I gladly pay good money for music, when I get a decent portion of what is placed onto a master. I refuse to pay premium prices for an algorithm to arbitrarily throw away 1/16th to 1/25th of the information present in a recording. An MP3 (or whatever) is a copy of the work, and a substandard copy at that.
However, this appears to be where the industry is headed: less royalties for the artists, and a big pocketful of change for the corps that sell name-brand crap at inflated prices.
The RIAA: promoting the Nike of music - crappy sweatshop clothing you can buy at any discount outlet with a stupid logo slapped on it.
I think the author of the article has conflated "politics" with "economics" in the first few paragraphs. While I appreciate that Parker is critical that recreational pastimes like gaming may be taking themselves too seriously, I'm not sure what the hell his point is.
Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trvialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture? Are fat little men in top hats really in charge of all public utilities, and able to charge whatever they want for rental of their slums? Shocking!
Singling out the so-called massively multiplayer games like Asheron's Call for being too "real" because the players are demanding a certain level of reality in their game play is a pretty weak argument that games, in general, are getting too political. Microsoft is in the business of selling software and subscriptions. Whether or not they are "scrambling" to offer what their subscribers want is hardly relevant.
People who design software and systems know that how the software is used in the wild is often very different than the your own idea of how it should be used. It's not surprising that people who pay good money to play Asheron's Call and Star Wars Galaxies want to create simulated economies, culture and history. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a more sophisticated versions of old BBS culture.
People grow culture. It's what we do.
I'm not convinced that any of this has anything to do with his other contention, that the software manufacturers themselves are getting over-political. Which is it? Are the customers demanding more immersive worlds, or the designers injecting overwrought politics into gaming? Are these really the same thing?
The other games he mentions seem to fall easily into the post-apocalyptic near-future scenarios that share dystopic fictions with a whole range of popular culture. Comics, anime and (of course) science fiction stories have mined this vein for decades. Placing your otherwise undemanding first-person shooter in some kind of science fiction setting to explain why you happen to be a hyper-muscled uber-soldier tearing holes in the "bad guys" seems perfectly reasonable to me.
How is this different from, say, Escape from New York or even "Buffy"?
While the author brings up some interesting points, he seems to miss the mark on every target he aims at. Maybe he needs to just relax and play some Unreal Tournament.
Gapless playback: Turn on "Crossfade playback", and drag the seconds slider to zero.
Unfortunately, this does not do what most people want. It minimizes the space played between discrete tracks but does not remove obvious gaps on playback. For example, if you rip a "concept" album or DJ CD as discrete tracks (i.e., instead of "joining tracks") there will still be a noticeable gap when moving from track to track.
You have a choice of hearing the tiny gap as tracks are switched, or cross-fading a bit to run the songs into each other. Either way is not seamless, and is quite obvious.
Note that this setting is for playback on iTunes only, and does not control the actual encoded content or (obviously) playback on the iPod.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I'm not convinced that this isn't just featching creeperism that will eventaully result in data leakage or worse.
Considering the market this is aimed at, I'm hoping the spec is doing more than just paying lip service to security. Hackers and hobbyists will have access to USB or PCI RFID (or whatever) units eventually. Better plan for it now.
Not to mention that it is unlikely that Hopper ever claimed to find the first "bug".
The comment next to the moth taped in the logbook seems to indicate that the word had been in use for some time, and Hopper was making a bit of a joke.
You know you're a geek when the mention of a language from your past fills you with warm fuzzies.
Back in the old days (for me), when I was unable to get Unix for my PC, I went out and spent cash money on PC-DOS from IBM, just so I could get Rexx. The coolest part was that command.com had been tweaked by IBM such that the any.bat file that started with a Rexx comment would be interpreted by Rexx when invoked (instead of the grungy batch language everyone else had).
It was pure heaven to have a real language to script with under DOS.
Ironically, my company is slowly being encouraged by some of our potential customers to be more big-iron friendly. They want our new-fangled Java stuff, but the more we play nice near mainframes, the more pilot projects we win. I'm now able to use my mad COBOL and Rexx skillz for real.
...using a calculator to add two numbers because that is the only way a person knows how strikes me as revealing a severe problem in the way people are now being taught.
True enough. Defaulting to using a calculator without knowing what it does (on a human scale) is certainly dangerous crutch. I'm not sure that this model works for our simple examples we've been using (i.e., finding the difference between two values). Most people know they need to make change when handed a $20. They just haven't learned how to do so when under pressure from a co-worker or customer (which is my problem -- I just forget how the numbers work). It certainly applies when one can solve complex equations with a graphing calculator and not know how to actually simplify and solve a differencial equation.
I have a math prof friend who just reframes test questions like this to force students to actually prove they know what they are solving for.
As far as measuring something we call "intelligence", I'll have to respectfully disagree. We can test for compentency at certain skills (solving math or arithmetic problems, iterating over verb forms, remembering how to spell certain words). These can test a certain breadth or depth of knowledge about subjects one can devise tests for. There is a lot of controversy over the idea that any of these tests measure anything we can call intelligence.
During the last century there has been a push for an index or measure of intelligence, and many tests devised to ascertain this index based on standardized tests. It's surprising how terribly these endeavours have failed. I'm not saying that we can't use tests to get an idea of where someone stands in a particular subject, especially if we use these results to reframe how a subject is taught to individuals (and then reframe the question -- an important loop to close). I'm saying that using these results to build a picture of general intelligence (for any reasonable definition of intelligence, which is a challenge all it's own) is probably doomed.
By the way, I'm really getting a lot of these ideas from Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man". He traces the history of science looking for the elusive "Q" -- an index of intelligence along one or more curves -- from phrenology to modern bell-curve testing methods.
...but those are words I would never use in conversation, because I believe that the vocabulary of the bottom half of the population (intelligence-wise, however you wish to measure it) is not sufficiently large enough understand what I was saying.
Interestingly enough, I posted a screed on another community that touches on this. I tend to assume that the people I talk with will get what I mean, and ask if they don't. I feel it's part of the social contract. My end of the bargain is to not use language as a weapon to divide and obscure. Anyway, when someone calls bullshit on me, it forces me to look in the dictionary and make sure I know what the hell I'm saying.
To move off-topic though, what do you think of the idea of information overload, and dulled sensitivity?
I actually heard of a study somewhere that seemed to indicate that as we get older, our ability to concentrate and divide our attention diminishes. I'm a famous multi-tasker as well, but I do have to block-out more mental space when I really have to concentrate. I tend to use music to blot out the outside worls when coding, though if I have a really hard bug I sometimes have to just have silence, and no Slashdot, either.
Today, I'm just putting off work because I'm bored.
Critical thinking is not about taking a contrary position just for the sake of doing so.
When one talks about critical thinking, definitions are often something like this. A good working definition is "regarding novel ideas with a dose of healthy scepticism."
It's about keeping your baloney detection kit handy. This can guard against getting taken by hoaxes.
I'm not making excuses for anything, especially any "new phenomena" (I'm not sure what you are referring to). People learn differently, and your assertion that one simply needs to learn some single technique is logically flawed.
Many people who cannot do arithmetic in their heads as fast as you are obviously not just unaware how to do so. These are just the mechanics of subtraction or spelling. By assuming that your way of solving a particular problem is the obvious correct solution, you are commiting a logical fallacy. Saying "subtraction is easy because all you have to do is subtract" is called a tautology. Your example uses scaling. Those of us who cut our teeth on integer math in embedded systems are already familiar with that technique. The fact is that it never helped me make change for a $20 under some circumstances, even though I'd been doing scalar integer math (keeping track of the decimal point programmatically when displaying values) for years.
I learned the standard way that grocers, shopkeepers and waiters have done for years: I counted up to 20. Nobody taught me that in school. Maybe this way makes no sense to you. Fair enough. However, assuming this method is the best and only technique for quickly making change is wrong.
It is a proven fact that our brains learn differently as we age and across populations. You might want to research why it is often easier for children to learn new languages -- often as easy as learning their native language. This is generally not so for adults.
Perhaps you may want to revisit my original reply. I was engaging you in something called a "discourse". Since neither of us have real proof at our fingertips (you have only offered anecdotal evidence to suggest people are getting worse schooling), I was not simply disagreeing just to disagree. You may find upon rereading that I was simply adding to the conversation, and suggested that falling for a hoax seems unlikely to be related to how easily one makes change for a $20 or spells "terminology"; I thought it might be more related to a general lack of critical thinking. Especially as I know many people who are excellent critical thinkers and yet have always had trouble remembering how to spell words. They know what the words mean. They just can't readily bring the word form to mind, and English absolutely sucks if you need to figure out a word based on rules. What language is the root of the word in? Does any prefix or suffix match this root language? Is it a word that is an exception that proves the rule? Is it one of those words where the pronunciation is completely alien to the spelling?
My only point was that these kinds of problems are complex. While it is easier to suggest that everyone is getting dumber, or that schools are getting worse, it is more likely that there are a combination of factors involved in how people learn and use this learning across a lifetime.
You may also want to revisit your statement about English. It is well established that English is hard to teach as a second language when compared with French or (especially) German. There are a variety of word form and grammar rules in English that are a result of it's recent mongrel history. English is not static, and has recently (given the age of languages) changed drastically in very unexpected ways. Romanized languages that adhere more closely with their earlier latinate (or germanic) roots tend to be easier to learn, as there is less reliance on memory for all the exceptions.
Yes, hailing from Manitoba originally, I learned French along with English in school. I find it interesting that we learned series of verb forms in French, but did not do so for English, even though I lived in a bilingual area where some students knew very little English.
Show me a reference that proves that "the average 50 year old with a high school education a much better English speller than the average 25 year old graduate student". I'm a fantastic speller with a pretty large
I'm not sure one can blame education or general intelligence for this -- at least not directly.
What we may have lost is the ability to detect bullshit. The tendency seems to be for adults to accept official looking information presented in an expected manner, or to believe statements from someone holding a microphone in front of a video camera.
I say "adults" only because I've seen a few "man on the street" spoofs where adults are caught up while their children look on in disbelief just before calling bullshit on the so-called interviewer. Some of Rick Mercer's "Talking to Americans" segments are particularly memorable examples.
Of course, this is completely anecdotal on my part. Not to mention some of the folks who got caught on this particular hoax were young adults. Adult enough, perhaps, to start believing what "experts" suggest to them without thinking critically about what is being presented to them.
The problem is a lack of critical thinking, I suggest, and not some arbitary level of intelligence (which is impossible to measure and compare, anyway).
Examples about making change or spelling may be a bit misleading. I've never been strong with arithmetic (not mathematics) even though I worked for years in the service industry. I never learned the tricks and shortcuts people use to quickly calculate change or percentages. I'm not sure there is much my schooling could have provided to help this. After 35 years I just know I should use a calculator, and check my figures twice.
Many people find spelling problematic. Especially English spelling, which is hardly a normalized language; being a good English speller requires a fair amount of sheer memorization. In fact, new research suggests that some so-called learning disabilities have almost nothing to do with intelligence or ability to learn. Dyslexics have different brains that may actually be better at some tasks than non-dyslexic brains. Dyslexics can read and comprehend letters and words the same as everyone else, but the part of the brain the recognizes words shapes and establishes a lexicon "buffer" is the problem.
I've been burned by this one too many times on a variety of UNIX systems. I've had a policy for some time now that all edits to precious config files (regardless of where they reside) are done against an RCS archive.
A simple rcsdiff now tells you exactly what has changed so you can accept or edit, lock, and checkin your munged changes to the archive. A bit more straight-forward than trying to figure out which installer-created backup copy is the last "good" one.
Guards against accidental deletion, as well. Also especially helpful when testing with a variety of settings for a new daemon you are configuring. You can always go back to a known good condition, and/or save those clever tweaks for posterity!
The problem with any encryption method is that it reduces (to some extent) convenience. Since convenience is the keyword mobile phone manufacturers depend on to sell their products, and any level of extra "complexity" is seen as a hindrance.
The mobile phone market is so tight that any possible hindrance (whether it is reasonable or not) is seen as a liability to sales.
Well, that and featching creeperism: Hey, we said we wanted Bluetooth phones. Nokia, et al, just gave them to us. We didn't say we wanted safe or well-designed Bluetooth phones, did we? Outside of a few troublemakers (like us), the market is perfectly happy with what it has been getting so far.
Security needs to be designed into products, and we are still getting prototypes out the door and tacking on security as it the last consideration, or adding features w/o considering the security implications.
While it's true all news organizations and media outlets will have a natural bias (even if this bias is nearly invisible endemic prejudices), the BBC typically covers stories that are completely ignored by the press in the U.S.
The modus operandi of the U.S. media conglomerates is to ignore a story, if they can, or spin it into a completely other story by focusing on some minor detail. It also helps that most "investigative reports" need to fit into 30 seconds.
In my opinion, if you are getting your news almost exclusively from CNN or (shudder) Fox News, you are getting almost no news at all.
The BBC is one of the largest and oldest news organizations ever, and is extrememly well-respected (recent hang-wringing notwithstanding). If the BCC is so "biased" that it's Iraq coverage can be considered tainted, then by comparision CNN/Fox are private propaganda companies paid by the government to sow lies and crush dissent.
Good idea. Usually I just bitch and moan, but this time I decided to just let them know how I feel.
In a classic case of sterotyping, Stephen Evans ("Linux cyber-battle turns nasty") has not only painted an entire community with the same brush, he's missed the point entirely.
The MyDoom worm is not about Linux, or SCO, or open-source. The definition of a computer virus (of which "worm" is a particular variety) includes the concept of a "payload". It's what the worm does once a certain trigger has been met.
The fact that this single worm has a payload that harms SCO by attempting a DOS attack is a result of the worm writer or writers making it do so. There is absolutely no evidence that any real or imagined cabal of Linux "zealots" or open-source advocates designed this worm for this specific purpose. In fact, community opinion on this worm is pretty much the same as it has been for all past worm-like attacks: some people lean toward supporting the worm creator, some don't, and others just don't care.
It is not hard to write a worm that targets Microsoft email systems, and the fact that this one targets SCO points to a single persons, working alone, to prove a point. Whether this is wise or not is the story. Whether business and personal computer users have learned anything from the many similar worms launched in the past is another. What people in business and in the open-source community are doing to protect their critical systems from this attacks is yet another.
The fact is that open-source software runs the world. Acronyms like SMTP, DNS, TCP/IP and others are, by definition, open-source or free software free of encumbering patents. They were designed to be used freely by all, and open-source proponents want to keep it that way.
I know of no open-source advocates that suggest all software should be free (for any definition of "free"). Most just suggest that certain public and infrastructure systems just work better when they are freely available. There are plenty of studies suggesting that, for some uses, open-source software allows for more oversite, less down time and generally benefits more than a select few.
I thought the strength of ${product} was security through complete obscurity. I've been recommended ${product} and other solutions from ${company} as an alternative to open-source software (which is inherently insecure) but now my belief in proprietory software has been shaken because of this flaw in ${product}.
Between this, and that last service worm, I'm not sure I can trust proprietory software anymore.
I'm always advocating open source software... and one of the biggest selling points is security.
If your definition of "security" is that bugs that allow security to be compromised can be found in software, then you may need to educate yourself before advocating your point-of-view. What are your other choices? Security holes you don't know about? That's real secure.
"Security" is not whether bugs can be found. It is a whole range of actions and responses, of which the free software model is an excellent example.
Slashdot Mirror
They want $16.99 for lossy compressed music?
I gladly pay good money for music, when I get a decent portion of what is placed onto a master. I refuse to pay premium prices for an algorithm to arbitrarily throw away 1/16th to 1/25th of the information present in a recording. An MP3 (or whatever) is a copy of the work, and a substandard copy at that.
However, this appears to be where the industry is headed: less royalties for the artists, and a big pocketful of change for the corps that sell name-brand crap at inflated prices.
The RIAA: promoting the Nike of music - crappy sweatshop clothing you can buy at any discount outlet with a stupid logo slapped on it.
I agree. Especially the part about a low-speed rear-end collision "opening a portal to hell."
I was wondering if anyone would catch the irony.
My point was that mild "political" content is to be expected in many places, including trivial little games (computer or not).
Whether or not my description of Monopoly is an accurate reflection of current US policy is just sweet, sweet irony.
I think the author of the article has conflated "politics" with "economics" in the first few paragraphs. While I appreciate that Parker is critical that recreational pastimes like gaming may be taking themselves too seriously, I'm not sure what the hell his point is.
Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trvialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture? Are fat little men in top hats really in charge of all public utilities, and able to charge whatever they want for rental of their slums? Shocking!
Singling out the so-called massively multiplayer games like Asheron's Call for being too "real" because the players are demanding a certain level of reality in their game play is a pretty weak argument that games, in general, are getting too political. Microsoft is in the business of selling software and subscriptions. Whether or not they are "scrambling" to offer what their subscribers want is hardly relevant.
People who design software and systems know that how the software is used in the wild is often very different than the your own idea of how it should be used. It's not surprising that people who pay good money to play Asheron's Call and Star Wars Galaxies want to create simulated economies, culture and history. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a more sophisticated versions of old BBS culture.
People grow culture. It's what we do.
I'm not convinced that any of this has anything to do with his other contention, that the software manufacturers themselves are getting over-political. Which is it? Are the customers demanding more immersive worlds, or the designers injecting overwrought politics into gaming? Are these really the same thing?
The other games he mentions seem to fall easily into the post-apocalyptic near-future scenarios that share dystopic fictions with a whole range of popular culture. Comics, anime and (of course) science fiction stories have mined this vein for decades. Placing your otherwise undemanding first-person shooter in some kind of science fiction setting to explain why you happen to be a hyper-muscled uber-soldier tearing holes in the "bad guys" seems perfectly reasonable to me.
How is this different from, say, Escape from New York or even "Buffy"?
While the author brings up some interesting points, he seems to miss the mark on every target he aims at. Maybe he needs to just relax and play some Unreal Tournament.
Unfortunately, this does not do what most people want. It minimizes the space played between discrete tracks but does not remove obvious gaps on playback. For example, if you rip a "concept" album or DJ CD as discrete tracks (i.e., instead of "joining tracks") there will still be a noticeable gap when moving from track to track.
You have a choice of hearing the tiny gap as tracks are switched, or cross-fading a bit to run the songs into each other. Either way is not seamless, and is quite obvious.
Note that this setting is for playback on iTunes only, and does not control the actual encoded content or (obviously) playback on the iPod.
Now, now. Such language is frowned upon in Slashdot comments.
Dude, I love that typo.
While I fully support your right to party, I will not sing the song until the witch is, fully and completely, dead.
I'll have a beer and toast the "ha-ha" gods tonight, though.
I'm sure we can all count on the engineering and implementation of this tech to be robust and secure.
I mean, at least as secure as Bluetooth.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I'm not convinced that this isn't just featching creeperism that will eventaully result in data leakage or worse.
Considering the market this is aimed at, I'm hoping the spec is doing more than just paying lip service to security. Hackers and hobbyists will have access to USB or PCI RFID (or whatever) units eventually. Better plan for it now.
"RFIDSnarfing" anyone?
Not to mention that it is unlikely that Hopper ever claimed to find the first "bug".
The comment next to the moth taped in the logbook seems to indicate that the word had been in use for some time, and Hopper was making a bit of a joke.
Wow. This article brings back some fond memories.
You know you're a geek when the mention of a language from your past fills you with warm fuzzies.
Back in the old days (for me), when I was unable to get Unix for my PC, I went out and spent cash money on PC-DOS from IBM, just so I could get Rexx. The coolest part was that command.com had been tweaked by IBM such that the any .bat file that started with a Rexx comment would be interpreted by Rexx when invoked (instead of the grungy batch language everyone else had).
It was pure heaven to have a real language to script with under DOS.
Ironically, my company is slowly being encouraged by some of our potential customers to be more big-iron friendly. They want our new-fangled Java stuff, but the more we play nice near mainframes, the more pilot projects we win. I'm now able to use my mad COBOL and Rexx skillz for real.
Who knew?
True enough. Defaulting to using a calculator without knowing what it does (on a human scale) is certainly dangerous crutch. I'm not sure that this model works for our simple examples we've been using (i.e., finding the difference between two values). Most people know they need to make change when handed a $20. They just haven't learned how to do so when under pressure from a co-worker or customer (which is my problem -- I just forget how the numbers work). It certainly applies when one can solve complex equations with a graphing calculator and not know how to actually simplify and solve a differencial equation.
I have a math prof friend who just reframes test questions like this to force students to actually prove they know what they are solving for.
As far as measuring something we call "intelligence", I'll have to respectfully disagree. We can test for compentency at certain skills (solving math or arithmetic problems, iterating over verb forms, remembering how to spell certain words). These can test a certain breadth or depth of knowledge about subjects one can devise tests for. There is a lot of controversy over the idea that any of these tests measure anything we can call intelligence.
During the last century there has been a push for an index or measure of intelligence, and many tests devised to ascertain this index based on standardized tests. It's surprising how terribly these endeavours have failed. I'm not saying that we can't use tests to get an idea of where someone stands in a particular subject, especially if we use these results to reframe how a subject is taught to individuals (and then reframe the question -- an important loop to close). I'm saying that using these results to build a picture of general intelligence (for any reasonable definition of intelligence, which is a challenge all it's own) is probably doomed.
By the way, I'm really getting a lot of these ideas from Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man". He traces the history of science looking for the elusive "Q" -- an index of intelligence along one or more curves -- from phrenology to modern bell-curve testing methods.
Interestingly enough, I posted a screed on another community that touches on this. I tend to assume that the people I talk with will get what I mean, and ask if they don't. I feel it's part of the social contract. My end of the bargain is to not use language as a weapon to divide and obscure. Anyway, when someone calls bullshit on me, it forces me to look in the dictionary and make sure I know what the hell I'm saying.
I actually heard of a study somewhere that seemed to indicate that as we get older, our ability to concentrate and divide our attention diminishes. I'm a famous multi-tasker as well, but I do have to block-out more mental space when I really have to concentrate. I tend to use music to blot out the outside worls when coding, though if I have a really hard bug I sometimes have to just have silence, and no Slashdot, either.
Today, I'm just putting off work because I'm bored.
I'm not sure I understand, or agree.
Critical thinking is not about taking a contrary position just for the sake of doing so.
When one talks about critical thinking, definitions are often something like this. A good working definition is "regarding novel ideas with a dose of healthy scepticism."
It's about keeping your baloney detection kit handy. This can guard against getting taken by hoaxes.
Which was why I brought it up in this context.
Especially so (in my experience) when the source is holding a microphone, or appears to be official.
I've tried to have Sagan's Baloney Detector handy for situations like these.
I'm not making excuses for anything, especially any "new phenomena" (I'm not sure what you are referring to). People learn differently, and your assertion that one simply needs to learn some single technique is logically flawed.
Many people who cannot do arithmetic in their heads as fast as you are obviously not just unaware how to do so. These are just the mechanics of subtraction or spelling. By assuming that your way of solving a particular problem is the obvious correct solution, you are commiting a logical fallacy. Saying "subtraction is easy because all you have to do is subtract" is called a tautology. Your example uses scaling. Those of us who cut our teeth on integer math in embedded systems are already familiar with that technique. The fact is that it never helped me make change for a $20 under some circumstances, even though I'd been doing scalar integer math (keeping track of the decimal point programmatically when displaying values) for years.
I learned the standard way that grocers, shopkeepers and waiters have done for years: I counted up to 20. Nobody taught me that in school. Maybe this way makes no sense to you. Fair enough. However, assuming this method is the best and only technique for quickly making change is wrong.
It is a proven fact that our brains learn differently as we age and across populations. You might want to research why it is often easier for children to learn new languages -- often as easy as learning their native language. This is generally not so for adults.
Perhaps you may want to revisit my original reply. I was engaging you in something called a "discourse". Since neither of us have real proof at our fingertips (you have only offered anecdotal evidence to suggest people are getting worse schooling), I was not simply disagreeing just to disagree. You may find upon rereading that I was simply adding to the conversation, and suggested that falling for a hoax seems unlikely to be related to how easily one makes change for a $20 or spells "terminology"; I thought it might be more related to a general lack of critical thinking. Especially as I know many people who are excellent critical thinkers and yet have always had trouble remembering how to spell words. They know what the words mean. They just can't readily bring the word form to mind, and English absolutely sucks if you need to figure out a word based on rules. What language is the root of the word in? Does any prefix or suffix match this root language? Is it a word that is an exception that proves the rule? Is it one of those words where the pronunciation is completely alien to the spelling?
My only point was that these kinds of problems are complex. While it is easier to suggest that everyone is getting dumber, or that schools are getting worse, it is more likely that there are a combination of factors involved in how people learn and use this learning across a lifetime.
You may also want to revisit your statement about English. It is well established that English is hard to teach as a second language when compared with French or (especially) German. There are a variety of word form and grammar rules in English that are a result of it's recent mongrel history. English is not static, and has recently (given the age of languages) changed drastically in very unexpected ways. Romanized languages that adhere more closely with their earlier latinate (or germanic) roots tend to be easier to learn, as there is less reliance on memory for all the exceptions.
Yes, hailing from Manitoba originally, I learned French along with English in school. I find it interesting that we learned series of verb forms in French, but did not do so for English, even though I lived in a bilingual area where some students knew very little English.
Show me a reference that proves that "the average 50 year old with a high school education a much better English speller than the average 25 year old graduate student". I'm a fantastic speller with a pretty large
I'm not sure one can blame education or general intelligence for this -- at least not directly.
What we may have lost is the ability to detect bullshit. The tendency seems to be for adults to accept official looking information presented in an expected manner, or to believe statements from someone holding a microphone in front of a video camera.
I say "adults" only because I've seen a few "man on the street" spoofs where adults are caught up while their children look on in disbelief just before calling bullshit on the so-called interviewer. Some of Rick Mercer's "Talking to Americans" segments are particularly memorable examples.
Of course, this is completely anecdotal on my part. Not to mention some of the folks who got caught on this particular hoax were young adults. Adult enough, perhaps, to start believing what "experts" suggest to them without thinking critically about what is being presented to them.
The problem is a lack of critical thinking, I suggest, and not some arbitary level of intelligence (which is impossible to measure and compare, anyway).
Examples about making change or spelling may be a bit misleading. I've never been strong with arithmetic (not mathematics) even though I worked for years in the service industry. I never learned the tricks and shortcuts people use to quickly calculate change or percentages. I'm not sure there is much my schooling could have provided to help this. After 35 years I just know I should use a calculator, and check my figures twice.
Many people find spelling problematic. Especially English spelling, which is hardly a normalized language; being a good English speller requires a fair amount of sheer memorization. In fact, new research suggests that some so-called learning disabilities have almost nothing to do with intelligence or ability to learn. Dyslexics have different brains that may actually be better at some tasks than non-dyslexic brains. Dyslexics can read and comprehend letters and words the same as everyone else, but the part of the brain the recognizes words shapes and establishes a lexicon "buffer" is the problem.
My opinion only, but this link only seems to highlight for me how unfunny Jay Leno is. It's pretty easy to make people look stupid on TV, anyway.
CNN does it on a daily basis!
I've been burned by this one too many times on a variety of UNIX systems. I've had a policy for some time now that all edits to precious config files (regardless of where they reside) are done against an RCS archive.
A simple rcsdiff now tells you exactly what has changed so you can accept or edit, lock, and checkin your munged changes to the archive. A bit more straight-forward than trying to figure out which installer-created backup copy is the last "good" one.
Guards against accidental deletion, as well. Also especially helpful when testing with a variety of settings for a new daemon you are configuring. You can always go back to a known good condition, and/or save those clever tweaks for posterity!
Remember kids: ci -u is your friend.
Why? Is he out of tune?
The problem with any encryption method is that it reduces (to some extent) convenience. Since convenience is the keyword mobile phone manufacturers depend on to sell their products, and any level of extra "complexity" is seen as a hindrance.
The mobile phone market is so tight that any possible hindrance (whether it is reasonable or not) is seen as a liability to sales.
Well, that and featching creeperism: Hey, we said we wanted Bluetooth phones. Nokia, et al, just gave them to us. We didn't say we wanted safe or well-designed Bluetooth phones, did we? Outside of a few troublemakers (like us), the market is perfectly happy with what it has been getting so far.
Security needs to be designed into products, and we are still getting prototypes out the door and tacking on security as it the last consideration, or adding features w/o considering the security implications.
Ain't capitalism great?
I respectfully disagree.
While it's true all news organizations and media outlets will have a natural bias (even if this bias is nearly invisible endemic prejudices), the BBC typically covers stories that are completely ignored by the press in the U.S.
The modus operandi of the U.S. media conglomerates is to ignore a story, if they can, or spin it into a completely other story by focusing on some minor detail. It also helps that most "investigative reports" need to fit into 30 seconds.
In my opinion, if you are getting your news almost exclusively from CNN or (shudder) Fox News, you are getting almost no news at all.
The BBC is one of the largest and oldest news organizations ever, and is extrememly well-respected (recent hang-wringing notwithstanding). If the BCC is so "biased" that it's Iraq coverage can be considered tainted, then by comparision CNN/Fox are private propaganda companies paid by the government to sow lies and crush dissent.
Good idea. Usually I just bitch and moan, but this time I decided to just let them know how I feel.
As long as they pronounce "sensor" as in "sen-sors indicate Kling-on wessel, captain", I'm in perfect agreement.
But only if.
What can this mean for ${product}?
I thought the strength of ${product} was security through complete obscurity. I've been recommended ${product} and other solutions from ${company} as an alternative to open-source software (which is inherently insecure) but now my belief in proprietory software has been shaken because of this flaw in ${product}.
Between this, and that last service worm, I'm not sure I can trust proprietory software anymore.
What should I do?
Crisis? What crisis?
If your definition of "security" is that bugs that allow security to be compromised can be found in software, then you may need to educate yourself before advocating your point-of-view. What are your other choices? Security holes you don't know about? That's real secure.
"Security" is not whether bugs can be found. It is a whole range of actions and responses, of which the free software model is an excellent example.