No. In fact, Windows 3.1 came on seven floppy diskettes with no 'fingerprinting' or 'keys' needed.
Even one of the earliest versions of Windows 95, the release on 5-1/4" floppy diskettes, required no 'CD key' and didn't 'fingerprint' the install diskettes with your registration information (the 3-1/2" floppy version imprints whatever name you enter the first time you install- just use diskcopy to make a throwaway copy of the first disk before beginning, of course)
I've never opened the sealed bag with my copy of Windows 98 on 3-1/2" floppies (one HELL of a lot of disks) to see if and how it 'fingerprints' or 'secures' the diskettes.
I'm going to say you are comparing apples to oranges. Mainly because most people with broadband can download a 650 MB CD or even GBs for a DVD image pretty easily. It would take a bit, but with P2P you just run the app and sooner or later you'll have your download. Back in the days of Win 3.1, Win95, and Win98 FTP was the only widespread viable means of bulk downloading. Finding and downloading info in the Win 3.1 and Win95 took along time. With most of the FTP clients that I recall you had to leave everything running and hope that the other end didn't error out on you for some reason. If it did, well you'd have to re-try downloading it all again. Win98 was about the time that I recall encountering some file transfer clients that would let you resume an interrupted download and it was also the first MS OS that was released widely on CDs. It took awhile for your average desktop to come with CDRs to make casual copying of Win98 easy. I don't really blame MS for trying to cut it down somewhat.
Your XP DRM made installing Windows such a pain in the ass that this maybe not so average geek finds it way too annoying to ever buy another copy.
Typing a license key and clicking on product activation is too annoying for you? O.K. I admit that it assumes that you have an internet connection. You don't even have to do product activation if you buy an OEM computer. I haven't looked into this new method of MS, but complaining about WinXPs being too annoying sounds just childish. Maybe that's because I have to deal with far more annoying vendor methods at work and they really don't compare with installing and running some games that require the media to be in the drive. I'll take a wait and see approach to this new feature, but I can't complain just to get modded up by those that hate MS just to be cool on slashdot.
It would only make sense that they force user security down our throats at the time of installation. I don't agree with this or condone it, of course. It is also quite naïve of them to think that they can win the cat n' mouse game of license control with the hackers.
Um hasn't MS always tried to secure their products upon install? You sound like this is something brand new that MS is trying. MS has always added things to atleast cut casual copying down as being too difficult. WinXP with Product Acivation was a great success since most causal copiers couldn't pirate it. I know that there are ways and means to actually get it to work, but their goal isn't to elminate it. It is to reduce it so that your average geek finds it too annoying a process to bother with. I'll complain about DRM and other things, but trying to prevent their software from being copied wholesale is something I can really bad mouth a software company for. (I do cuss at them if they do things like require the install media to be in the drive before the program runs.)
Lots of people trust the biggest supermarket in the country, it sells them food they trust, clothes they trust, and they sell computers these days. So they'll trust "Tesco software".
I don't "trust" the food or clothes that I buy. I take it as a matter of course that they are "safe" because all my neighbors and family haven't dropped dead after shopping at a place. Doesn't mean that I "trust" their products. Usually it just means that they just have cheap shinies that I can afford. I don't trust inanimate objects or corporations. It's a basic safety requirement.
Perhaps that's the true objective of the SAT writing test - can you quickly write on any subject in such a way as to appeal to a narrow audience? If so, you can make it through the university system without much effort.
You forgot having to guess and what you supposedly learned audience whats to hear as well. That's really all it comes down to.
For some reason, the SAT believes that ambiguous, poorly crafted prompts somehow judge a student's writing abilities. If they want to judge a student's writing skills, this would be a much better prompt:
Your friend is contemplating cheating on the SAT. Write a letter to dissuade him/her from doing so.
I find this would be worse. Consider that "cheating" varies according to attitude and what has previously been allowed for the student. At times, the student may take tests with any reference materials or notes. I've taken some tests where the professors really encouraged you to bring in as much material that you felt you needed. We quickly learned better. Tests where generally 4-10 questions and books and notes could rarely help you. The best thing that notes could sometimes do for you is give you a previous example of a class of problem. It was usually easier to reinvent the answer within 5-10 minutes rather than use the time looking through notes and books for a likely answer. Tests were mainly an hour or until the next class walked in which ever was first.
If anything "cheating" has taught me that only "cheaters" really win at life. You really need to know what to cheat at though and how to properly cheat. Here is a tip. Studying is cheating. Studying only material that will be on the test is cheating. To pass life you must cheat. Getting found out about cheating though is unforgivable, and you will be harshly punished.
As a writer (yes, you can't tell from my slashdot writing, which proves my point...), one needs limitations when one writes. For example, what reading level shoudl I write to, who is the audience, what is the audience comprehension level, and what style or genre would you prefer for my text. The instructions for both tests give very little of this information. I would find it impossible to write to my audience here... the exam graders/judges.
I have a much higher reading comprehension than usable working writing/typing vocablary. There are many words that I know the meaning of, that I couldn't spell when instantly needed so don't make use of myself. I'm also like that verbally. I've read alot of terms that I'd never heard others say like anime and Linux so I use the terms in written communications, but will avoid saything them to avoid embrassment. What you say about audience and audience comprehesion level is exactly right.
Another thing that you have to take into condsideration is if in that forum there are professionals that are just being lazy. Take slashdot. There are alot of engineers and software writters that will skim the articles and just the handful of 5 modded posts because they only want what might be important to them. If they ever bother posting, they'll try to take the least amount of time possible and will be a bit sloppy about it. That doesn't mean the folks hear have an elementary school writing level because of how they post in slashdot. It means that slashdot is a forum where they don't care if they express themselves with that amount of forethought. I'd hope every slashdot user takes far more care about their work than about the spelling and grammer of their slashdot posts.
In Florida we have (or had, it's been a while) a law called the Gordon Rule. It requires that each student must write a minimum number of words in order to graduate from high school. Though I don't agree much with the quantity required, I think it's a good idea. For me it has always seemed odd that people will practice tennis, math, guitar in order to be proficient but will not do the same thing for writing.
I don't agree with you. Mainly it's because I've always hated writing. I don't mind reading or "thinking" or math, but writing isn't something that I've ever wanted to do. Outside of school, what words have a mainly written down? About the only english that I really make use of is name, address, & phone number information. The things to fill out a standard form with my personal info are about the only things that I use day in and day out. Oh, the other thing that I use english for is posting in forums. I'm happy enough if I type somewhat complete sentences and spell properly in slashdot.
I'd think that the two or three skills that you are really wanting are debating, typing up a single page form business letter, and summarizing (converting 50+ pages into 1 page of essentials.) Those skills really need to be taught to students for verbal, written and web communication (visual/animation communication).
Or is there still a group out there that thinks education is bad, mkay? Don't teach our kids about sexual health because (GASP) they might become sexually active! OMG STFU WTF.
Hint: they're going to anyway, surely it's better for them to learn properly than from some xxx website.
I tend to think of myself as open minded, but I draw the line at somethings. Ok. I wouldn't mind opening up my porn collection to the kids to view, but my wife and I will not be demonstrating how to perform sex properly to our kids. There are just somethings/lines that I won't cross. Besides, aren't they teaching that in schools now aways?
Globalization is helping everyone in the long run.
My personally opinion on this is that globalization will be a failure until there are Walmarts in every country and all the workers are paid the same amount with the same benefits throughout the world. When that happens, you can say globalization is a long term success. I'm just waiting for Walmart to dominate the shopping experience of the entire world and be the determining factor of global minimum wage and benefits.
From the perspective of someone who is not American, this is a good thing. It means that unions in rich countries are no longer able to keep the rest of the world poor. Poor people in Romania who have excellent IT skills have the freedom and opportunity to enter the capitalist system and compete on the global market.
The Americans spent 50 years trying to win the cold war so the guy in Romania would have this opportunity. Would you now turn around and say "Sorry, we're going to be implementing some socialist protectionist measures.... we didn't expect American workers to have to compete with you".
From what I'm reading, it's not that we have to compete with other countries that is bugging us. It's that the countries that we are competing with don't have the living/working conditions for their workers. Um, it isn't socialist for the government to require safe working conditions and for companies to pay enough so that towns don't become "company towns." Personally, I'm just waiting for feudalism to come back. We bitch and moan about the evils of corporatism and how companies end up treating their employees like ants. I'm just waiting for some random rich guy to bring back oaths of service. I see some people liking the idea of corporate vassalage. If the corporate lord was required to modern living conditions, life time employement, health benefits, and some other benefits, then I could see alot of non-job hoppers moving towards that form of employement. I doubt it'd happen though since it requires effort from employers to responsibly look after their employees needs. It's more likely that we'd move to a temp. agency only economy where everyone except board members are temp. employees and could be reassigned at any time.
The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.
Hey, our political games are rigged that you'll have to choose one of the 2 main parties anyway. Any given election really doesn't matter when additional parties/view points can never enter the race. I'm not really worried about political dirty tricks because I have enough faith in people that I'd believe that both parties cheat as much as they can get away with. The huge part of not having "international" monitors is that we'd rather our cheating was all domestic. If we had international folks "monitoring" the event we'd have a real third party that would influence the cheating and the outcome. I'd rather keep our politics internal rather than giving "foreigners" any input into our elections. Though, I guess it would be interesting if we ran elections for the next US president in places like China and Russia. Who would they vote for the next US president?
I'd hire a "contracting" company that had their services to offer, but I wouldn't want to put them on my actual direct payroll. I'd always worry that they were collecting info on me off my system to use for the future. The less tech. savy a manager is, I'd bet the more that they'd want to cover their butts, just in case of that. I would use them for corporate IT theft on other companies, but would always would about how defended my own company is.
Sometimes I find myself wondering: 10-15 years from now, am I going to be the old fogey freaking out about something new that I don't trust, but all the kids are into?
Then I think of MySpace.
Um, MySpace isn't even wrong. It's just that those kids should be capable of so much more than that. I think webdesign or just basic published page layout may need to be an elementary school class now. Forget reading. Learn the basics of just put 2 ad banners up: one at the top and one at the side, and 2 nav panels and 1 large clean block of content. "Reading" really needs to be seperated out into different skill sets. Looking through a poorly designed website is much harder than just reading a book except if it has any decent search utility. The KISS prinicple in page design needs to be hammered into kids before they start building masses of ugliness.
This meeting however brings to light the issue of the power system for the MSL. The Mars Science Lab originally called for a nuclear power source, much like the Cassini and New Horizon missions use. Some vocal opposition to this has been voiced in the past.
You know I'm sick and tired of driving around in oil powered vehicles. We should have nuke powered vehicles that only need filling once when manufactured and they last for the life of the vehicle. We'll never get it though because the anti-nuke lobby would be absolutely horrified at the thought of any nuke powered vehicle accident. The oil energy companies really shouldn't have to worry because we still need vast quantities of oil for our industrial society. In some sense, we've been "wasting" oil by burning to get around. There are tons of products that we make out of oil and that's not going to change if we switch from an oil fueled vehicles.
I wish that they'd work on something that didn't involve building huge colliders! I'm sorry, but I've had enough of reading about every larger colliders needed to prove the existance of some subatomic particle. Let me know if you figure out anything useful to do with those particles in the present. I'm not interested in particles our events that may have happened in a few milliseconds after the big bang. There are lots of physics things that I'd like money to be spent on: space elvators, blimps, levies (nah no one is interested in keeping the waves out), http://www.monolithicdome.com/ , sustainable housing, and "alt" energy. I guess that I'm not happy with this research because they just keep wanting bigger colliders to prove/disprove the existance of particles. Um, I might care if we could build or use those particles, but if the only way that we could even notice one is building these things what's the point?
Ahh, yes I forgot this is blue sky physics research.
I went to wiki to find out who this Peter Moore guy was..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Moore Peter Moore (chemist) (born 1939), professor at Yale University Peter Moore (Microsoft), Microsoft executive Peter Bullfrog Moore (1932-2000), Canterbury Bulldogs Rugby League official Peter Moore (serial killer) (born c. 1940), British serial killer Peter Moore (travel author) (born 1962), Australian travel writer Peter Moore (Australian rules footballer), winner of the Brownlow Medal in 1979 and 1984 Peter Moore (politician), leader of Sheffield City Council, Yorkshire, England
Comparing the pictures, it turned out to be the MS executive. I was just wondering based on the comments the guy was spouting if he was the politican or serial killer though.
What ever happened to just trying to educate the voters? At the end of the day, the people voting are not scientifically founded.
What planet did you come from where the voters had ever actually voted logically? I don't think that we've ever made any attempt for educated voters in our entire history. We've always used the emotional voter to get politicans into office. The only thing that came slightly to educating voters was Ross Perot's attempt to educate the voters on the national budget. I'd be happy if our future politicans debates were over issues such as the budget. That's what I really want my law makers to be thinking about anyways.
on a related note, credit card thieves in africa are using non-profits "donation" pages (those who accept CCs) to test their newly stolen cards. one of our customer has multiple occurences of one scammer doing 3 transactions within a few minutes, two times for small amounts (1-2$) and one larger amount (~50$)
Oh, well my CC company would deny that payment quickly because they know that I'd never give to any non-profit. Some times it actually pays for the CC to know everything about you. On the other hand if they tested the CC by buying USB flash drives or anime products I'd be screwed.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Those are communications companies and not dot-bomb companies. If anything we should have had a faster rollout of telecommunications equipment because the labor and supplies would have been a bit cheaper without the dot-com folks around. I hated the dot-com era and allowing the telecomms to use the dot-com collapse as an excuse for something that they should have had rolled out before the dot-com era really started is a huge cop out. In some respects you can blame the dot-com collapse on the telecoms for not having the nation wired up with fiber at 100 Mbits/sec up and down in the mid 90s! The dot-com era was from the mid to late 90s. The telecoms should have been finishing up wiring the country with fiber before the dot-com era really picked up!
Well, I'm in the 'who cares' boat. My city is rolling FTTH RIGHT NOW. I'll be hooked up by next year, at the latest.
Grrr you are what's wrong. You are in the who cares boat because your city is getting fiber now? You should be in the I'm bloody pissed that its taken more than a decade for them to rollout fiber to my city! At this rate, it'll take 2-3 decades for most of the nation to be wired up to slow speed fiber. You are most likely going to get alot slower than 100 Mbits/sec up and down and will be thrilled with the service. I'll be a pissed old man when they finally wire up my neighborhood in 20-30 years at 10 Mbits/sec up and down when we should be getting 1,000-10,000 Mbits/sec up and down in the 20-30 years it'll take them to wire up here.
I'm in New York and have FiOS. It's a very nice service. Happily, in New York, the slowest speed tier is 10 Mbits/sec down / 2 Mbits/sec up, and it's quite affordable compared to cable modem service. I'm looking forward to the FiOS TV service, and the day I'll be completely rid of Time Warner (not that Verizon itself is such a wonderful company).
Um, you are happy with 2 up when you should have 100 Mbits/sec up and and 10 Mbits/sec down when you should have 100 Mbits/sec down. I'll give my local the benefit of the doubt since I live in a rural state and there is little hope of every getting real highspeed internet. New York though should have real 100 Mbits/sec up/down at a min. Really, I'd want you guys to have 1,000 Mbits/sec up and down. I mean come on you are the one of the most densely populated states in the US if any state should be able to do it is should be NY. I could see some cities in CA, TX, FL having it, but those states the population is spread out over a far larger area. I'd really would hope our top 10-20 cities would all have atleast 100 Mbits/sec up and down. I'm on dial up at home and lucky to stay connected for 2 hours without having to reconnect. The options for broad band in my area would cost $60 per month that's more than I can afford.
I actually happen to believe that one's sanity critically depends on the ability to forget things... I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
Um, there are differences between having an accurate recording of an event and overly focusing on an event/memory. What'll be different is that we'll have inaccurate memories and then have the urge to look at the event and see that's not really how it happened. I can see professionals actually trying to block events from being viewed "too often" or even at all by certain patients. I could see those that were abused or raped or had other things done to the them having a mental block on the event, and the physicans blocking off their access to the event until they are really ready to face it. In some respects, it might be easier watching some things over and over again. Repeatedly watching the same horrors will dehumanize it and somewhat distance yourself from the event. It could be used as a form of healing.
We'd adjust to it over a 2-3 generations once we had it. The first generation would complain and have a low adoption rate, the second generation would either adopt it or a small percentage will contiune to use it for a couple of generations. In the third generation, the folks will either consider it normal, useful for somethings and taken for granted in others, or "evil and everyone that has one must not be part of our society."
I can imagine that for most people, this would actually upset them.
People's memories are colored by everything from their state of mind at the time to associations with other experiences (that may not even seem related).
I think most people would be upset to find out just *how much* their cherished memory of an event differs from the actual thing as it was recorded.
There was a book that I read that I can't remember the title. The plot was about using worm holes to view what happened in the past. At first it had a range of only a few minutes into the past and then a few days and then years and centuries. They learned how colored history actually was. The young adjusted by doing alot of what we'd consider private out in public since they could be viewed in their homes just as easily if anyone actually wanted to watch them. It had one criminal trial that I recall and it had video of the actual events and "state of mind" of both individuals was a big part of it. Neither individual remembered it happening the way it actually did.
I could see this tech. having good and bad effects. Social changes would be made and we'd adjust. The book was about wormholes and you had no ability to prevent any one from the future or present from viewing you. They quickly started becoming more civilized since they didn't know who might be watching them. It's one thing if God is watching you, it's another if Big Brother is watching you, and it's a different thing if nameless others are watching you. What if you become famous and some folks are making a highlights real of your life? In some repects we could actually make an Earthly review of a life after the individual died if we had this tech. I don't know if we'd care to, but we could.
As if watching other people's home videos isn't torture enough already...and those are supposedly the more interesting parts of their lives.
Just imagine having to sit through your uncle's slide show documenting every second of his vacation, including the 5 minutes he spent standing in front of the mirror scratching his ass. No thanks.
Well, we could always ask to see the hottie cousin making out with random beach dude.
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No. In fact, Windows 3.1 came on seven floppy diskettes with no 'fingerprinting' or 'keys' needed.
Even one of the earliest versions of Windows 95, the release on 5-1/4" floppy diskettes, required no 'CD key' and didn't 'fingerprint' the install diskettes with your registration information (the 3-1/2" floppy version imprints whatever name you enter the first time you install- just use diskcopy to make a throwaway copy of the first disk before beginning, of course)
I've never opened the sealed bag with my copy of Windows 98 on 3-1/2" floppies (one HELL of a lot of disks) to see if and how it 'fingerprints' or 'secures' the diskettes.
I'm going to say you are comparing apples to oranges. Mainly because most people with broadband can download a 650 MB CD or even GBs for a DVD image pretty easily. It would take a bit, but with P2P you just run the app and sooner or later you'll have your download. Back in the days of Win 3.1, Win95, and Win98 FTP was the only widespread viable means of bulk downloading. Finding and downloading info in the Win 3.1 and Win95 took along time. With most of the FTP clients that I recall you had to leave everything running and hope that the other end didn't error out on you for some reason. If it did, well you'd have to re-try downloading it all again. Win98 was about the time that I recall encountering some file transfer clients that would let you resume an interrupted download and it was also the first MS OS that was released widely on CDs. It took awhile for your average desktop to come with CDRs to make casual copying of Win98 easy. I don't really blame MS for trying to cut it down somewhat.
Your XP DRM made installing Windows such a pain in the ass that this maybe not so average geek finds it way too annoying to ever buy another copy.
Typing a license key and clicking on product activation is too annoying for you? O.K. I admit that it assumes that you have an internet connection. You don't even have to do product activation if you buy an OEM computer. I haven't looked into this new method of MS, but complaining about WinXPs being too annoying sounds just childish. Maybe that's because I have to deal with far more annoying vendor methods at work and they really don't compare with installing and running some games that require the media to be in the drive. I'll take a wait and see approach to this new feature, but I can't complain just to get modded up by those that hate MS just to be cool on slashdot.
It would only make sense that they force user security down our throats at the time of installation. I don't agree with this or condone it, of course. It is also quite naïve of them to think that they can win the cat n' mouse game of license control with the hackers.
Um hasn't MS always tried to secure their products upon install? You sound like this is something brand new that MS is trying. MS has always added things to atleast cut casual copying down as being too difficult. WinXP with Product Acivation was a great success since most causal copiers couldn't pirate it. I know that there are ways and means to actually get it to work, but their goal isn't to elminate it. It is to reduce it so that your average geek finds it too annoying a process to bother with. I'll complain about DRM and other things, but trying to prevent their software from being copied wholesale is something I can really bad mouth a software company for. (I do cuss at them if they do things like require the install media to be in the drive before the program runs.)
Lots of people trust the biggest supermarket in the country, it sells them food they trust, clothes they trust, and they sell computers these days. So they'll trust "Tesco software".
I don't "trust" the food or clothes that I buy. I take it as a matter of course that they are "safe" because all my neighbors and family haven't dropped dead after shopping at a place. Doesn't mean that I "trust" their products. Usually it just means that they just have cheap shinies that I can afford. I don't trust inanimate objects or corporations. It's a basic safety requirement.
Perhaps that's the true objective of the SAT writing test - can you quickly write on any subject in such a way as to appeal to a narrow audience? If so, you can make it through the university system without much effort.
You forgot having to guess and what you supposedly learned audience whats to hear as well. That's really all it comes down to.
For some reason, the SAT believes that ambiguous, poorly crafted prompts somehow judge a student's writing abilities. If they want to judge a student's writing skills, this would be a much better prompt:
Your friend is contemplating cheating on the SAT. Write a letter to dissuade him/her from doing so.
I find this would be worse. Consider that "cheating" varies according to attitude and what has previously been allowed for the student. At times, the student may take tests with any reference materials or notes. I've taken some tests where the professors really encouraged you to bring in as much material that you felt you needed. We quickly learned better. Tests where generally 4-10 questions and books and notes could rarely help you. The best thing that notes could sometimes do for you is give you a previous example of a class of problem. It was usually easier to reinvent the answer within 5-10 minutes rather than use the time looking through notes and books for a likely answer. Tests were mainly an hour or until the next class walked in which ever was first.
If anything "cheating" has taught me that only "cheaters" really win at life. You really need to know what to cheat at though and how to properly cheat. Here is a tip. Studying is cheating. Studying only material that will be on the test is cheating. To pass life you must cheat. Getting found out about cheating though is unforgivable, and you will be harshly punished.
As a writer (yes, you can't tell from my slashdot writing, which proves my point...), one needs limitations when one writes. For example, what reading level shoudl I write to, who is the audience, what is the audience comprehension level, and what style or genre would you prefer for my text. The instructions for both tests give very little of this information. I would find it impossible to write to my audience here... the exam graders/judges.
I have a much higher reading comprehension than usable working writing/typing vocablary. There are many words that I know the meaning of, that I couldn't spell when instantly needed so don't make use of myself. I'm also like that verbally. I've read alot of terms that I'd never heard others say like anime and Linux so I use the terms in written communications, but will avoid saything them to avoid embrassment. What you say about audience and audience comprehesion level is exactly right.
Another thing that you have to take into condsideration is if in that forum there are professionals that are just being lazy. Take slashdot. There are alot of engineers and software writters that will skim the articles and just the handful of 5 modded posts because they only want what might be important to them. If they ever bother posting, they'll try to take the least amount of time possible and will be a bit sloppy about it. That doesn't mean the folks hear have an elementary school writing level because of how they post in slashdot. It means that slashdot is a forum where they don't care if they express themselves with that amount of forethought. I'd hope every slashdot user takes far more care about their work than about the spelling and grammer of their slashdot posts.
In Florida we have (or had, it's been a while) a law called the Gordon Rule. It requires that each student must write a minimum number of words in order to graduate from high school. Though I don't agree much with the quantity required, I think it's a good idea. For me it has always seemed odd that people will practice tennis, math, guitar in order to be proficient but will not do the same thing for writing.
I don't agree with you. Mainly it's because I've always hated writing. I don't mind reading or "thinking" or math, but writing isn't something that I've ever wanted to do. Outside of school, what words have a mainly written down? About the only english that I really make use of is name, address, & phone number information. The things to fill out a standard form with my personal info are about the only things that I use day in and day out. Oh, the other thing that I use english for is posting in forums. I'm happy enough if I type somewhat complete sentences and spell properly in slashdot.
I'd think that the two or three skills that you are really wanting are debating, typing up a single page form business letter, and summarizing (converting 50+ pages into 1 page of essentials.) Those skills really need to be taught to students for verbal, written and web communication (visual/animation communication).
Or is there still a group out there that thinks education is bad, mkay? Don't teach our kids about sexual health because (GASP) they might become sexually active! OMG STFU WTF.
Hint: they're going to anyway, surely it's better for them to learn properly than from some xxx website.
I tend to think of myself as open minded, but I draw the line at somethings. Ok. I wouldn't mind opening up my porn collection to the kids to view, but my wife and I will not be demonstrating how to perform sex properly to our kids. There are just somethings/lines that I won't cross. Besides, aren't they teaching that in schools now aways?
Globalization is helping everyone in the long run.
My personally opinion on this is that globalization will be a failure until there are Walmarts in every country and all the workers are paid the same amount with the same benefits throughout the world. When that happens, you can say globalization is a long term success. I'm just waiting for Walmart to dominate the shopping experience of the entire world and be the determining factor of global minimum wage and benefits.
From the perspective of someone who is not American, this is a good thing. It means that unions in rich countries are no longer able to keep the rest of the world poor. Poor people in Romania who have excellent IT skills have the freedom and opportunity to enter the capitalist system and compete on the global market.
The Americans spent 50 years trying to win the cold war so the guy in Romania would have this opportunity. Would you now turn around and say "Sorry, we're going to be implementing some socialist protectionist measures.... we didn't expect American workers to have to compete with you".
From what I'm reading, it's not that we have to compete with other countries that is bugging us. It's that the countries that we are competing with don't have the living/working conditions for their workers. Um, it isn't socialist for the government to require safe working conditions and for companies to pay enough so that towns don't become "company towns." Personally, I'm just waiting for feudalism to come back. We bitch and moan about the evils of corporatism and how companies end up treating their employees like ants. I'm just waiting for some random rich guy to bring back oaths of service. I see some people liking the idea of corporate vassalage. If the corporate lord was required to modern living conditions, life time employement, health benefits, and some other benefits, then I could see alot of non-job hoppers moving towards that form of employement. I doubt it'd happen though since it requires effort from employers to responsibly look after their employees needs. It's more likely that we'd move to a temp. agency only economy where everyone except board members are temp. employees and could be reassigned at any time.
The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.
Hey, our political games are rigged that you'll have to choose one of the 2 main parties anyway. Any given election really doesn't matter when additional parties/view points can never enter the race. I'm not really worried about political dirty tricks because I have enough faith in people that I'd believe that both parties cheat as much as they can get away with. The huge part of not having "international" monitors is that we'd rather our cheating was all domestic. If we had international folks "monitoring" the event we'd have a real third party that would influence the cheating and the outcome. I'd rather keep our politics internal rather than giving "foreigners" any input into our elections. Though, I guess it would be interesting if we ran elections for the next US president in places like China and Russia. Who would they vote for the next US president?
I'd hire a "contracting" company that had their services to offer, but I wouldn't want to put them on my actual direct payroll. I'd always worry that they were collecting info on me off my system to use for the future. The less tech. savy a manager is, I'd bet the more that they'd want to cover their butts, just in case of that. I would use them for corporate IT theft on other companies, but would always would about how defended my own company is.
Sometimes I find myself wondering: 10-15 years from now, am I going to be the old fogey freaking out about something new that I don't trust, but all the kids are into?
Then I think of MySpace.
Um, MySpace isn't even wrong. It's just that those kids should be capable of so much more than that. I think webdesign or just basic published page layout may need to be an elementary school class now. Forget reading. Learn the basics of just put 2 ad banners up: one at the top and one at the side, and 2 nav panels and 1 large clean block of content. "Reading" really needs to be seperated out into different skill sets. Looking through a poorly designed website is much harder than just reading a book except if it has any decent search utility. The KISS prinicple in page design needs to be hammered into kids before they start building masses of ugliness.
This meeting however brings to light the issue of the power system for the MSL. The Mars Science Lab originally called for a nuclear power source, much like the Cassini and New Horizon missions use. Some vocal opposition to this has been voiced in the past.
You know I'm sick and tired of driving around in oil powered vehicles. We should have nuke powered vehicles that only need filling once when manufactured and they last for the life of the vehicle. We'll never get it though because the anti-nuke lobby would be absolutely horrified at the thought of any nuke powered vehicle accident. The oil energy companies really shouldn't have to worry because we still need vast quantities of oil for our industrial society. In some sense, we've been "wasting" oil by burning to get around. There are tons of products that we make out of oil and that's not going to change if we switch from an oil fueled vehicles.
I wish that they'd work on something that didn't involve building huge colliders! I'm sorry, but I've had enough of reading about every larger colliders needed to prove the existance of some subatomic particle. Let me know if you figure out anything useful to do with those particles in the present. I'm not interested in particles our events that may have happened in a few milliseconds after the big bang. There are lots of physics things that I'd like money to be spent on: space elvators, blimps, levies (nah no one is interested in keeping the waves out), http://www.monolithicdome.com/ , sustainable housing, and "alt" energy. I guess that I'm not happy with this research because they just keep wanting bigger colliders to prove/disprove the existance of particles. Um, I might care if we could build or use those particles, but if the only way that we could even notice one is building these things what's the point?
Ahh, yes I forgot this is blue sky physics research.
I went to wiki to find out who this Peter Moore guy was..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Moore
Peter Moore (chemist) (born 1939), professor at Yale University
Peter Moore (Microsoft), Microsoft executive
Peter Bullfrog Moore (1932-2000), Canterbury Bulldogs Rugby League official
Peter Moore (serial killer) (born c. 1940), British serial killer
Peter Moore (travel author) (born 1962), Australian travel writer
Peter Moore (Australian rules footballer), winner of the Brownlow Medal in 1979 and 1984
Peter Moore (politician), leader of Sheffield City Council, Yorkshire, England
Comparing the pictures, it turned out to be the MS executive. I was just wondering based on the comments the guy was spouting if he was the politican or serial killer though.
What ever happened to just trying to educate the voters? At the end of the day, the people voting are not scientifically founded.
What planet did you come from where the voters had ever actually voted logically? I don't think that we've ever made any attempt for educated voters in our entire history. We've always used the emotional voter to get politicans into office. The only thing that came slightly to educating voters was Ross Perot's attempt to educate the voters on the national budget. I'd be happy if our future politicans debates were over issues such as the budget. That's what I really want my law makers to be thinking about anyways.
on a related note, credit card thieves in africa are using non-profits "donation" pages (those who accept CCs) to test their newly stolen cards. one of our customer has multiple occurences of one scammer doing 3 transactions within a few minutes, two times for small amounts (1-2$) and one larger amount (~50$)
Oh, well my CC company would deny that payment quickly because they know that I'd never give to any non-profit. Some times it actually pays for the CC to know everything about you. On the other hand if they tested the CC by buying USB flash drives or anime products I'd be screwed.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Those are communications companies and not dot-bomb companies. If anything we should have had a faster rollout of telecommunications equipment because the labor and supplies would have been a bit cheaper without the dot-com folks around. I hated the dot-com era and allowing the telecomms to use the dot-com collapse as an excuse for something that they should have had rolled out before the dot-com era really started is a huge cop out. In some respects you can blame the dot-com collapse on the telecoms for not having the nation wired up with fiber at 100 Mbits/sec up and down in the mid 90s! The dot-com era was from the mid to late 90s. The telecoms should have been finishing up wiring the country with fiber before the dot-com era really picked up!
Well, I'm in the 'who cares' boat. My city is rolling FTTH RIGHT NOW. I'll be hooked up by next year, at the latest.
Grrr you are what's wrong. You are in the who cares boat because your city is getting fiber now? You should be in the I'm bloody pissed that its taken more than a decade for them to rollout fiber to my city! At this rate, it'll take 2-3 decades for most of the nation to be wired up to slow speed fiber. You are most likely going to get alot slower than 100 Mbits/sec up and down and will be thrilled with the service. I'll be a pissed old man when they finally wire up my neighborhood in 20-30 years at 10 Mbits/sec up and down when we should be getting 1,000-10,000 Mbits/sec up and down in the 20-30 years it'll take them to wire up here.
I'm in New York and have FiOS. It's a very nice service. Happily, in New York, the slowest speed tier is 10 Mbits/sec down / 2 Mbits/sec up, and it's quite affordable compared to cable modem service. I'm looking forward to the FiOS TV service, and the day I'll be completely rid of Time Warner (not that Verizon itself is such a wonderful company).
Um, you are happy with 2 up when you should have 100 Mbits/sec up and and 10 Mbits/sec down when you should have 100 Mbits/sec down. I'll give my local the benefit of the doubt since I live in a rural state and there is little hope of every getting real highspeed internet. New York though should have real 100 Mbits/sec up/down at a min. Really, I'd want you guys to have 1,000 Mbits/sec up and down. I mean come on you are the one of the most densely populated states in the US if any state should be able to do it is should be NY. I could see some cities in CA, TX, FL having it, but those states the population is spread out over a far larger area. I'd really would hope our top 10-20 cities would all have atleast 100 Mbits/sec up and down. I'm on dial up at home and lucky to stay connected for 2 hours without having to reconnect. The options for broad band in my area would cost $60 per month that's more than I can afford.
I actually happen to believe that one's sanity critically depends on the ability to forget things... I am not sure at all that the psychological consequences of a full-life recording have been investigated, and I somehow tend to believe they wouldn't be positive.
Um, there are differences between having an accurate recording of an event and overly focusing on an event/memory. What'll be different is that we'll have inaccurate memories and then have the urge to look at the event and see that's not really how it happened. I can see professionals actually trying to block events from being viewed "too often" or even at all by certain patients. I could see those that were abused or raped or had other things done to the them having a mental block on the event, and the physicans blocking off their access to the event until they are really ready to face it. In some respects, it might be easier watching some things over and over again. Repeatedly watching the same horrors will dehumanize it and somewhat distance yourself from the event. It could be used as a form of healing.
We'd adjust to it over a 2-3 generations once we had it. The first generation would complain and have a low adoption rate, the second generation would either adopt it or a small percentage will contiune to use it for a couple of generations. In the third generation, the folks will either consider it normal, useful for somethings and taken for granted in others, or "evil and everyone that has one must not be part of our society."
I can imagine that for most people, this would actually upset them.
People's memories are colored by everything from their state of mind at the time to associations with other experiences (that may not even seem related).
I think most people would be upset to find out just *how much* their cherished memory of an event differs from the actual thing as it was recorded.
There was a book that I read that I can't remember the title. The plot was about using worm holes to view what happened in the past. At first it had a range of only a few minutes into the past and then a few days and then years and centuries. They learned how colored history actually was. The young adjusted by doing alot of what we'd consider private out in public since they could be viewed in their homes just as easily if anyone actually wanted to watch them. It had one criminal trial that I recall and it had video of the actual events and "state of mind" of both individuals was a big part of it. Neither individual remembered it happening the way it actually did.
I could see this tech. having good and bad effects. Social changes would be made and we'd adjust. The book was about wormholes and you had no ability to prevent any one from the future or present from viewing you. They quickly started becoming more civilized since they didn't know who might be watching them. It's one thing if God is watching you, it's another if Big Brother is watching you, and it's a different thing if nameless others are watching you. What if you become famous and some folks are making a highlights real of your life? In some repects we could actually make an Earthly review of a life after the individual died if we had this tech. I don't know if we'd care to, but we could.
As if watching other people's home videos isn't torture enough already...and those are supposedly the more interesting parts of their lives.
Just imagine having to sit through your uncle's slide show documenting every second of his vacation, including the 5 minutes he spent standing in front of the mirror scratching his ass. No thanks.
Well, we could always ask to see the hottie cousin making out with random beach dude.