Re:Nice 'gift' for christmas
on
Home DNA Sequencing
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That's a big part of the reason they don't do blood typing in science classes anymore. Most people think it's because of the AIDS scare but really it's because in almost every class some kid would discover there was no way his (or her) father was real. Some fathers knew... Some didn't.
No I think you got the gyst of the problem. The schools have labs with a small handful of computers that sit unused because they cannot be powered reliably. On the odd day of the year that the students get to use them they don't really know what to do with them. This is largely because they know what the textbook says but don't understand what the start button is for. (I know, Windows!!! Ugh!)
So yes if the electricity was more reliable they would be better trained. But that goes part and parcel with living in towns in the middle of nowhere with a dirt road main street. You can get a Coke from a vendor with a propane fridge but if you want the internet you have to hope the power stays on long enough to charge your batteries.
And don't expect the batteries to deep cycle for very long.
So the end result is that it's ok to punish people you don't like or agree with more harshly then another group for the same crime. In any case, Rockstar hasn't comitted any crimes so why is the state threatening them with punishments under the hate crime laws?
I am so sick and tired of the crap hate gets. Personally I don't think it's too much of a crime to hate. The government has no business telling me who I can hate or not. Hate is a natural part of human existance. Maybe unpleasant for some but no less unpleasant then driving through Los Angeles and seeing bumper stickers that say "Fuck You, this is Mexico now!" Fact is this is America and it's our right to hate for any reason we choose. If I shoot someone then why not come after me for the crime of shooting them. Whether or not I like them is nobody's business but my own.
It's not as if dead tree texts are going to hinder their learning of reading, writing, arithmatic, other pressing subjects.
See my main post below for the backstory on my friend in Africa. One of the things he tells me is that many of the school age children are being taught computers from books. They're very literate when asked what parts of hardware are and how the machines store files but have no idea how to answer questions requiring a Google search because they touch a computer for maybe a half hour a year.
Yes solar is a fine way to go but from what my friend has told me when they break down they stay down. That is unless the person who set up the panel system is still around and you happened to have a spare of whatever just burned out. Most of the successful power solutions seem to be of the charging batteries variety. Either when the grid is up in the village or by adding extra batteries to the local taxicab and charging them from the alternator as they drive around.
I have a good friend who's currently working on a Fulbright Scholarship in Western Africa to study this exact problem. From the sporadic emails I recieve it seems that the problem isn't telecom so much as ELECTRICITY. Many places get on the grid for only an hour a day. That hour is spent charging old car batteries so they can get juice for the rest of the day. So when your options are run the water pump at 3amp hours for a half hour or a computer monitor 15 minutes, you need the water more.
Another big problem is there's nothing to sell these people online. They have no credit cards.
Anyway, he can probably tell the story better then me. I'll try to get him to post his thoughts.
Videogames are the next logical step beyond the Gutenberg Bible and Talkies. To censor them is to tell Falukner, Fitzgerald and Twain they can't make black people the servants in any novel. What's the point of writing if you can't tell the truth about the times you're writing about?
Problem is how do you put a dollar value on the data? My data is 18gigs large on this computer but 3 gigs are mp3's. 7 gigs are pornography. 7 gigs are programs and operating system. 1/4 gig are old term papers. I'm not really sure what the last 3/4 are. Those old termpapers aren't worth much to me but maybe I can sell them on the internet. I didn't pay for those mp3's. I have no idea where all that porn came from.
Re-read your post. I think purchasing and operating system that advertises itself as safe and connecting to the net with a service that advertises itself as protecting the user from the big nasty internet should suffice.
I think Windows XP and MSN should be all I need to protect myself.
People throw the idea of a private trusted internet around all the time but I can say in the case of the university there are damn few people in my research group (chemistry) who know or care to secure the computers. We want them to be tools and don't want to spend any time worrying about updates and security. Someone will connect to the university and they will be the lowest common denominator. Who's to say the average guy on the street wouldn't be smarter? I'll stick to the one internet and keep closing that window telling me there are new updates available. I don't have time to wait for that crap to install.
There's a term and I'm sure someone who knows more about law then I do knows it but someone who should know better shouldn't be giving bad advice. At the least it's called malpractice. So if a stockbroker gives bad advice at a coctail party he can in fact be sued when the other guy loses all his money. A CS student is not yet qualified in that field. They would probably get off. Now if they graduate and start working (or drop out and get a job) they will be expected to secure their systems.
Interestingly, what about MSN, AOL and Mindspring who all advertise protection from the big bad nasty internet. Aren't they begging for responsibility when their customers get infected?
Interesting you and I both used guns as an analogy. But in the real world the tool alone isn't responsible for the crime. There has to be a person to pin the crime on. Leaving dangerous objects lying around is a crime but are computers that dangerous yet? If someone hacked my home security attack robot and it killed the paperboy then I could see making a big deal out of this but computer crimes are still just economic at worse. Nobody dies.
If a mobster dumps his bodies in a hole behind your barn and you didn't know about it are you guilty of murder? Is it the gun that murders or the person pulling the trigger? Now what if the gun is used and then put back without the owner knowing? Is the rental car company guilty of hit and run? I think there's precident in the real world for this kind of thing.
I would liken computer crimes to that of bringing the gun back to the owner. An educated gun owner will know if his gun is fired or kept clean. A sloppy computer owner will never know why his computer is slightly slower then normal. In either case it's the owners responsibility to keep their property safe but at some point it's impossible to keep everything safe. I'd say if the owner can show they made a good faith effort to secure their property they should be let go.
But in the real world we know it's never so black and white.
Had this been something more important, say the postal service, a hospital, or even a fast food chain, what would the fallback have been?
Don't underestimate the power of the un-necessary. Hospital ER has to shut down for 6 hours nobody complains. Cable goes out for 60 minutes and Americans call their lawyers. A weekend without booze will result a new govenor.
Some kind of image enhancement machine that my advisor supposedly paid a fortune for back in the 80's. Story is that the damn thing never worked the way advertised but every year some new grad student thinks maybe I'll be the one who gets it to work. Right now that guy is me. Plus we have some really old school chain drive resistance coil electrode pullers that still get used even though we have nice new laser heated ones.
As someone who stands on the sholders of this years winners and is working under someone who worked for someone who is constantly slighted by this "Nobel" group I have to say that the prize is nothing more than winning the lottery. Maybe sometimes the right guy wins and like Gangreen and the "Rock and Roll Rumble" the right guy is in the right place at the right time... Most often then not the guy who wins stood on the sholders of many underlings who gave their heart and soul for nothing more then the love of the science. Guys like this remind us that there's more to science then just a bullet point in the Tuesday New York Times.
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That's a big part of the reason they don't do blood typing in science classes anymore. Most people think it's because of the AIDS scare but really it's because in almost every class some kid would discover there was no way his (or her) father was real. Some fathers knew... Some didn't.
Not if they're keychain dongles. Put all your money into Farraday Pockets.
So yes if the electricity was more reliable they would be better trained. But that goes part and parcel with living in towns in the middle of nowhere with a dirt road main street. You can get a Coke from a vendor with a propane fridge but if you want the internet you have to hope the power stays on long enough to charge your batteries.
And don't expect the batteries to deep cycle for very long.
So the end result is that it's ok to punish people you don't like or agree with more harshly then another group for the same crime. In any case, Rockstar hasn't comitted any crimes so why is the state threatening them with punishments under the hate crime laws?
I am so sick and tired of the crap hate gets. Personally I don't think it's too much of a crime to hate. The government has no business telling me who I can hate or not. Hate is a natural part of human existance. Maybe unpleasant for some but no less unpleasant then driving through Los Angeles and seeing bumper stickers that say "Fuck You, this is Mexico now!" Fact is this is America and it's our right to hate for any reason we choose. If I shoot someone then why not come after me for the crime of shooting them. Whether or not I like them is nobody's business but my own.
See my main post below for the backstory on my friend in Africa. One of the things he tells me is that many of the school age children are being taught computers from books. They're very literate when asked what parts of hardware are and how the machines store files but have no idea how to answer questions requiring a Google search because they touch a computer for maybe a half hour a year.
Yes solar is a fine way to go but from what my friend has told me when they break down they stay down. That is unless the person who set up the panel system is still around and you happened to have a spare of whatever just burned out. Most of the successful power solutions seem to be of the charging batteries variety. Either when the grid is up in the village or by adding extra batteries to the local taxicab and charging them from the alternator as they drive around.
Another big problem is there's nothing to sell these people online. They have no credit cards.
Anyway, he can probably tell the story better then me. I'll try to get him to post his thoughts.
Videogames are the next logical step beyond the Gutenberg Bible and Talkies. To censor them is to tell Falukner, Fitzgerald and Twain they can't make black people the servants in any novel. What's the point of writing if you can't tell the truth about the times you're writing about?
Never underestimate the power of a couple hundred geeks. Next on the hitlist? How about the RIAA!
So how much is my data worth?
I think Windows XP and MSN should be all I need to protect myself.
But not their lives.
People throw the idea of a private trusted internet around all the time but I can say in the case of the university there are damn few people in my research group (chemistry) who know or care to secure the computers. We want them to be tools and don't want to spend any time worrying about updates and security. Someone will connect to the university and they will be the lowest common denominator. Who's to say the average guy on the street wouldn't be smarter? I'll stick to the one internet and keep closing that window telling me there are new updates available. I don't have time to wait for that crap to install.
There's a term and I'm sure someone who knows more about law then I do knows it but someone who should know better shouldn't be giving bad advice. At the least it's called malpractice. So if a stockbroker gives bad advice at a coctail party he can in fact be sued when the other guy loses all his money. A CS student is not yet qualified in that field. They would probably get off. Now if they graduate and start working (or drop out and get a job) they will be expected to secure their systems.
Interestingly, what about MSN, AOL and Mindspring who all advertise protection from the big bad nasty internet. Aren't they begging for responsibility when their customers get infected?
Interesting you and I both used guns as an analogy. But in the real world the tool alone isn't responsible for the crime. There has to be a person to pin the crime on. Leaving dangerous objects lying around is a crime but are computers that dangerous yet? If someone hacked my home security attack robot and it killed the paperboy then I could see making a big deal out of this but computer crimes are still just economic at worse. Nobody dies.
I would liken computer crimes to that of bringing the gun back to the owner. An educated gun owner will know if his gun is fired or kept clean. A sloppy computer owner will never know why his computer is slightly slower then normal. In either case it's the owners responsibility to keep their property safe but at some point it's impossible to keep everything safe. I'd say if the owner can show they made a good faith effort to secure their property they should be let go.
But in the real world we know it's never so black and white.
We are Penn State!!!!
That would be great. Then you can translate it for us.
No you'll still have to bring me a WiFi gadget AND a wad of cash.
when it was an episode of Star Trek NG but hated it when it was that crappy movie with Robin Williams.
Don't underestimate the power of the un-necessary. Hospital ER has to shut down for 6 hours nobody complains. Cable goes out for 60 minutes and Americans call their lawyers. A weekend without booze will result a new govenor.
Some kind of image enhancement machine that my advisor supposedly paid a fortune for back in the 80's. Story is that the damn thing never worked the way advertised but every year some new grad student thinks maybe I'll be the one who gets it to work. Right now that guy is me. Plus we have some really old school chain drive resistance coil electrode pullers that still get used even though we have nice new laser heated ones.
Damn! I want to be that bullet point some day.