I wonder if it's possible to live in a IP-free environment.
Basically, no. It's not possible. Especially not if you want to have a computer. That free/open source software you would run on your homebrew computer? It's covered by copyright. All free/open software licenses are based on the right of the copyright holder to determine how their work can be redistributed. This holds true for the GPL, even - when GPL'ing a bit of code, you have to put your name, the date, and claim copyright over the code before you can move on to the actual license bit.
Oh, and I don't know why you pick 1954 as the cut-off date for your books; check out the Gutenberg Project's Copyright HowTo, which discusses how to determine whether a book is public domain or not. The rule of thumb is that anything printed before January first 1923 is safe, and only a few very specific cases after that (eg, a work created before 1964 whose copyright was not renewed and did not qualify for automatic re-qualification under the GATT copyright agreement of 1991). In general, nothing printed from January 1st 1923 onward is in the public domain, and won't be until 2019 (barring further copyright extensions, heaven forbid).
Well, aside from perhaps making OSS people look like greasy hippies . ..
Huh?
I'm confused. How does gaining formal observer status at a massive international governmental body make the OSS crowd look like greasy hippies? I'd have thought it would be the other way around -- make us look like a bunch of tie-wearing authoritarians, maybe. I agree with your post otherwise -- this is good news -- but I don't understand that first bit.
Such a vehicle does not fit into the automotive industry's model of planned obselescence. Your car must wear out quickly so that you will buy a new car.
It's not quite that simple. Surely you don't imagine that any car, electric or otherwise, could be zero maintenance? There will be revenue streams associated with electric cars -- battery replacements come to mind, and of course the tires haven't gone away. You're right to point out that they require less maintenance, but that's not the reason we haven't seen widespread adoption.
No, we're not going to see any kind of wide-scale deployment of EVs until a number of concerns and problems are resolved:
The range needs to be greater. (This is getting there, but slowly. 200 miles per charge isn't bad, though you still can't go on a road trip with it.)
The charge time needs to be faster.
The cost needs to be comparable to a traditional car.
The source of the electricity to run these things needs to be improved. Just depending on the grid for electricity does no more than conceal emissions - and if there's any crowd that's likely to be the early adopters of this technology, it's the green-minded.
The amenities need to be on par with traditional cars. If my 200-mile range drops to 150 miles when I'm using the air-conditioning, is that good enough? And make no mistake, A/C really sucks down the juice you're using to run the wheels.
Much though I like the idea, it's just not going to take off until these concerns are met. Or until the last drop of gas has been burned off into the atmosphere and we're left with no choice but to develop alternative technologies.
Could somebody with more legal background than I have please write a HOWTO on submitting prior art?
Sorry to reply to my own post . . . when, oh, when will we get the ability to edit our posts?
Anyway -- it seems someone has already written a Prior Art HOWTO, as I would have discovered had I thought to run it through Google before hitting the "Submit" button.
Sadly, given the state of the patent system nowadays, it would not surprise me if it is granted.
Attention all SlashDotters: you too can join the hunt for prior art on patents! That's right -- the US Code Section 35 part 301 specifies that "Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential."
See also Persons Who May Cite Prior Art", which explicitly says that "'Any person' includes patentees, licensees, reexamination requesters, real parties in interest, persons without a real interest, and persons acting for real parties in interest without a need to identify the real party of interest." You don't even need to have a legal stake in the outcome of the patent application in order to submit prior art.
Mind you, it's probably not as straightforward as just writing a letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Nothing is ever straightforward with legal stuff, and the USPTO web site doesn't go out of its way to advertise the approved method for submitting prior art. Could somebody with more legal background than I have please write a HOWTO on submitting prior art? Then, every time a story pops up on SlashDot about patents like this one, we can all turn our collective attention to unearthing prior art that might shoot down the foul thing instead of bellyaching about how b0rked the system is.
This might be a good place to bring up the old suggestion that anything out of print for a year become public domain. A newspaper publisher could then maintain their copyright by setting up a method of reprinting old issues. But most of them wouldn't find this lucrative enough, and would just let the copyright expire. Then the LoC could include most newspapers after a year.
While I approve the impulse, I think this would be a nightmare to maintain, particularly if the "expire after a year" idea was applied to all copyrighted material. If applied to books, that means that anything that is not successful enough to need reprinting every year would soon go out of copyright, thereby making it much more difficult for anyone to even make a pretense at supporting themselves through writing. Our very first copyright legislation, the Copyright Act of 1790 provided a term of 14 years, extensible to 26 on application; that's how long the founding fathers (many of whom were in Congress at that point) felt was necessary to adequately fulfill the Constitution's requirement to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in Section 8 Clause 8. You could argue that they were just copying the Statute of Anne (1710) which set forth the same period of protection for copyrighted works; but I would argue that if they had felt that a longer or shorter period of coverage was required, they'd have changed it. Anyway, having the copyright expire after one year out of print would drastically reduce the coverage period of any work that failed to stimulate instant and ongoing demand.
Furthermore, how would we apply "out of print" to works that are copyrighted but never printed? Take software. You can download programs that are years old -- shareware, old open source stuff, etc -- long after the original copyright holder has lost all interest in the program. Is that "in print" or not?
All that said, I can see you reason for wanting to apply such a rule specifically to newspapers, and perhaps to other current-events publications whose value declines rapidly with age (news magazines, etc). If the rule was limited to those sorts of publications, I guess I'd support it. Though I should point out that leaving those sorts of things under copyright for a somewhat longer period of time has two benefits: recycling material from an old article that is copyrighted is plagiarism; but doing so from a public domain article is perfectly kosher. Letting the news into the wild too soon might serve to decrease the originality of the news, particularly in opinion pieces. Second, some article writers sell their articles to multiple publications over time. It is sometimes easier to re-sell an article once it's been out of the public view for a while. Therefore, in order to protect the livelihoods of struggling writers, it would be better to give them a longer grace period before the work goes public domain.
One of the very real problems with copyright law is that it allows publishers to "capture" our history and prevent access to some of the most important primary documents.
I agree. I just think that your solution has a lot of side-effects that would need to be carefully weighed and balanced before it was put into effect.
Would it be possible to build an XUL Chat Room, requiring only that clients be using FireFox?
Yes. It's called ChatZilla. It works with FireFox and Mozilla.
This is, however, an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client, meaning you have to have an IRC server somewhere that you can all sign on. There are lots of public IRC servers -- dalnet, freenode, etc -- and some of them allow you to create your own channel. If you want to use another chat protocol, you'll have to code that yourself. But yes, it's eminently do-able.
The checks and balances in the system were designed expressly to avoid the evils of majority rule, and it's up to those on the 'blue' side to make sure their senators and reps use those checks to the fullest. The checks and balances have already reined in the worst excesses of the Bush administration, like the attempted end-run around the court system.
Oh, and those have been working SO well these last few years. When the administration tried to legalize "sneak and peek" searches without a warrant, the Democratic minority boldly defied him. When the administration pushed for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the ultra-rich, the Democrats dug in their heels and killed the bill. When Our Glorious Leader was making the case for war with Iraq, our courageous Democrats scrutinized their evidence and found it wanting.
What planet have you been living on? I want to move there, because in my world, the Dems have rolled over on every important issue for the last few years. And now, with the Republicans increasing their majorities in both the House and the Senate, it's going to be even more difficult for them to put up a credible fight.
I will grant your example of the Supreme Court rejecting the administration's "enemy combatant" arguments. But guess what? The Supreme Court is going to change in the next few years -- Rehnquist's seriously ill, and the rest of the court is rapidly aging. None of them are younger than 65, and several of them are older than 80. Bush will likely get to appoint two justices, and conceivably as many as four. If you look at his previous judicial appointments, you'll find that he does NOT go out of his way to find non-partisan, open-minded civil servants for these posts. What's more, there have been a LOT of 5-4 votes in the Supreme Court over the last couple of decades -- if just one of the more liberal justices dies or retires, rulings are likely to take a sharp turn to the right. And that will last years -- decades, even.
President Bush has proven extremely good at unchecking and imbalancing. With increased Republican dominance in Congress, and a Supreme Court just one or two appointments away from a conservative majority, he stands a very good chance of nullifying those checks and balances for the foreseeable future.
How about a cat that doesn't shed, a cat that sleeps AT NIGHT instead of during the day, a cat that doesn't s**t behind the couch when you piss it off, a cat that is hairball resistant, a cat that doesn't care if the bowl isn't exactly full, a cat that can actually decide if it wants to be inside or outside (as opposed to wanting both simultaneously), a cat that views keyboards as natural preditors, a cat that will not release any "presents" in the house until said "gift" is completely DEAD, a cat that will actually kill said "gifts" that get into your house by other means, a cat that'll bring home USEFUL things instead of the typical birds, rabbits, mice, frogs... a new lawnmower would be nice once in awhile, or maybe some PC hardware - but no, it's always half-dead stuff.
Some of this wishlist can be met by judicious selection, equipping and training. MY cat 1) is hairball resistant (she's gotten like one or two in the last eighteen years); 2) doesn't urinate/defecate indoors (she takes care of all that outdoors); 3) is always exactly where she wants to be (a cat flap is a beautiful invention); and 4) she doesn't walk on keyboards any more (check PawSense out!).
I'll admit she does have an unfortunate habit of bringing half-dead critters in -- but fortunately, she has a very distinctive yowl meaning "I've just crippled something and I've just gotta show you," which makes it easy to shove her out the cat flap and latch it behind her before she actually lets her new playmate loose.
As for bringing in useful stuff, well . . . if I had a cat with discerning taste in computer hardware who was also strong enough to haul in a lawnmower, I would be rather nervous about living in the same house with it.;-)
Violation of free speech? Excuse me? They think that they have a RIGHT to interrupt my dinner, sex life, or gaming? Or, even more importantly, Slashdotting? I THINK NOT
This was never a problem when we were all still on dial-up. Ah, the good old days . . .
How is Iraq less of a dictatorship today than it was under Saddam Hussein?
Easy: in a dictatorship, someone is in control of the country. In Iraq today, nobody is really in control of the whole country. We have:
The interim government, which claims to have control, but hasn't so far been able to reign in the insurgents;
The U.S. military, which definitely has control of some portions of the country, especially the "Green Zone" in Baghdad -- but lacks control of other places, eg Fallujah;
The British military, which seems to have Basra pretty well in hand, but little influence anywhere else;
And the insurgents, who seem to have pretty much free reign over Fallujah and Sadr City (which, if I understand correctly, is a neighborhood of Baghdad). And even if they don't have direct control anywhere else, they're certainly exercising a lot of influence over events all over the place.
In short, no one entity, governmental, military, or otherwise, is calling the shots for the whole country. That doesn't sound like any kind of dictatorship to me -- it sounds more like chaos.
Why does the browser even allow Javascript to create popup windows without toolbars, menu bars and status bars? This has to be one of the most annoying features of any web browser, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would think up or need such a feature.
This feature is useful:
1) Whenever you have to show the user some information that is not directly related to the task at hand. Example: you have a multi-page "wizard" style form allowing a user to enter information into a database. It is a fairly complex process, in which the options offered on later pages will depend on which options were selected on earlier pages. Scattered across each page, you have links that open a glossary to define a particular term. Opening the glossary information in a new window (one without toolbars, etc), allows you to provide that information to the user without interrupting their workflow. Toolbars are extraneous to the window, since it never shows anything but the glossary page. Showing them would be pointless, and would detract from the look-and-feel of the application.
2) When you want to offer a user the ability to view an arbitrary item from a list without reloading the page. Example: you have a bunch of images, and you want to let a user preview each one. You list each filename and other file details, then you have a link entitle "Preview", which opens up a new window (with no toolbar, etc) showing that image. Subsequent previews will resize the existing preview window and change its url rather than opening an entirely new one. If the preview button left the index page to preview each picture, it would increase the amount of traffic on your web server, with each new request for the index page. This may seem trivial, but if the index page is generated using information from a database, that can mount up fast, especially if you have multiple concurrent users. Again, toolbars are extraneous to the function of the window in this situation.
3) In any situation where you want to make two windows easily distinguishable from one another. If you have ever watched inexperienced or non-proficient web users, you will note that they frequently become confused when dealing with multiple browser windows, and this is especially true when the page author adds a target="_blank" attribute to a link. The new window opens, taking up all the available screen real estate, and looking exactly like the previous window, so the user naturally tries to use the "Back" button to return to what they were just looking at. But it doesn't work, and so they have to stop and study their open programs to figure out what happened. If, on the other hand, that content were opened in a smaller window with no toolbars overlaid on the parent window, it is instantly obvious that it's a new window, and the user is much less likely to get confused, leading to a better experience with the web site.
The first and second examples come from real life uses of window.open() -- both in my own pages. The third is applicable to virtually any proper use of JavaScript window control. I hate pop-up ads as much as anyone, and I'm profoundly grateful that FireFox blocks unsolicited calls to window.open(). Two other things make me glad: firstly, that you have the option of turning all that stuff off because you hate it; and secondly, I am glad that you're not in charge of FireFox development, because I suspect that a lot of "annoying" pages might not function properly in FireFox if you were.
. . . and eventually I turned off the catch-all feature. It was very nice for about a year, until some spammer decided to start sending spams that appeared to originate from non-existent email addresses at my domain. Then all of a sudden I started receiving some four thousand messages per day to accounts that didn't exist. Most of them were bounce messages -- "Postmaster: error, user X doesn't exist" or "Postmaster: No such address" -- but there were also a few actual emails from incensed people demanding to know why I was sending out pornographic horse-on-girl crap. Oh, and one person wanted to know why on earth I wanted to sell her both breast enhancements and penis enlargement pills.
After a couple of days of that, I turned off the catch-all account. It's just not worth it.
I was diagnosed with ADD when I was in elementary school. I tried chemical regimens (Ritalin) but gave it up when I was in Junior High because I didn't believe it was actually helping me.
About that time, my parents heard about a clinic in our city (Denver) doing neural feedback therapy for ADD, so they signed me up.
The drill went something like this: I would take the bus across town to the offices of the clinic. There, they would put a hair-net with a built-in series of electrodes onto my head and squirt a cold, goopy saline-type gel into each of them to enhance conductivity between my skin and the electrode. This was then hooked up to a desktop computer, which would output the signals from the electrodes in a variety of different colored graphs -- line graphs, bar charts, and I think there was a pie chart. Then I had to stare at the screen and try to control the graph.
The one I remember most clearly is the line chart. It had different colored lines scrolling across the screen for the different types of brain wave (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) and I had to keep one type down (that was alpha, I think) and another up (that was beta -- I don't recall what gamma is, but delta waves are most common when you're asleep). And that's what I would do. For an hour.
It was the single most boring thing I have ever done in my entire life. I could indeed see that I was sometimes able to exert some limited control over the relative strengths of my brainwaves, as shown on the graph, but it was intermittent at best. The whole thing bored me out of my skull. Not to mention I had to wash the electro-goop out of my hair every time I went. Blech. In retrospect, I have to wonder -- if the object is to teach someone to concentrate, then why on earth did they design such a dull program? I can think of few things more dull than staring at a graph for an hour at a time. It's like they went out of their way to pick the most boring thing they could think of. And they expect adolescent patients to actually learn mental discipline from this?
The very best part was when they let me play Commander Keen at the end of sessions where I'd done well. I bet you if they had designed the brainwave-monitoring program as a game, I would have been interested enough to actually work at it. Slashot had an article about a biofeedback game last fall -- I can't find the Slashdot article, but the game is called The Wild Divine. You hook up some biofeedback finger rings to your person computer and use them to control the game. I haven't tried it, and there's a lot of New-Age-ish claptrap about "soul-awareness" and "finding inner peace through the game", but the basic principle seems to be the same as that employed by the therapists I saw.
We gave up the therapy after a short while, mostly because our finances took a turn for the worse and we could no longer afford it.
Now. As to results: I didn't notice any particular benefit from the therapy I took. However, there are a number of things which suggest that my experience is not reliable. 1) I was only at it for a short time -- a couple of months, I think. If I had worked longer, I might have progressed far enough to get some benefit out of it. 2) Their equipment and techniques were primitive. I bet their techniques (and their technology) have improved a LOT. I recall seeing a story on Slashdot a while ago about a place in Boulder, Colorado, that made a therapy game controlled by biofeedback -- you had to "lift a feather" on the screen, which sounds a lot more interesting than staring at spikes on a line graph.
I gave up both medication and therapy after seventh grade. I had a rough time in 8th and 9th grades, but by the time I got to 10th grade I had learned to focus when I needed to, and to control my physical symptoms (which are, in many ways, similar to your daughter's -- strange vocalizations and a tendency to twitch a lot).
The biggest campus rivalry of all is between the sciences and the humanities. This article is just one more example of the same.
We have the scientists on the one hand, who are used to working with verifiable facts (eg "2+2=4") and potentially disprovable hypotheses (eg "pi is infinite" which could potentially be disproven but so far has not been).
On the other hand, we have humanities people who are used to working with ambiguous data (eg "What's our next move?" could be either an inquiry as to strategy, asking when/where we'll next move house to, or both) and hypotheses that are neither provable nor falsifiable (eg the statement "The Wind in the Willows is a good book" cannot be proven, because there is no objective standard for measuring a book's quality, and cannot be disproven for the same reason).
Returning to the article, though. The author makes this statement:
What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected.
While the analogy is good, he is overlooking a major environmental factor: departmental funding. This is the lifeblood of an academic department. Without funding, the department dies, and takes all the jobs with it. It is a limited resource, and every department is a competitor for that resource, regardless of topic. This means that the English Department is in competition with the Electrical Engineering Department for existence. In short, the English departments are NOT "an isolated population with unique selective pressues"; departments are more analogous to species in competition with one another. They share an environment (the "Ivory Tower"), and all of them have the same set of pressues ("produce, or the funding dries up").
My theory is that the humanities have adopted these impenetrable (and often useless) theories in order to compete with the sciences, which have absorbed increasing amounts of the overall budget over the last century. They have to compete on the sciences' terms, because the benefits of training people in judging the relative merits of ambiguous situations are not immediate, and may not come into play until well after the students have graduated. But in the competition for funding, it's immediate results that matter. The sciences can say "We've found out how to split atoms! We're going to win a major award! But there were these interesting side-effects we'd like to investigate further." And then they get more funding to continue research. If the humanities say "We've turned out a citizen who is well-equipped to make choices in an ambiguous world!" they don't get funding -- but if they say "We've opened up a whole new area of inquiry with our article on 'The Parturition of Culture in Beowulf'*!" then maybe they get enough funding to survive another year.
Adding in all this fluff makes the field inaccessible to laymen, and obscures the valuable stuff with loads of crap.
My greatest objection to this process is that it undermines the most useful aspect of humanities: making judgements based on ambiguous or even contradictory data is an extremely valuable skill. We are confronted with ambiguous situations every day, ranging from the mundane (eg "Wheaties or Kix this morning?") to the vital (eg "Would it be a good idea to go to war with Iraq?"). Humanities, and especially literature, allow an individual to (in essence) perform thought experiments in judging ambiguous situations of all sorts (political, moral, and ethical, to name a few) without dire consequences attached. This, IMHO, is the true value of studying literature and other humanities, and I worry that drastically reducing or eliminating these studie
Re:Online mentions in IBM filing
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SCO's team, on the other hand, probably starts chewing the rug everytime there's an update...
Well, they've got to do something with all the money SCO is paying them. I'm happy for the rug merchants of Lindon, Utah.
1.), regarding the Church's response to the printing of books: It was the printing part which made books a threat; books themselves predated the printing press by centuries. And, of course, written records of knowledge pre-dated the "book" format by a lot more -- scrolls, tablets, and wall inscriptions are all forms of written communication. No, it was not the books that were threatening to the Church: it was the printing press, which made it a lot harder for the Church to control the dissemination of knowledge. It is not surprising that the Reformation was underway within 100 years of Gutenberg's printing press (invented 1436, completed 1440); the printing press made it possible to create and disseminate heretical works much more widely, presenting a great challenge to the Church's authority.
Oh, and I'll admit that it was a bit disingenuous to claim that they didn't have classrooms; that was a rather feeble attempt at humor. In future I shall keep my jokes strictly to myself, to avoid confusing people.
2.) I did not blame a technology (TV, in that case) for poor pedagogy. I merely observed that it can be used in one of two ways (well or poorly), and provided an example from my own experience of one poor application. Perhaps I should have included an example of a good application, for balance; but offhand I can't think of a time when I was particularly impressed by the use of a TV in the classroom.
3.) I don't quite understand your argument. Furthermore, I think we actually agree on this point. I was arguing, first, that technology is not strictly necessary; and second, that it can be immensely valuable when used properly. It isn't strictly necessary: you could get by without it, as evidenced by the fact that people did get by with out it until very recently. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use technology in schools; just that we don't absolutely require it, as the original poster suggested.
In addition, I said that ". . . they [computers] should be a supplement, not a staple. There's plenty of time for more computer-centric education during the later years of education (eg ages 12 and up)." That would seem to be in line with your statement that ". . . a much more advanced set of problems can be solved and explained using technology AFTER basic fundamentals have been mastered." In brief, computers should be used in moderation, as a supplement to more basic skills, particularly in early education. How are we in disagreement here?
4.) I will concede you this point; I do not know enough about K-12 expenditures. As this guy pointed out already, with better data and much more politely.
I DO, however, know that the San Francisco Unified School District referred to in the article has recently experienced budget cuts because of the State of California's 1.7 billion dollar cut to the education budget, and that they are currently working on a "Master Technology Plan", which they hope ". . . may result in operational savings to recover the cost of technology investments by the District." They are planning public forums starting in February to get public input on ways to do that. At such a time, is it really unreasonable to suggest switching away from expensive proprietary solutions?
It may be that you're right, that Linux isn't ready for widespread desktop usage in K-12 schools. (Though this school and this one and this one an
I'd really like to see the breakdown of expenditures for that money, but the Budget Status reports for the San Francisco United School District don't seem to be available. The server that hosts them is down -- and anyway, based on the filenames in the URL, you need some sort of user account to access that information anyway.
I see that the SFUSD is developing a Master Technology Plan, with the avowed purpose of putting together a scheme that ". . . may result in operational savings to recover the cost of technology investments by the District." They also hope to qualify for technology grants, probably of the sort discussed in the article that started this whole discussion. They're holding public forums to discuss their technology plan, starting next February.
Perhaps it would be a good idea for some open source advocates in the area to attend some of these. Take along CDs full of open source software for Windows. Try The OpenCD. The schools are certain to have an existing investment in Windows, and would be highly suspicious of a switch to desktop Linux. But at the same time, they may be willing to experiment with OSS on an existing platform.
OpenOffice.org, for example, might be a good way of avoiding upgrade fees for MS Office. It would also open up the possibility of switching to Linux without losing a familiar app later on. Potential problems with this might include 1) distribution to students so they can use it at home (though I bet burning CDs in bulk is cheaper than buying MS Office); and 2) existing contractual obligations with MS or a reseller might make it unfeasible to switch at this time.
At any rate, it can't hurt to show up at a forum, say your piece, and give them a disc full of OSS to play with.
So I wonder when people were crying that books shouldn't be in classrooms.
I doubt people complained much about books in the classroom, for a number of reasons. 1) They didn't have classrooms. Socrates, for example, did his teaching outdoors. In that day and age, dedicated teaching areas were few and far between. 2) Slow adoption. Literacy was a privilege of the elite for centuries -- millenia. Heck, literacy isn't universal even today, especially not in the 3rd world. Widespread literacy has only really begun to catch on in the last 250 years or so.
When I was in grade school, people bitched about using TVs.
Yeah, me too. And you know what? When it comes to teaching, the TV is a double edged tool. It can be used effectively, but there's also the danger of sitting back and letting the TV do all the work. I had a professor in college (!) who would lecture for 10-15 minutes, and then plug in a documentary. Some of them were pretty good documentaries, but they were still no substitute for a real teacher who can answer questions.
We need all of these things to teach our kids!
Wrong. We don't need any of them. Education could proceed with nothing more than a teacher and a student, and maybe a stick to draw in the dirt. Televisions and computers and even books are just tools to make teaching and learning easier. Used in moderation, they can be phenomenally useful; but you can't substitute a machine for a teacher, especially at the earlier levels. Personally, I'd be happier if the elementary schools in this country would concentrate on strong reading skills, strong mathematical ability, strong writing skills, and a general grounding in science and history. If computers are part of that process, great! But they should be a supplement, not a staple. There's plenty of time for more computer-centric education during the later years of education (eg ages 12 and up).
What really worries me is that these schools are getting ripped off. A million dollars for 450 computers? That seems awfully steep. Since the article specifies that the cash is divided among multiple schools, I assume that the 1 million is all or mostly spent on hardware and software, rather than salaries for support staff or such. That means they're paying approximately $2,200 per computer, which is absolutely ludicrous. That's the kind of money you spend on a professional workstation. Either these schools are buying systems that are WAAAAAAY over-powered for their needs, or they're getting totally ripped off on software prices.
Heck, I could build those same 450 systems for approximately $320,000 using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and Linux (perhaps Debian Junior, a kid-oriented flavor of Debian). Budget another $120,000 to employ a code monkey for a few years to work on any rough edges in the systems. The rest of the money could go to other school programs in need of funding -- music, art, PE, free lunches for poor kids. It really pisses me off to see our schools spending huge amounts on exorbitantly priced licenses for proprietary software, when those funds could be better spent on other areas.
You can use BitTorrent to download the OpenCD ISO, in addition to the traditional mirrors. Henrik Omma (the project founder) put up.torrent files here:
Note: there are TWO torrents. One is the binary ISO, one is the source code. Make sure you know which you want (most people will just want the regular ISO, not the source code).
Nothing's hidden, it's all there, it's all searchable from the white house website, just not from search engines.
Correction: it's all there, as far as we can tell. How can I be sure that the results returned by the whitehouse.gov search engine are full and complete when google and all the other search engines have been partially crippled? There's no way to verify the completeness of the results -- I just have to take their word for it. Just like I was asked to take their word about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Paranoia aside, I object to these restrictions as a matter of principle. They're making it more difficult to access publically available information. It's not classified, and it never was. I, as a citizen of the U.S.A., have a right to know what my leaders have said and done.
Let's assume the whitehouse.gov search engine is completely honest, and faithfully returns a complete listing of all materials on the site having to do with Iraq. If that's so, then there should be no reason to disable other search engines, since their results would just confirm the internal results.
But the restrictions are in place, meaning that someone thought there was a good reason to do so. Restricting access makes it more difficult for people to research information pertaining to Iraq on the whitehouse.gov web site. Who are the people most likely to be doing that? Answer: journalists, activists, and concerned citizens. Obviously these restrictions aren't enough by themselves to dissuade a determined researcher; but it might slow them down. And it might actually stop a diffident researcher completely.
I'm not even going to go into scenarios where the whitehouse.gov search engine is not trustworthy, because serving up "doctored" speeches or information is highly unlikely. There are too many other archives to compare against, and it would be a major scandal if the administration was found to be altering records on its website. They'd have to be really, really dumb to do that.
The whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.
Um, no. SVG does use pixels. If you come up with a way to display something on a screen without using pixels -- get a patent!
What you were trying to say, I think, is that SVG generates vector graphics as opposed to bitmapped graphics. Bitmapped graphics are basically lists of pixels, saying "First row: pixel 1 is red, pixel 2 is red, pixel 3 is green. Second row: pixel 1 is red, pixel 2 is green, pixel 3 is red. Third row: pixel 1 is green, pixel 2 is red, pixel 3 is red." This generates a three-by-three graphic like this:
RRG RGR GRR
In other words, a red square with a green slash extending diagonally upwards from the bottom left to the top right. You can save some disk space by compressing the file -- for example, the file might say "Green pixels: Row 1, pixel 3; Row 2, pixel 2; Row 3, pixel 1; all others Red." Other compression schemes use different approaches, but that's one way. At base, though, it's still just a list of pixels. Examples of bitmapped graphics include BMP, JPG, PNG, and GIF graphics.
Vector graphics are different. They specify a set of mathematical descriptions of shapes. Like plotting out the algebraic formulas for lines and squares and stuff on a graph in high school. Instead of describing the picture, vector graphics describe how to draw the picture. The advantage to this is that the picture can be drawn at any size. You could take a vector graphic and draw it at 3x3 pixels or 3000x3000 pixels, and the end result would be true to its description. You can enlarge something indefinitely without it getting all pixellated and blocky. You can also reduce it indefinitely. Of course, at one point or another it gets too big or too small to be useful, but in between those points it gives you a lot of flexibility. Sick of those miniscule icons in the toolbar of your word processor? If they were SVG, you could twiddle their size until they felt comfortable. Some of the better-known examples of vector graphics are TrueType fonts and Macromedia's Flash graphics.
SVG, which is short for Scalable Vector Graphics, is an open, XML-based standard for vector graphics, similar to Flash. You use XML tags (vaguely like HTML) to describe your shapes and such. Then you need an interpreter that takes those instructions, figures out the math, and draws the shapes for you. You can animate them with ECMAscript (read: JavaScript). The standard is fairly new, but has a lot of backing.
In KDE, icons are the most obvious use for SVG. There is a definite performance hit -- all that math means a lot of CPU overhead. For this reason, I don't think SVG is likely to be used to generate the whole interface. But there's an excellent compromise: once the SVG has been sized and drawn, you could then take that and save it as a bitmapped graphic. So you could size your interface once, then save to plain old bitmapped files, using compression if you like. That way you get your UI sized the way you want it, and you don't have to keep re-calculating all the vectors.
It's a spiffy new technology, and has a lot of potential applications. Neaaat.
GameGrid dynamically partitions areas of the game map, including players and objects, onto different servers. If a player or object, such as a rocket, moves from one server to another, the first server sends the player's state--the player's name, vector, velocity, and statistics--from one server to the next. [. ..] Even if a player isn't physically "on" a server, he must still be able to "see" objects stored on another. The Quake code determines the state of the world every tenth of a second, Bethencourt said.
Could this (or something like it) be used in a user-constructed world? I'm thinking of Active Worlds and similar sorts of software, where people log in, and can then alter the landscape or build things using pre-defined shapes and textures. Kind of like Legos, only you can't step on 'em in the dark.
Anyway, would it be feasible to run such a thing using a grid? Currently, the size of such a shared world is limited by the power of the server on which it is hosted. Alphaworld, the largest world in the Active Worlds universe, is only about the size of California. But if you were using a grid, you could then theoretically expand the world by adding more nodes to handle more real estate. (Or virtual estate, rather.)
If you could find a situation with low enough latency, individuals could even provide their own nodes, adding new territory to the fringes of an existing world. Neaaaat.
It's so nice when somebody actually replies intelligently. Thanks. You're going on the "friends" list. (Though I do have a couple of quibbles with the meat of your reply.)
The principle driving force behind the colonization of North America was to get natural resources. Initially, it was the search for a route to India to get spices. Later it was driven by the fur trade, lumber, fish, and sugar (oh, and the fabled cities of gold). Overcrowding and pollution were not issues.
I'd argue that obtaining natural resources was what the colonies ended up doing, not what they were founded to do -- as I see it, the colonists came over for two main reasons: 1) to establish new forms of government (theocracy in early Massachusetts, feudalism in Maryland) or to get rich quick (Virginia, and to a certain extent the Carolinas).
The search for a quicker route to India wasn't about colonization -- Columbus, and later Henry Hudson, weren't interested in settling down to raise family, and were probably damned annoyed to find a ruddy continent in their way. (Well, Hudson was annoyed, particularly when his crew marooned him in Canada. I seem to recall that Columbus believed he'd actually gotten to the East Indies till the day he died. Poor muddled fellow.)
Fur, lumber, fish, and sugar were exports that came to light after the colonies were established -- though they were undeniably important, they were not what the colonists set out to do.
I always thought the cities-of-gold were more of a South American thing. Pizarro, Cortes, Coronado, all mucking about in Peru, Mexico, and the Arizona/New Mexico area. Am I missing something?
You're absolutely correct to point out that overcrowding and pollution were not issues driving the colonization of America. (Well . . . probably they were, but only in a limited, secondary sort of way.) I just left 'em in there so as to modify the parent post as little as possible.
Where is the driving force for a colony on Mars, or on the Moon? It's not economics. We can get whatever is there from here more cheaply. Protection from cataclysm? That would rank, like, #342 in the top ten reasons to do it. Science? Maybe. However, unmanned probes and robots can do the same job, at a far smaller cost. Because it's there? Because it is a test of the human spirit? Erm... Um... Okay, maybe.
All of these are valid objections. It doesn't make economic sense, cataclysm-insurance is a low priority for most people, science is doing nicely with robots.
But note the subject line we're still using: I hope this turns into a space race. Political one-up-manship could provide the incentive to make the dream happen. Mind, I don't think this Nuclear-Power-on-Mars project is going to ignite such a contest. I mean, saying you're going to put a power station there and actually doing it are two different things.
Now, if Russia actually follows through on this announcement, then we might see some action. I can't imagine America's leaders being happy at Russia beating them to Mars, even if the Cold War is over.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, no. It's not possible. Especially not if you want to have a computer. That free/open source software you would run on your homebrew computer? It's covered by copyright. All free/open software licenses are based on the right of the copyright holder to determine how their work can be redistributed. This holds true for the GPL, even - when GPL'ing a bit of code, you have to put your name, the date, and claim copyright over the code before you can move on to the actual license bit.
Oh, and I don't know why you pick 1954 as the cut-off date for your books; check out the Gutenberg Project's Copyright HowTo, which discusses how to determine whether a book is public domain or not. The rule of thumb is that anything printed before January first 1923 is safe, and only a few very specific cases after that (eg, a work created before 1964 whose copyright was not renewed and did not qualify for automatic re-qualification under the GATT copyright agreement of 1991). In general, nothing printed from January 1st 1923 onward is in the public domain, and won't be until 2019 (barring further copyright extensions, heaven forbid).
Huh?
I'm confused. How does gaining formal observer status at a massive international governmental body make the OSS crowd look like greasy hippies? I'd have thought it would be the other way around -- make us look like a bunch of tie-wearing authoritarians, maybe. I agree with your post otherwise -- this is good news -- but I don't understand that first bit.
It's not quite that simple. Surely you don't imagine that any car, electric or otherwise, could be zero maintenance? There will be revenue streams associated with electric cars -- battery replacements come to mind, and of course the tires haven't gone away. You're right to point out that they require less maintenance, but that's not the reason we haven't seen widespread adoption.
No, we're not going to see any kind of wide-scale deployment of EVs until a number of concerns and problems are resolved:
Much though I like the idea, it's just not going to take off until these concerns are met. Or until the last drop of gas has been burned off into the atmosphere and we're left with no choice but to develop alternative technologies.
Sorry to reply to my own post . . . when, oh, when will we get the ability to edit our posts?
Anyway -- it seems someone has already written a Prior Art HOWTO, as I would have discovered had I thought to run it through Google before hitting the "Submit" button.
Attention all SlashDotters: you too can join the hunt for prior art on patents! That's right -- the US Code Section 35 part 301 specifies that "Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential."
See also Persons Who May Cite Prior Art", which explicitly says that "'Any person' includes patentees, licensees, reexamination requesters, real parties in interest, persons without a real interest, and persons acting for real parties in interest without a need to identify the real party of interest." You don't even need to have a legal stake in the outcome of the patent application in order to submit prior art.
Mind you, it's probably not as straightforward as just writing a letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Nothing is ever straightforward with legal stuff, and the USPTO web site doesn't go out of its way to advertise the approved method for submitting prior art. Could somebody with more legal background than I have please write a HOWTO on submitting prior art? Then, every time a story pops up on SlashDot about patents like this one, we can all turn our collective attention to unearthing prior art that might shoot down the foul thing instead of bellyaching about how b0rked the system is.
While I approve the impulse, I think this would be a nightmare to maintain, particularly if the "expire after a year" idea was applied to all copyrighted material. If applied to books, that means that anything that is not successful enough to need reprinting every year would soon go out of copyright, thereby making it much more difficult for anyone to even make a pretense at supporting themselves through writing. Our very first copyright legislation, the Copyright Act of 1790 provided a term of 14 years, extensible to 26 on application; that's how long the founding fathers (many of whom were in Congress at that point) felt was necessary to adequately fulfill the Constitution's requirement to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in Section 8 Clause 8. You could argue that they were just copying the Statute of Anne (1710) which set forth the same period of protection for copyrighted works; but I would argue that if they had felt that a longer or shorter period of coverage was required, they'd have changed it. Anyway, having the copyright expire after one year out of print would drastically reduce the coverage period of any work that failed to stimulate instant and ongoing demand.
Furthermore, how would we apply "out of print" to works that are copyrighted but never printed? Take software. You can download programs that are years old -- shareware, old open source stuff, etc -- long after the original copyright holder has lost all interest in the program. Is that "in print" or not?
All that said, I can see you reason for wanting to apply such a rule specifically to newspapers, and perhaps to other current-events publications whose value declines rapidly with age (news magazines, etc). If the rule was limited to those sorts of publications, I guess I'd support it. Though I should point out that leaving those sorts of things under copyright for a somewhat longer period of time has two benefits: recycling material from an old article that is copyrighted is plagiarism; but doing so from a public domain article is perfectly kosher. Letting the news into the wild too soon might serve to decrease the originality of the news, particularly in opinion pieces. Second, some article writers sell their articles to multiple publications over time. It is sometimes easier to re-sell an article once it's been out of the public view for a while. Therefore, in order to protect the livelihoods of struggling writers, it would be better to give them a longer grace period before the work goes public domain.
I agree. I just think that your solution has a lot of side-effects that would need to be carefully weighed and balanced before it was put into effect.
Yes. It's called ChatZilla. It works with FireFox and Mozilla.
This is, however, an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client, meaning you have to have an IRC server somewhere that you can all sign on. There are lots of public IRC servers -- dalnet, freenode, etc -- and some of them allow you to create your own channel. If you want to use another chat protocol, you'll have to code that yourself. But yes, it's eminently do-able.
Oh, and those have been working SO well these last few years. When the administration tried to legalize "sneak and peek" searches without a warrant, the Democratic minority boldly defied him. When the administration pushed for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the ultra-rich, the Democrats dug in their heels and killed the bill. When Our Glorious Leader was making the case for war with Iraq, our courageous Democrats scrutinized their evidence and found it wanting.
What planet have you been living on? I want to move there, because in my world, the Dems have rolled over on every important issue for the last few years. And now, with the Republicans increasing their majorities in both the House and the Senate, it's going to be even more difficult for them to put up a credible fight.
I will grant your example of the Supreme Court rejecting the administration's "enemy combatant" arguments. But guess what? The Supreme Court is going to change in the next few years -- Rehnquist's seriously ill, and the rest of the court is rapidly aging. None of them are younger than 65, and several of them are older than 80. Bush will likely get to appoint two justices, and conceivably as many as four. If you look at his previous judicial appointments, you'll find that he does NOT go out of his way to find non-partisan, open-minded civil servants for these posts. What's more, there have been a LOT of 5-4 votes in the Supreme Court over the last couple of decades -- if just one of the more liberal justices dies or retires, rulings are likely to take a sharp turn to the right. And that will last years -- decades, even.
President Bush has proven extremely good at unchecking and imbalancing. With increased Republican dominance in Congress, and a Supreme Court just one or two appointments away from a conservative majority, he stands a very good chance of nullifying those checks and balances for the foreseeable future.
Some of this wishlist can be met by judicious selection, equipping and training. MY cat 1) is hairball resistant (she's gotten like one or two in the last eighteen years); 2) doesn't urinate/defecate indoors (she takes care of all that outdoors); 3) is always exactly where she wants to be (a cat flap is a beautiful invention); and 4) she doesn't walk on keyboards any more (check PawSense out!).
I'll admit she does have an unfortunate habit of bringing half-dead critters in -- but fortunately, she has a very distinctive yowl meaning "I've just crippled something and I've just gotta show you," which makes it easy to shove her out the cat flap and latch it behind her before she actually lets her new playmate loose.
As for bringing in useful stuff, well . . . if I had a cat with discerning taste in computer hardware who was also strong enough to haul in a lawnmower, I would be rather nervous about living in the same house with it. ;-)
In short, no one entity, governmental, military, or otherwise, is calling the shots for the whole country. That doesn't sound like any kind of dictatorship to me -- it sounds more like chaos.
1) Whenever you have to show the user some information that is not directly related to the task at hand. Example: you have a multi-page "wizard" style form allowing a user to enter information into a database. It is a fairly complex process, in which the options offered on later pages will depend on which options were selected on earlier pages. Scattered across each page, you have links that open a glossary to define a particular term. Opening the glossary information in a new window (one without toolbars, etc), allows you to provide that information to the user without interrupting their workflow. Toolbars are extraneous to the window, since it never shows anything but the glossary page. Showing them would be pointless, and would detract from the look-and-feel of the application.
2) When you want to offer a user the ability to view an arbitrary item from a list without reloading the page. Example: you have a bunch of images, and you want to let a user preview each one. You list each filename and other file details, then you have a link entitle "Preview", which opens up a new window (with no toolbar, etc) showing that image. Subsequent previews will resize the existing preview window and change its url rather than opening an entirely new one. If the preview button left the index page to preview each picture, it would increase the amount of traffic on your web server, with each new request for the index page. This may seem trivial, but if the index page is generated using information from a database, that can mount up fast, especially if you have multiple concurrent users. Again, toolbars are extraneous to the function of the window in this situation.
3) In any situation where you want to make two windows easily distinguishable from one another. If you have ever watched inexperienced or non-proficient web users, you will note that they frequently become confused when dealing with multiple browser windows, and this is especially true when the page author adds a target="_blank" attribute to a link. The new window opens, taking up all the available screen real estate, and looking exactly like the previous window, so the user naturally tries to use the "Back" button to return to what they were just looking at. But it doesn't work, and so they have to stop and study their open programs to figure out what happened. If, on the other hand, that content were opened in a smaller window with no toolbars overlaid on the parent window, it is instantly obvious that it's a new window, and the user is much less likely to get confused, leading to a better experience with the web site.
The first and second examples come from real life uses of window.open() -- both in my own pages. The third is applicable to virtually any proper use of JavaScript window control. I hate pop-up ads as much as anyone, and I'm profoundly grateful that FireFox blocks unsolicited calls to window.open(). Two other things make me glad: firstly, that you have the option of turning all that stuff off because you hate it; and secondly, I am glad that you're not in charge of FireFox development, because I suspect that a lot of "annoying" pages might not function properly in FireFox if you were.
. . . and eventually I turned off the catch-all feature. It was very nice for about a year, until some spammer decided to start sending spams that appeared to originate from non-existent email addresses at my domain. Then all of a sudden I started receiving some four thousand messages per day to accounts that didn't exist. Most of them were bounce messages -- "Postmaster: error, user X doesn't exist" or "Postmaster: No such address" -- but there were also a few actual emails from incensed people demanding to know why I was sending out pornographic horse-on-girl crap. Oh, and one person wanted to know why on earth I wanted to sell her both breast enhancements and penis enlargement pills.
After a couple of days of that, I turned off the catch-all account. It's just not worth it.
I was diagnosed with ADD when I was in elementary school. I tried chemical regimens (Ritalin) but gave it up when I was in Junior High because I didn't believe it was actually helping me.
About that time, my parents heard about a clinic in our city (Denver) doing neural feedback therapy for ADD, so they signed me up.
The drill went something like this: I would take the bus across town to the offices of the clinic. There, they would put a hair-net with a built-in series of electrodes onto my head and squirt a cold, goopy saline-type gel into each of them to enhance conductivity between my skin and the electrode. This was then hooked up to a desktop computer, which would output the signals from the electrodes in a variety of different colored graphs -- line graphs, bar charts, and I think there was a pie chart. Then I had to stare at the screen and try to control the graph.
The one I remember most clearly is the line chart. It had different colored lines scrolling across the screen for the different types of brain wave (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) and I had to keep one type down (that was alpha, I think) and another up (that was beta -- I don't recall what gamma is, but delta waves are most common when you're asleep). And that's what I would do. For an hour.
It was the single most boring thing I have ever done in my entire life. I could indeed see that I was sometimes able to exert some limited control over the relative strengths of my brainwaves, as shown on the graph, but it was intermittent at best. The whole thing bored me out of my skull. Not to mention I had to wash the electro-goop out of my hair every time I went. Blech. In retrospect, I have to wonder -- if the object is to teach someone to concentrate, then why on earth did they design such a dull program? I can think of few things more dull than staring at a graph for an hour at a time. It's like they went out of their way to pick the most boring thing they could think of. And they expect adolescent patients to actually learn mental discipline from this?
The very best part was when they let me play Commander Keen at the end of sessions where I'd done well. I bet you if they had designed the brainwave-monitoring program as a game, I would have been interested enough to actually work at it. Slashot had an article about a biofeedback game last fall -- I can't find the Slashdot article, but the game is called The Wild Divine. You hook up some biofeedback finger rings to your person computer and use them to control the game. I haven't tried it, and there's a lot of New-Age-ish claptrap about "soul-awareness" and "finding inner peace through the game", but the basic principle seems to be the same as that employed by the therapists I saw.
We gave up the therapy after a short while, mostly because our finances took a turn for the worse and we could no longer afford it.
Now. As to results: I didn't notice any particular benefit from the therapy I took. However, there are a number of things which suggest that my experience is not reliable. 1) I was only at it for a short time -- a couple of months, I think. If I had worked longer, I might have progressed far enough to get some benefit out of it. 2) Their equipment and techniques were primitive. I bet their techniques (and their technology) have improved a LOT. I recall seeing a story on Slashdot a while ago about a place in Boulder, Colorado, that made a therapy game controlled by biofeedback -- you had to "lift a feather" on the screen, which sounds a lot more interesting than staring at spikes on a line graph.
I gave up both medication and therapy after seventh grade. I had a rough time in 8th and 9th grades, but by the time I got to 10th grade I had learned to focus when I needed to, and to control my physical symptoms (which are, in many ways, similar to your daughter's -- strange vocalizations and a tendency to twitch a lot).
. . . you can also try DOSbox, which is a virtual DOS machine.
We have the scientists on the one hand, who are used to working with verifiable facts (eg "2+2=4") and potentially disprovable hypotheses (eg "pi is infinite" which could potentially be disproven but so far has not been).
On the other hand, we have humanities people who are used to working with ambiguous data (eg "What's our next move?" could be either an inquiry as to strategy, asking when/where we'll next move house to, or both) and hypotheses that are neither provable nor falsifiable (eg the statement "The Wind in the Willows is a good book" cannot be proven, because there is no objective standard for measuring a book's quality, and cannot be disproven for the same reason).
Returning to the article, though. The author makes this statement:
While the analogy is good, he is overlooking a major environmental factor: departmental funding. This is the lifeblood of an academic department. Without funding, the department dies, and takes all the jobs with it. It is a limited resource, and every department is a competitor for that resource, regardless of topic. This means that the English Department is in competition with the Electrical Engineering Department for existence. In short, the English departments are NOT "an isolated population with unique selective pressues"; departments are more analogous to species in competition with one another. They share an environment (the "Ivory Tower"), and all of them have the same set of pressues ("produce, or the funding dries up").
My theory is that the humanities have adopted these impenetrable (and often useless) theories in order to compete with the sciences, which have absorbed increasing amounts of the overall budget over the last century. They have to compete on the sciences' terms, because the benefits of training people in judging the relative merits of ambiguous situations are not immediate, and may not come into play until well after the students have graduated. But in the competition for funding, it's immediate results that matter. The sciences can say "We've found out how to split atoms! We're going to win a major award! But there were these interesting side-effects we'd like to investigate further." And then they get more funding to continue research. If the humanities say "We've turned out a citizen who is well-equipped to make choices in an ambiguous world!" they don't get funding -- but if they say "We've opened up a whole new area of inquiry with our article on 'The Parturition of Culture in Beowulf'*!" then maybe they get enough funding to survive another year.
Adding in all this fluff makes the field inaccessible to laymen, and obscures the valuable stuff with loads of crap.
My greatest objection to this process is that it undermines the most useful aspect of humanities: making judgements based on ambiguous or even contradictory data is an extremely valuable skill. We are confronted with ambiguous situations every day, ranging from the mundane (eg "Wheaties or Kix this morning?") to the vital (eg "Would it be a good idea to go to war with Iraq?"). Humanities, and especially literature, allow an individual to (in essence) perform thought experiments in judging ambiguous situations of all sorts (political, moral, and ethical, to name a few) without dire consequences attached. This, IMHO, is the true value of studying literature and other humanities, and I worry that drastically reducing or eliminating these studie
1.), regarding the Church's response to the printing of books: It was the printing part which made books a threat; books themselves predated the printing press by centuries. And, of course, written records of knowledge pre-dated the "book" format by a lot more -- scrolls, tablets, and wall inscriptions are all forms of written communication. No, it was not the books that were threatening to the Church: it was the printing press, which made it a lot harder for the Church to control the dissemination of knowledge. It is not surprising that the Reformation was underway within 100 years of Gutenberg's printing press (invented 1436, completed 1440); the printing press made it possible to create and disseminate heretical works much more widely, presenting a great challenge to the Church's authority.
Oh, and I'll admit that it was a bit disingenuous to claim that they didn't have classrooms; that was a rather feeble attempt at humor. In future I shall keep my jokes strictly to myself, to avoid confusing people.
2.) I did not blame a technology (TV, in that case) for poor pedagogy. I merely observed that it can be used in one of two ways (well or poorly), and provided an example from my own experience of one poor application. Perhaps I should have included an example of a good application, for balance; but offhand I can't think of a time when I was particularly impressed by the use of a TV in the classroom.
3.) I don't quite understand your argument. Furthermore, I think we actually agree on this point. I was arguing, first, that technology is not strictly necessary; and second, that it can be immensely valuable when used properly. It isn't strictly necessary: you could get by without it, as evidenced by the fact that people did get by with out it until very recently. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use technology in schools; just that we don't absolutely require it, as the original poster suggested.
In addition, I said that ". . . they [computers] should be a supplement, not a staple. There's plenty of time for more computer-centric education during the later years of education (eg ages 12 and up)." That would seem to be in line with your statement that ". . . a much more advanced set of problems can be solved and explained using technology AFTER basic fundamentals have been mastered." In brief, computers should be used in moderation, as a supplement to more basic skills, particularly in early education. How are we in disagreement here?
4.) I will concede you this point; I do not know enough about K-12 expenditures. As this guy pointed out already, with better data and much more politely.
I DO, however, know that the San Francisco Unified School District referred to in the article has recently experienced budget cuts because of the State of California's 1.7 billion dollar cut to the education budget, and that they are currently working on a "Master Technology Plan", which they hope ". . . may result in operational savings to recover the cost of technology investments by the District." They are planning public forums starting in February to get public input on ways to do that. At such a time, is it really unreasonable to suggest switching away from expensive proprietary solutions?
It may be that you're right, that Linux isn't ready for widespread desktop usage in K-12 schools. (Though this school and this one and this one an
Interesting.
I'd really like to see the breakdown of expenditures for that money, but the Budget Status reports for the San Francisco United School District don't seem to be available. The server that hosts them is down -- and anyway, based on the filenames in the URL, you need some sort of user account to access that information anyway.
I see that the SFUSD is developing a Master Technology Plan, with the avowed purpose of putting together a scheme that ". . . may result in operational savings to recover the cost of technology investments by the District." They also hope to qualify for technology grants, probably of the sort discussed in the article that started this whole discussion. They're holding public forums to discuss their technology plan, starting next February.
Perhaps it would be a good idea for some open source advocates in the area to attend some of these. Take along CDs full of open source software for Windows. Try The OpenCD. The schools are certain to have an existing investment in Windows, and would be highly suspicious of a switch to desktop Linux. But at the same time, they may be willing to experiment with OSS on an existing platform.
OpenOffice.org, for example, might be a good way of avoiding upgrade fees for MS Office. It would also open up the possibility of switching to Linux without losing a familiar app later on. Potential problems with this might include 1) distribution to students so they can use it at home (though I bet burning CDs in bulk is cheaper than buying MS Office); and 2) existing contractual obligations with MS or a reseller might make it unfeasible to switch at this time.
At any rate, it can't hurt to show up at a forum, say your piece, and give them a disc full of OSS to play with.
Yeah, me too. And you know what? When it comes to teaching, the TV is a double edged tool. It can be used effectively, but there's also the danger of sitting back and letting the TV do all the work. I had a professor in college (!) who would lecture for 10-15 minutes, and then plug in a documentary. Some of them were pretty good documentaries, but they were still no substitute for a real teacher who can answer questions.
Wrong. We don't need any of them. Education could proceed with nothing more than a teacher and a student, and maybe a stick to draw in the dirt. Televisions and computers and even books are just tools to make teaching and learning easier. Used in moderation, they can be phenomenally useful; but you can't substitute a machine for a teacher, especially at the earlier levels. Personally, I'd be happier if the elementary schools in this country would concentrate on strong reading skills, strong mathematical ability, strong writing skills, and a general grounding in science and history. If computers are part of that process, great! But they should be a supplement, not a staple. There's plenty of time for more computer-centric education during the later years of education (eg ages 12 and up).
What really worries me is that these schools are getting ripped off. A million dollars for 450 computers? That seems awfully steep. Since the article specifies that the cash is divided among multiple schools, I assume that the 1 million is all or mostly spent on hardware and software, rather than salaries for support staff or such. That means they're paying approximately $2,200 per computer, which is absolutely ludicrous. That's the kind of money you spend on a professional workstation. Either these schools are buying systems that are WAAAAAAY over-powered for their needs, or they're getting totally ripped off on software prices.
Heck, I could build those same 450 systems for approximately $320,000 using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and Linux (perhaps Debian Junior, a kid-oriented flavor of Debian). Budget another $120,000 to employ a code monkey for a few years to work on any rough edges in the systems. The rest of the money could go to other school programs in need of funding -- music, art, PE, free lunches for poor kids. It really pisses me off to see our schools spending huge amounts on exorbitantly priced licenses for proprietary software, when those funds could be better spent on other areas.
You can use BitTorrent to download the OpenCD ISO, in addition to the traditional mirrors. Henrik Omma (the project founder) put up .torrent files here:
http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/torrents/
Note: there are TWO torrents. One is the binary ISO, one is the source code. Make sure you know which you want (most people will just want the regular ISO, not the source code).
Paranoia aside, I object to these restrictions as a matter of principle. They're making it more difficult to access publically available information. It's not classified, and it never was. I, as a citizen of the U.S.A., have a right to know what my leaders have said and done.
Let's assume the whitehouse.gov search engine is completely honest, and faithfully returns a complete listing of all materials on the site having to do with Iraq. If that's so, then there should be no reason to disable other search engines, since their results would just confirm the internal results.
But the restrictions are in place, meaning that someone thought there was a good reason to do so. Restricting access makes it more difficult for people to research information pertaining to Iraq on the whitehouse.gov web site. Who are the people most likely to be doing that? Answer: journalists, activists, and concerned citizens. Obviously these restrictions aren't enough by themselves to dissuade a determined researcher; but it might slow them down. And it might actually stop a diffident researcher completely.
I'm not even going to go into scenarios where the whitehouse.gov search engine is not trustworthy, because serving up "doctored" speeches or information is highly unlikely. There are too many other archives to compare against, and it would be a major scandal if the administration was found to be altering records on its website. They'd have to be really, really dumb to do that.
The whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.
What you were trying to say, I think, is that SVG generates vector graphics as opposed to bitmapped graphics. Bitmapped graphics are basically lists of pixels, saying "First row: pixel 1 is red, pixel 2 is red, pixel 3 is green. Second row: pixel 1 is red, pixel 2 is green, pixel 3 is red. Third row: pixel 1 is green, pixel 2 is red, pixel 3 is red." This generates a three-by-three graphic like this:
RRG
RGR
GRR
In other words, a red square with a green slash extending diagonally upwards from the bottom left to the top right. You can save some disk space by compressing the file -- for example, the file might say "Green pixels: Row 1, pixel 3; Row 2, pixel 2; Row 3, pixel 1; all others Red." Other compression schemes use different approaches, but that's one way. At base, though, it's still just a list of pixels. Examples of bitmapped graphics include BMP, JPG, PNG, and GIF graphics.
Vector graphics are different. They specify a set of mathematical descriptions of shapes. Like plotting out the algebraic formulas for lines and squares and stuff on a graph in high school. Instead of describing the picture, vector graphics describe how to draw the picture. The advantage to this is that the picture can be drawn at any size. You could take a vector graphic and draw it at 3x3 pixels or 3000x3000 pixels, and the end result would be true to its description. You can enlarge something indefinitely without it getting all pixellated and blocky. You can also reduce it indefinitely. Of course, at one point or another it gets too big or too small to be useful, but in between those points it gives you a lot of flexibility. Sick of those miniscule icons in the toolbar of your word processor? If they were SVG, you could twiddle their size until they felt comfortable. Some of the better-known examples of vector graphics are TrueType fonts and Macromedia's Flash graphics.
SVG, which is short for Scalable Vector Graphics, is an open, XML-based standard for vector graphics, similar to Flash. You use XML tags (vaguely like HTML) to describe your shapes and such. Then you need an interpreter that takes those instructions, figures out the math, and draws the shapes for you. You can animate them with ECMAscript (read: JavaScript). The standard is fairly new, but has a lot of backing.
In KDE, icons are the most obvious use for SVG. There is a definite performance hit -- all that math means a lot of CPU overhead. For this reason, I don't think SVG is likely to be used to generate the whole interface. But there's an excellent compromise: once the SVG has been sized and drawn, you could then take that and save it as a bitmapped graphic. So you could size your interface once, then save to plain old bitmapped files, using compression if you like. That way you get your UI sized the way you want it, and you don't have to keep re-calculating all the vectors.
It's a spiffy new technology, and has a lot of potential applications. Neaaat.
Anyway, would it be feasible to run such a thing using a grid? Currently, the size of such a shared world is limited by the power of the server on which it is hosted. Alphaworld, the largest world in the Active Worlds universe, is only about the size of California. But if you were using a grid, you could then theoretically expand the world by adding more nodes to handle more real estate. (Or virtual estate, rather.)
If you could find a situation with low enough latency, individuals could even provide their own nodes, adding new territory to the fringes of an existing world. Neaaaat.
The search for a quicker route to India wasn't about colonization -- Columbus, and later Henry Hudson, weren't interested in settling down to raise family, and were probably damned annoyed to find a ruddy continent in their way. (Well, Hudson was annoyed, particularly when his crew marooned him in Canada. I seem to recall that Columbus believed he'd actually gotten to the East Indies till the day he died. Poor muddled fellow.)
Fur, lumber, fish, and sugar were exports that came to light after the colonies were established -- though they were undeniably important, they were not what the colonists set out to do.
I always thought the cities-of-gold were more of a South American thing. Pizarro, Cortes, Coronado, all mucking about in Peru, Mexico, and the Arizona/New Mexico area. Am I missing something?
You're absolutely correct to point out that overcrowding and pollution were not issues driving the colonization of America. (Well . . . probably they were, but only in a limited, secondary sort of way.) I just left 'em in there so as to modify the parent post as little as possible.All of these are valid objections. It doesn't make economic sense, cataclysm-insurance is a low priority for most people, science is doing nicely with robots.
But note the subject line we're still using: I hope this turns into a space race. Political one-up-manship could provide the incentive to make the dream happen. Mind, I don't think this Nuclear-Power-on-Mars project is going to ignite such a contest. I mean, saying you're going to put a power station there and actually doing it are two different things.
Now, if Russia actually follows through on this announcement, then we might see some action. I can't imagine America's leaders being happy at Russia beating them to Mars, even if the Cold War is over.