the CPU on that, by sending.exe's (or, better,.exe's inside a compressed container, and maybe tweak the compression so it takes the maximum amount of CPU to decompress).
The quality of graduates is only as poor as the quality of entrants; as a TA, I've seen some *serious* dumbshittery among some of the undergrads. Some of them are brilliant.
1. No ISP shall give preferential handling to, modify, fail to deliver, or alter the content of traffic based on either its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content.
Exception: If a quality-of-service mechanism becomes widely used over the Internet, such as setting a time-critical flag on certain traffic (online gaming, VoIP, etc.), ISP's may give preferential handling to traffic so flagged, as long as:
a) the mechanism for requesting a higher QoS for certain traffic is widely known and available, such that anyone can use it;
b) the preferential treatment given to time-critical content is given equally to all traffic claiming to need a higher QoS without regard for its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content;
Exception: Traffic which is clearly and unambiguously malicious may be dropped. "Malicious", in this case, means either:
a) It is intended to interfere with the correct operation and control of the recipient's equipment, if the recipient of the traffic is a customer of the ISP. This includes, but is not limited to, denial-of-service traffic and exploit attempts. However, an ISP must honor a request in writing by a customer to cease filtering inbound malicious traffic to them.
b) It is generated by a program running without the consent of, and against the wishes of, the owner of the sending computer, if the sender is a customer of the ISP.
c) Such traffic consists of unsolicited commercial email, and the customer has requested that the ISP filter inbound email to remove spam.
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
I think the interstate system, the university system, the Park Service, the management of national forests, public libraries, and a lot of other things work pretty well, and don't mind spending tax money on them at all.
I think that if they're injecting packets into their customers' data streams, we should be injecting packets into theirs, right?
Quality of service is important, so just to ensure that their service is up and running, we should ping -f -s 10000 it, don't you think?
***
In essence, Comcast is executing a denial of service attack on their customers' traffic with a third party. That traffic does not belong to them; they merely carry it. Isn't this illegal under some sort of computer-sabotage law?
Now what in all that depends on religious differences or past wrongs?
The fact that Israel had to be founded where it is. If the Jewish people wanted a homeland, there are plenty of places that aren't already occupied by crazies, but it *had* to be Jerusalem/Israel because of the religious implications. Note the name of the movement: they're not "Jewish nationalists", they're "Zionists", since it's important to have not just *any* homeland but to have *Zion*. We could have given them West Texas, for instance, which is pretty empty and has a climate roughly similar to Israel. But that won't do, since it's important to occupy the same patch of dirt as those people a long time ago who *first* got the idea of cutting off the end of your penis.
My comments aren't meant to condone the nasty things either the Israelis or Palestinians have done, but to point out that all the friction is at heart caused by religious desires.
Re:Why does Israel continue to be a pariah in the
on
New Nerve Gas Antidotes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The whole thing is a wonderful ball of insanity, as everybody thinks that their own interpretation of the Invisible Friend in the Sky wants them to occupy some particular patch of dirt.
If anyone's technically to blame for the problems in the Middle East, it's the Jews -- the ancient Jews, who were the first to invent the eternally-PMS'ing, cranky, smite-happy, horse-blinders-distributing warmongering Jehovah.
The world would be a much more peaceful place if the three Abrahamic religions vanished tomorrow.
Sadly there's one bit of military equipment that desperately needed testing before being used in the line of duty, but didn't receive it: the current Commander-in-Chief.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, they should be prosecuted for assault if their child contracts the disease in question.
So much of this can be combated with a foundation in the scientific method and skeptical inquiry. They try to make that the corner stone of 6th grade science education, but it's forgotten by the time you get to the 11th grade. I'd like to see it reinforced all the way through college.
Truer words haven't been spoke on Slashdot for a long while. Part of the problem is that our science teachers don't really understand the scientific method and skeptical inquiry (to many of them it's just a bunch of words in a textbook, and they'd rather the students parrot back the definition rather than understand and practice it), since an actual scientific outlook seems to be increasingly rare among science teachers. Another problem is that there's such pressure to make students learn specific facts; since science education is so lacking in general, we wind up with 11th grade science teachers struggling to get students to understand the difference between velocity and acceleration and losing scientific inquiry by the wayside.
Then by college, we wind up with students who don't know how to formulate ways of discovering answers on their own. Asking a bunch of Physics 103 students "So, how would you test this?" will get you more blank stares than anything I know.
I have had the displeasure of working with a 7th grade science teacher who dropped sodium into water into an ordinary glass beaker in front of her classroom. The resulting explosion destroyed the beaker and embedded a very large glass shard 2cm from a student's eye. She is the "best" science teacher at the middle school in question. *This* is what we're fighting against to improve science education.
Microsoft has already done things far more worthy of prohibition than this, and were convicted in court for it ... and then the Bush administration conveniently dropped the case when they were appointed. I wish legislators would get off their ass and enforce the judgments that already exist.
Selling what the customer's asking for *is* astounding in today's world. It shouldn't be, but it is.
The current video games thing: yes, you do need Windows for that.
I have no problems exchanging files with people running Windows while on Ubuntu, though. Why would I?
It looks better on mine; that's all I know.
Sell the OS at a fair price. I'd wager that some games have had a whole lot more dev work put into them, and have higher quality code, than Vista. Some also have free online play requiring infrastructure from the company (see Guild Wars). Yet your average game is $50, and Vista is $hundreds?
Piracy is a symptom of overpriced software.
That's exactly why I use Ubuntu: because I don't have time to tweak things. My laptop came with a dodgy wireless driver in WinXP. It didn't come with a lot of things that you'd expect a new system to have: a vorbis decoder, for one, or ssh/sftp clients, or a working shell, or a compiler, or a web browser*, or an office suite.
Sure, I can download all those things, but it's constantly a pain under Windows to have to fiddle with things. Want subpixel rendering for LCD screens? Have to download some MS thing and fiddle with it. Want to *install* it? Get ready to reboot, a lot. (Ubuntu requires one reboot, and you can use all the apps while it's reinstalling.)
Autoupdating of things? Oh god. Windows is always trying to push dodgy Windows Media-type updates, and every program has its own updater. In Ubuntu I get upgrade notifications for all sorts of random packages, and can trust that they're not malicious.
I use Ubuntu because, well, it's easier.
*That doesn't suck
And how many of those are there now?
I've seen a lot of games that say things like "System requirements: 1GB RAM, 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent. Vista: 2GB RAM, 3GHz Pentium 4, dual core recommended."
I imagine that 95% of those people could also use WinXP on a daily basis and not have problems either, and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.
Are there any GNU tools distributed with Xubuntu?
I'm sure there are -- gcc, emacs, etc.
They own the copyright to those, even if Xubuntu packages it all together.
No, obviously there are ||: developers developers developers developers :|| under his shirt.
As I understand it the main purpose of robots.txt is to prevent crawlers from consuming excessive amounts of network resources, not to "protect content". It's not a contract; it's not legally-binding; it's a request that automated web agents choose to follow if they want to be polite, or rather a description of how to be polite in the context of a certain site. (Nobody wants crawlers to be indexing dynamically-generated pages, for instance.) As an example, the physics preprint archive arXiv.org has a rather sternly-worded warning: "Follow our robots.txt file or you'll wander off into terabytes of dynamically-generated files, chewing up lots of our bandwidth, and we'll have to ban you to protect our bandwidth bill." That's what it's for, not "protecting content".
Banning Google from visiting a page and then summarizing its result on a search page is pretty much equivalent to Slashdot banning me from saying "There's this article at goatpron.slashdot.org/whatever that has a description of goat bestiality that I think you might find interesting".
As long as the summaries are sufficiently short so that they fall under the fair use exception (which Google search results surely do), Google can keep on doing what they're doing.
I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona, a Research-1 institution with a bunch of top-ranked programs (Eller College of Management, Lunar and Planetary Labs, Steward Observatory, the architecture program, and lots of others). It's certainly not a Cracker-Jack-Box degree.
Tuition: $4700.
45 grand per year? I think you dropped an order of magnitude somewhere.
That sucks that your parents screwed up your ability to get a pell grant; the assumption that parents' have their children's best interests at heart is taken for granted by the people doing financial aid, and sadly it's not always the case. This is a flaw in the system.
Does this still prevent you from getting a student loan?
Good point.
.exe's (or, better, .exe's inside a compressed container, and maybe tweak the compression so it takes the maximum amount of CPU to decompress).
A more sophisticated thing to do might be to see what sort of email virus scanning they have and saturate the CPU on that, by sending
Average undergraduate tuition to a four-year public university is $4500/year (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition#Recent_trends), and many students receive scholarships, grants, subsidized loans, etc.
The quality of graduates is only as poor as the quality of entrants; as a TA, I've seen some *serious* dumbshittery among some of the undergrads. Some of them are brilliant.
Well, one way to do it:
1. No ISP shall give preferential handling to, modify, fail to deliver, or alter the content of traffic based on either its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content.
Exception: If a quality-of-service mechanism becomes widely used over the Internet, such as setting a time-critical flag on certain traffic (online gaming, VoIP, etc.), ISP's may give preferential handling to traffic so flagged, as long as:
a) the mechanism for requesting a higher QoS for certain traffic is widely known and available, such that anyone can use it;
b) the preferential treatment given to time-critical content is given equally to all traffic claiming to need a higher QoS without regard for its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content;
Exception: Traffic which is clearly and unambiguously malicious may be dropped. "Malicious", in this case, means either:
a) It is intended to interfere with the correct operation and control of the recipient's equipment, if the recipient of the traffic is a customer of the ISP. This includes, but is not limited to, denial-of-service traffic and exploit attempts. However, an ISP must honor a request in writing by a customer to cease filtering inbound malicious traffic to them.
b) It is generated by a program running without the consent of, and against the wishes of, the owner of the sending computer, if the sender is a customer of the ISP.
c) Such traffic consists of unsolicited commercial email, and the customer has requested that the ISP filter inbound email to remove spam.
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
I think the interstate system, the university system, the Park Service, the management of national forests, public libraries, and a lot of other things work pretty well, and don't mind spending tax money on them at all.
I think that if they're injecting packets into their customers' data streams, we should be injecting packets into theirs, right?
Quality of service is important, so just to ensure that their service is up and running, we should ping -f -s 10000 it, don't you think?
***
In essence, Comcast is executing a denial of service attack on their customers' traffic with a third party. That traffic does not belong to them; they merely carry it. Isn't this illegal under some sort of computer-sabotage law?
Not on American citizens, it's not.
Not every post has to be a reply to the original article.
Some posts can be replies to other posts. This is why we have this nifty "threaded" comment model, where posts can be replies to each other.
Neat, huh?
Now what in all that depends on religious differences or past wrongs?
The fact that Israel had to be founded where it is. If the Jewish people wanted a homeland, there are plenty of places that aren't already occupied by crazies, but it *had* to be Jerusalem/Israel because of the religious implications. Note the name of the movement: they're not "Jewish nationalists", they're "Zionists", since it's important to have not just *any* homeland but to have *Zion*. We could have given them West Texas, for instance, which is pretty empty and has a climate roughly similar to Israel. But that won't do, since it's important to occupy the same patch of dirt as those people a long time ago who *first* got the idea of cutting off the end of your penis.
My comments aren't meant to condone the nasty things either the Israelis or Palestinians have done, but to point out that all the friction is at heart caused by religious desires.
The whole thing is a wonderful ball of insanity, as everybody thinks that their own interpretation of the Invisible Friend in the Sky wants them to occupy some particular patch of dirt.
If anyone's technically to blame for the problems in the Middle East, it's the Jews -- the ancient Jews, who were the first to invent the eternally-PMS'ing, cranky, smite-happy, horse-blinders-distributing warmongering Jehovah.
The world would be a much more peaceful place if the three Abrahamic religions vanished tomorrow.
Sadly there's one bit of military equipment that desperately needed testing before being used in the line of duty, but didn't receive it: the current Commander-in-Chief.