At UIUC a while ago in the math department there was an Egyptian guy that was kind of odd. Saying someone in a math department is kind of odd is like saying Slashdot readers kind of don't like software patents; everyone knows it, and no matter how you say it you radically underestimate the true situation. Anyway, this guy fit right in and people saw him around for a year and didn't think much of it. Depending on who he talked to, he either claimed to be a new professor, a new postdoc, or just a grad student. We all figured he was a slightly older grad student with image issues.
Occassionally people saw him brushing his teeth in the bathroom, but no-one thought that was weird. I think some people knew he spent the night at the department sometimes, but even that is not too weird. Heck, I've done it myself when I had a final exam due at 8am the next morning. But somehow, someone finally checked his ID carefully against official documents and discovered that he was neither a student nor a postdoc, nor a professor. It turns out he was an escaped mental patient that was living in the department, carrying around math books.
So the point is, if an escaped mental patient can live in a big math department for a YEAR before being found out, that tells you something about how close real mathematicians are to mental patients, and how tolerant they are of mental "quirks" in their colleagues. It's no accident that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind) was a mathematician.
My advice to all schizophrenics: become mathematicians (or artists).
I think a better analogy is building sandcastles on the beach and taking photographs. You start building up a castle, some random kid thinks it's cool and comes over to help you, etc.. Arguing that people that build something like this are "stupid" because "anyone could come kick it over, here, I'll show you..." is not convincing.
Wikis do account for human nature, by telling people who are being assholes that they are being assholes! The effort it takes to vandalise a site and the effort to revert vandals changes are similar, so I don't think there is much real motivation to vandalise wikis. I'm much more concerned with scripts and automatic tools that disrupt the operation of a wiki as a whole. With anonymous editing, these kinds of scripts are trivial to write.
I just had this bizarre dream. I floating in empty space, bored, so I decided to check Slashdot to relieve the monotony. But all the stories were duplicates! Even the comments were just cut and pasted from old stories. That's when I realized, I was dead and in hell.
Luckily I woke up and escaped the tedium... OR DID I???
So a comment about a joke superficially related to the story is not relevant to you? I guess your rant about a comment on a joke superficially related to the story is much more relevant to readers.
The real test of DARE's effectiveness is the difference in drug use between schools using the program and schools not using the program. The only real data on this that I know of shows that DARE is not effective.
I think what they are getting at is that they feel like they owned some ideas that IBM released under the GPL. Their argument is that since they didn't agree to this release and they owned the ideas, the release is invalid. In my view this is a very reasonable interpretation of how copyright law and the GPL would work. The big question is whether IBM broke some contract (or whatever SCO is saying these days) when they released the stuff under the GPL. And the answer is that SCO is full of it.
The objection is that not all studies and papers come from adequately funded projects! Imagine one lone professor who doesn't get the grant he wants, who travels to far-flung corners of the Earth on his own money gathering data for his unconventional work. Making him pay lots of money to get published is just one more way non-mainstream ideas could be marginalized.
Although this type of scenario illustrates how the price of author-pays publication might discourage non-mainstream research more, this is not a reason to abandon the idea of author-pays journals. I love the idea of open science and author-pays; I think it really is the most sane model of academic communication. If a non-mainstream idea cannot be published in an author-pays journal, it can still be dissemated widely on the internet. Finding worthy ideas that deserve to be published but haven't yet been because of the fees would be the perfect job for philanthropic organizations.
This is one of my favorite books, and is largely responsible for me switching from math to CS. I had done C and Java programming before, but I always considered programming (and computer science) a messy but fun engineering activity akin to woodworking. When I read this book, I got a glimpse of the "true meaning" of programming.
I would recommend this book to programmers that have a couple years experience with imperative or OO languages, who have also taken an introductory course in algorithms. A motivated reader does not need experience with ML, but having taken some sort of "Programming Languages" class that spends a day or two on ML is very helpful. I found it the most rewarding to learn ML and start programming in ML while reading this book, then attempting to implement the data structures in the book myself to use in small projects.
If you don't know any functional languages and don't want to learn them, this book will not be helpful and you probably won't get enough motivation from the book itself to understand what it's talking about. If you don't really know functional languages but are willing to give them a try, this book is ideal. If you already know one or more functional languages well, you should try to read Okasaki's papers on functional data structures before getting the book. Of course you might want the book too.
The officer should have attempted to talk with the man and woman (which he didn't do very effectively), then either arrest the man or let him go. After failing to get information from the man, he should have asked the woman if she had been hit. If the woman said no and the officer determined she was probably telling the truth, he should have let them go. If she said yes, or said no and appeared to be lying, he should have arrested the man and brought him to the police station for questioning.
There is an expectation that we as accused citizens have the "right to remain silent".
One of the points the article mentions is that there have been numerous server compromises of machines hosting open source code, which is worrying. What if that happened and nobody found out? I believe this is a legitimate worry, and am working on developing a security model for version control tools, Majestic.
However, there is some confusion in the article about what security means. One aspect of security is authenticity and integrity; another is secrecy. When you check the MD5 checksum on a download, you are checking the integrity of the files even though the contents are publicly available. Having the source code freely available can only help the quality of projects, and does not necessitate compromising code integrity.
The point of comparative advantage is that the result is that the surgeon and the typist are both better off, and that by specializing and grouping together they are more productive. The lesson is that market forces drive productivity in a global sense; you can't just look at one activity and say that this person is the most efficient at this activity so they should do it.
It is interesting that some heavy computer users do lots of programming, and some do lots of gaming. I think the issue is what types of reinforcement the person is more sensitive to. The programmer type person wants to get the satisfaction of solving problems and being creative. The gamer type person wants the problem solving, and has more of a visual/audio aesthetic.
I think games are moving more and more towards allowing creativity. I think programming languages should move towards having an audio/visual aesthetic. Maybe not drag-n-drop icons, but think about diagrams on a whiteboard that animate as data structures change during program execution. That would be cool.
Hey, these are kids learning about programming and computers! How can everyone be so hard on them? I think the analogy of graffiti is the most appropriate. Yes, it is illegal and bad, but it can be cool sometimes, and kids caught doing it should be reprimanded, not thrown in jail for 10 years.
The parent post has somewhat of a valid point; the reason passwords work is that attackers don't know them. Port-knocking works because of the same principle, that attackers don't know which ports to knock on to get in. But if you take the analogy further, you realize the weakness of port-knocking: it sends the password in the clear!
The security model of port-knocking is no different than telnet. The security you get from attackers not knowing you are using port-knocking is the same as the security you get from attackers not knowing you are running a telnet server (i.e. not much!)
I don't know about housing, but cars are a good example of 'rising expectations' that a previous poster mentioned. Modern cars cost much more new than cars in the 60's did, matched for inflation. But modern cars are much better than cars from the 60's. They last longer and cost less to maintain- I'm guessing that the amortized cost of transportation now versus the 60's is quite comparable.
They might have changed this at some point; it was a several years ago when I checked it. I think they got Draconian after the Netscape thing (students leaving and taking Mosaic with them to start Netscape). I might also be misremembering, and it was someplace else that I was researching a while ago.
The statement about copyright being assigned to the university is not false for all schools. I have researched this issue at three schools, and one had students assign copyright of submitted assignments to the school (UIUC). The others just have agreements that the student won't plagiarize or pass off work done for one class in another class without permission from the instructor. The reason UIUC does the copyright assignment is to make it against school policy for students to submit their assignments to mills and other "cheat sites". I don't think they expect it to have legal weight (the journalism project is probably really owned by the student). What they really want is to make these types of "cheating" against the school policy and grounds for disciplinary action.
To think that women would (or should) do a better job than men is quite sexist. The point of gender equality is providing an equal opportunity for men and women to prove themselves. It has always been a problem that women in men's fields face a higher barrier for others to take them seriously; thinking that one shouldn't hire a women if they are not going to be any better than a man just makes this worse.
This is the crux of the matter, and the part people don't seem to realize. Companies outsource labor because it makes economic sense (some companies make mistakes about that, though). When companies behave rationally economically, goods and services get better and cheaper. I'm not an economics expert, but I think there are some theories on trade between nations that say that loosening restrictions on anything always makes both parties better off overall.
Even if you don't believe the economic theories about trade, you have to ask yourself why you care about keeping jobs in the US. I care about keeping my job, not about keeping jobs in the US. I feel sad for Americans and happy for Indians when jobs migrate, but it's really not a big deal. The only really compelling argument against outsourcing and "globalization" is vastly different environmental regulation. When companies move to the third world to get around environmental regulation, that is a problem.
In CS, conference proceedings generally include full texts of the papers. Often conference papers will be a general description of an idea and how it was implemented in a system, with references that include a technical report or someone's thesis with more details about the ideas and implementation. I'm not disagreeing that to prove prior art more may be required than old papers.
Changing the color of your desktop will not affect battery life. The backlight is always "on", the colors come about by the LCD pixels filtering the white backlight. The only way to save battery power this way is to run the backlight on less power.
Slashdot Mirror
Occassionally people saw him brushing his teeth in the bathroom, but no-one thought that was weird. I think some people knew he spent the night at the department sometimes, but even that is not too weird. Heck, I've done it myself when I had a final exam due at 8am the next morning. But somehow, someone finally checked his ID carefully against official documents and discovered that he was neither a student nor a postdoc, nor a professor. It turns out he was an escaped mental patient that was living in the department, carrying around math books.
So the point is, if an escaped mental patient can live in a big math department for a YEAR before being found out, that tells you something about how close real mathematicians are to mental patients, and how tolerant they are of mental "quirks" in their colleagues. It's no accident that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind) was a mathematician.
My advice to all schizophrenics: become mathematicians (or artists).
Wikis do account for human nature, by telling people who are being assholes that they are being assholes! The effort it takes to vandalise a site and the effort to revert vandals changes are similar, so I don't think there is much real motivation to vandalise wikis. I'm much more concerned with scripts and automatic tools that disrupt the operation of a wiki as a whole. With anonymous editing, these kinds of scripts are trivial to write.
Luckily I woke up and escaped the tedium... OR DID I???
So a comment about a joke superficially related to the story is not relevant to you? I guess your rant about a comment on a joke superficially related to the story is much more relevant to readers.
This is doubly funny because in the movie 2001, HAL is actually designed at UIUC...
I just found a 10-year followup with the same conclusion, that DARE is not effective.
The real test of DARE's effectiveness is the difference in drug use between schools using the program and schools not using the program. The only real data on this that I know of shows that DARE is not effective.
Another cool thing is that every project has a wiki set up for it. I think wikis are a great way to record FAQs and such for evolving projects.
Sung rocks!
I think what they are getting at is that they feel like they owned some ideas that IBM released under the GPL. Their argument is that since they didn't agree to this release and they owned the ideas, the release is invalid. In my view this is a very reasonable interpretation of how copyright law and the GPL would work. The big question is whether IBM broke some contract (or whatever SCO is saying these days) when they released the stuff under the GPL. And the answer is that SCO is full of it.
Although this type of scenario illustrates how the price of author-pays publication might discourage non-mainstream research more, this is not a reason to abandon the idea of author-pays journals. I love the idea of open science and author-pays; I think it really is the most sane model of academic communication. If a non-mainstream idea cannot be published in an author-pays journal, it can still be dissemated widely on the internet. Finding worthy ideas that deserve to be published but haven't yet been because of the fees would be the perfect job for philanthropic organizations.
I would recommend this book to programmers that have a couple years experience with imperative or OO languages, who have also taken an introductory course in algorithms. A motivated reader does not need experience with ML, but having taken some sort of "Programming Languages" class that spends a day or two on ML is very helpful. I found it the most rewarding to learn ML and start programming in ML while reading this book, then attempting to implement the data structures in the book myself to use in small projects.
If you don't know any functional languages and don't want to learn them, this book will not be helpful and you probably won't get enough motivation from the book itself to understand what it's talking about. If you don't really know functional languages but are willing to give them a try, this book is ideal. If you already know one or more functional languages well, you should try to read Okasaki's papers on functional data structures before getting the book. Of course you might want the book too.
There is an expectation that we as accused citizens have the "right to remain silent".
However, there is some confusion in the article about what security means. One aspect of security is authenticity and integrity; another is secrecy. When you check the MD5 checksum on a download, you are checking the integrity of the files even though the contents are publicly available. Having the source code freely available can only help the quality of projects, and does not necessitate compromising code integrity.
The point of comparative advantage is that the result is that the surgeon and the typist are both better off, and that by specializing and grouping together they are more productive. The lesson is that market forces drive productivity in a global sense; you can't just look at one activity and say that this person is the most efficient at this activity so they should do it.
I think games are moving more and more towards allowing creativity. I think programming languages should move towards having an audio/visual aesthetic. Maybe not drag-n-drop icons, but think about diagrams on a whiteboard that animate as data structures change during program execution. That would be cool.
Hey, these are kids learning about programming and computers! How can everyone be so hard on them? I think the analogy of graffiti is the most appropriate. Yes, it is illegal and bad, but it can be cool sometimes, and kids caught doing it should be reprimanded, not thrown in jail for 10 years.
The parent post has somewhat of a valid point; the reason passwords work is that attackers don't know them. Port-knocking works because of the same principle, that attackers don't know which ports to knock on to get in. But if you take the analogy further, you realize the weakness of port-knocking: it sends the password in the clear! The security model of port-knocking is no different than telnet. The security you get from attackers not knowing you are using port-knocking is the same as the security you get from attackers not knowing you are running a telnet server (i.e. not much!)
I don't know about housing, but cars are a good example of 'rising expectations' that a previous poster mentioned. Modern cars cost much more new than cars in the 60's did, matched for inflation. But modern cars are much better than cars from the 60's. They last longer and cost less to maintain- I'm guessing that the amortized cost of transportation now versus the 60's is quite comparable.
They might have changed this at some point; it was a several years ago when I checked it. I think they got Draconian after the Netscape thing (students leaving and taking Mosaic with them to start Netscape). I might also be misremembering, and it was someplace else that I was researching a while ago.
The statement about copyright being assigned to the university is not false for all schools. I have researched this issue at three schools, and one had students assign copyright of submitted assignments to the school (UIUC). The others just have agreements that the student won't plagiarize or pass off work done for one class in another class without permission from the instructor. The reason UIUC does the copyright assignment is to make it against school policy for students to submit their assignments to mills and other "cheat sites". I don't think they expect it to have legal weight (the journalism project is probably really owned by the student). What they really want is to make these types of "cheating" against the school policy and grounds for disciplinary action.
To think that women would (or should) do a better job than men is quite sexist. The point of gender equality is providing an equal opportunity for men and women to prove themselves. It has always been a problem that women in men's fields face a higher barrier for others to take them seriously; thinking that one shouldn't hire a women if they are not going to be any better than a man just makes this worse.
It illustrates how vulnerable linux companies are to legal wrangling; this is different than linux itself being vulnerable.
Even if you don't believe the economic theories about trade, you have to ask yourself why you care about keeping jobs in the US. I care about keeping my job, not about keeping jobs in the US. I feel sad for Americans and happy for Indians when jobs migrate, but it's really not a big deal. The only really compelling argument against outsourcing and "globalization" is vastly different environmental regulation. When companies move to the third world to get around environmental regulation, that is a problem.
In CS, conference proceedings generally include full texts of the papers. Often conference papers will be a general description of an idea and how it was implemented in a system, with references that include a technical report or someone's thesis with more details about the ideas and implementation. I'm not disagreeing that to prove prior art more may be required than old papers.
Changing the color of your desktop will not affect battery life. The backlight is always "on", the colors come about by the LCD pixels filtering the white backlight. The only way to save battery power this way is to run the backlight on less power.