The cause of climate change is also not really under dispute either. We only care about catastrophic anthropocentric climate change. And even within that category, we should only really care about things we can realistically and economically do. For example, Australia apparently has a huge carbon tax that will have an impact on the climate so small, it cannot even be measured.
We need to make dirt-simple to encrypt messages and files, then start spreading the word to your personal support circle (you know, the people who rely on you to keep things running for them) that "everybody encrypts these days". If you see an unencrypted message or file, say, "ugh, don't touch that, that's like spam". We engineers have a lot of influence on the ground, where it is hardest for any government to interfere.
It will be an order of magnitude easier to overrun government's spying capabilities than it will be to thwart them.
... is make it more difficult for the government to spy on us, right? How may more people have to start routinely encrypting email before it gets so computationally expensive that bulk searches are no longer worth the effort?
One of the things I like about Sphinx is that it has a just one file per chapter, and every one has a table of contents and links to other chapters. So, even if you land on a page from a search, you still have your navigation.
His argument is that a lot of people just produce reference materials and claim they've "documented" the system. Proper documentation needs both tutorial AND reference.
The problem is that documentation in code is documentation of code. It helps people writing the code, but not those using the output of your code. To do that, you have to teach.
I quit facebook after the Obama campaign revealed that they got special permission from FB to ignore its ToS and allow campaign workers to hoover their friend data and send it to the campaign for analysis. A very dirty trick, IMHO. The ToS basically means nothing, its assurances are meaningless.
I'm not aware of any serious study that attempts to explain why women aren't better represented as programmers. There are lots of studies that establish that it is so.
So, we really don't know why. Until someone really can nail this down with a decently reliable study, everyone is just speculating.
Personally, I think looking at programming is too narrow. If you look at the broader aspects of a development project -- application design, programming, human/computer interfaces, information organization, testing, documenting, requirements gathering, customer management, deployment, training, troubleshooting, customer support, etc. -- I think you'd find that the gender distribution is a lot closer to the working population. It truly does take a village to develop software. It's pretty narrow-minded to focus on just one aspect of the problem, and pretend like that's all there is.
Isn't Gene Expression equally as important as which genes you have in the first place, and isn't expression often a response to external events, so even if you were to make a perfect copy of John Lennon, the copy would be quite different? Especially as time goes on?
Or am I misunderstanding how all this works in the first place.
No, music is not already "open source". It has to have a copyright grant from the original composer that permits the music to be modified.
I have been writing "open source" music for decades ( http://www.newhymns.org/.) I have always included a grant to modify, and about 8 years ago adopted the least restrictive Creative Commons license (Attribution only), specifically to encourage fellow musicians to carry the compositions further, even if they do it for commercial projects. I release the music in MusicXML format to make editing even easier.
My personal experience has been that many people are willing to download and use music, but only a vanishingly small number are willing or able to modify it. The ratio is something like 1 modification per 200K downloads, perhaps even less. That ratio probably tracks pretty close to other open source projects in general.
I have had some wonderful emails from people telling me how they used the music in a children's summer camp, or in a special worship service, and so on. It's great to share, actually, it's worth so much more than money.
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Open and shut, IMHO. Yahoo is just following its terms.
Consciousness is what one experiences when the parts of the brain's network are communicating with one another, a classic network effect. Consciousness is one of the attributes of value a system gets by exercising its existence.
If the attacker has physical access to my machine in a logged-in state, tell me how any kind of master password or encryption scheme is going to keep him out of my data, including anything on my local hard drive, or any web-hosted services that have a cached credential? The barn door's already opened, fellas.
Besides which, any "solution" such as storing passwords offsite, encrypting, etc. will also require the user to take definitive action to open and close the password repo. The problem is our user can't/won't be bothered with taking action to secure his access, so that solution is no solution.
... but you wouldn't want to live there. The cost of transporting the essentials of a rich person's life -- all the food, the drinks, the furniture, the disco balls, the fast cars, the drugs -- would surely exceed the cost of building the station itself. However, a space station that la riche can visit once a year, like a month in the Riviera only in space, now that would work. Plus, what's the point of being ostentatious if there are no peasants to impress? Better to have a least some people you can lock the gates on, just to feel like you've made it.
Yes, I feel SO much better knowing that the IRS was holding up all kinds of requests for political reasons, routing them to Washington, DC, then making completely illegal requests for information such as the content of prayers (!), and delaying approval for years. Just because more than one ox was gored does not mean the problem is gone. The IRS has leaders who used the agency for political ends, that is an abomination.
The irony of eBooks is although they are orders of magnitude more capable of random-access reading, the only comfortable way to use them is for sequential reading. Try flipping back to an earlier part of an eBook, and then returning to your original place. Agonizing. Try looking at two or more passages at once. Impossible. Try keeping notes or a collection of citations, and on most eBooks, it's amazingly lacking.
The main problem with eBooks is that the user experience is very immature. Developers gave us an easy way to sequentially read, and apparently thought that was enough. You have to go to desktop-based ebook readers to even come close to satisfying the normal use cases for reading books.
Of course, don't get me started on how less of a value an eBook is compared to a physical book. Amazon's policies on lending ebooks are an insult (you can only lend 'x' times, for two weeks, and you have to give Amazon the email of the person you're lending to.) And that's just Amazon.
The vendors say they obey the law, respond only to direct requests for information, review those carefully, and then decided what data to release.
But how is that possible if the data is being hoovered? Would the "direct request" be something on the order of, "gives me all your data -- all of it, on everyone", in which case, that thoughtful review and careful decision is a MEANINGLESS exercise.
When the state has ultimate power, it drains the normal meanings of words. Even saying something like, "we are a nation of laws, not men" is meaningless in the face of such categorical activity. When the government is that intrusive, what's legal is whatever it wants it to be.
That's the problem. If I were a plucky startup, I would be busy getting together a technical response to this. Clearly, everyone needs to be able to encrypt everything BEFORE it gets into the hands of any information provider.
This pro-homosexual marriage summary is entirely fundamentalist in its approach: there is only one authority; there is only one correct point of view; dissent is forbidden; anyone who disagrees is a sinner (against society), and deserves to be shunned.
Such rigidness of thought richly deserves to be mocked.
What is so horrible about letting people believe what they want, and feeling free to speak one's mind either in agreement or disagreement?
Imagine that someone with an opinion contrary to mainstream Slashdot thought were to speak up in a post. People here would of course treat that person with respect, and would never stoop to calling him a bigot and worse.
And last i heard they did allow you to 'loan' your locked kindle books to friends, up to 14 days at a shot.
Glad you brought that up, because it is such as useful comparison to ordinary book buying. Yes, you can load your books to someone, provided you give Amazon that person's email address, and only for 14 days, and only two times, ever.
For what other product do we think it acceptable to let the retailer get the person email address of the person we are lending to? You bought a sweater, and you can't lend it to your brother unless you give the store his address?
For what other product do we think it acceptable to put a time limit on lending? Or a limit on the number of times we choose to lend? These are ridiculous limits, almost insulting, really.
Slashdot Mirror
"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming." Nature
The cause of climate change is also not really under dispute either. We only care about catastrophic anthropocentric climate change. And even within that category, we should only really care about things we can realistically and economically do. For example, Australia apparently has a huge carbon tax that will have an impact on the climate so small, it cannot even be measured.
We need to make dirt-simple to encrypt messages and files, then start spreading the word to your personal support circle (you know, the people who rely on you to keep things running for them) that "everybody encrypts these days". If you see an unencrypted message or file, say, "ugh, don't touch that, that's like spam". We engineers have a lot of influence on the ground, where it is hardest for any government to interfere.
It will be an order of magnitude easier to overrun government's spying capabilities than it will be to thwart them.
... is make it more difficult for the government to spy on us, right? How may more people have to start routinely encrypting email before it gets so computationally expensive that bulk searches are no longer worth the effort?
One of the things I like about Sphinx is that it has a just one file per chapter, and every one has a table of contents and links to other chapters. So, even if you land on a page from a search, you still have your navigation.
His argument is that a lot of people just produce reference materials and claim they've "documented" the system. Proper documentation needs both tutorial AND reference.
He didn't say "experts need to be taught", he said, "teach someone to become an expert." Big difference.
The problem is that documentation in code is documentation of code. It helps people writing the code, but not those using the output of your code. To do that, you have to teach.
I quit facebook after the Obama campaign revealed that they got special permission from FB to ignore its ToS and allow campaign workers to hoover their friend data and send it to the campaign for analysis. A very dirty trick, IMHO. The ToS basically means nothing, its assurances are meaningless.
I'm not aware of any serious study that attempts to explain why women aren't better represented as programmers. There are lots of studies that establish that it is so.
So, we really don't know why. Until someone really can nail this down with a decently reliable study, everyone is just speculating.
Personally, I think looking at programming is too narrow. If you look at the broader aspects of a development project -- application design, programming, human/computer interfaces, information organization, testing, documenting, requirements gathering, customer management, deployment, training, troubleshooting, customer support, etc. -- I think you'd find that the gender distribution is a lot closer to the working population. It truly does take a village to develop software. It's pretty narrow-minded to focus on just one aspect of the problem, and pretend like that's all there is.
Obligatory C.S. Lewis reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis's_trilemma
Isn't Gene Expression equally as important as which genes you have in the first place, and isn't expression often a response to external events, so even if you were to make a perfect copy of John Lennon, the copy would be quite different? Especially as time goes on?
Or am I misunderstanding how all this works in the first place.
Those lazy Marmosets, lab rats, mice, and chimps! No wonder they're getting fat.
No, music is not already "open source". It has to have a copyright grant from the original composer that permits the music to be modified.
I have been writing "open source" music for decades ( http://www.newhymns.org/ .) I have always included a grant to modify, and about 8 years ago adopted the least restrictive Creative Commons license (Attribution only), specifically to encourage fellow musicians to carry the compositions further, even if they do it for commercial projects. I release the music in MusicXML format to make editing even easier.
My personal experience has been that many people are willing to download and use music, but only a vanishingly small number are willing or able to modify it. The ratio is something like 1 modification per 200K downloads, perhaps even less. That ratio probably tracks pretty close to other open source projects in general.
I have had some wonderful emails from people telling me how they used the music in a children's summer camp, or in a special worship service, and so on. It's great to share, actually, it's worth so much more than money.
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Open and shut, IMHO. Yahoo is just following its terms.
Very interesting post!
Consciousness is what one experiences when the parts of the brain's network are communicating with one another, a classic network effect. Consciousness is one of the attributes of value a system gets by exercising its existence.
If the attacker has physical access to my machine in a logged-in state, tell me how any kind of master password or encryption scheme is going to keep him out of my data, including anything on my local hard drive, or any web-hosted services that have a cached credential? The barn door's already opened, fellas.
Besides which, any "solution" such as storing passwords offsite, encrypting, etc. will also require the user to take definitive action to open and close the password repo. The problem is our user can't/won't be bothered with taking action to secure his access, so that solution is no solution.
Google's right on this one.
... but you wouldn't want to live there. The cost of transporting the essentials of a rich person's life -- all the food, the drinks, the furniture, the disco balls, the fast cars, the drugs -- would surely exceed the cost of building the station itself. However, a space station that la riche can visit once a year, like a month in the Riviera only in space, now that would work. Plus, what's the point of being ostentatious if there are no peasants to impress? Better to have a least some people you can lock the gates on, just to feel like you've made it.
Yes, I feel SO much better knowing that the IRS was holding up all kinds of requests for political reasons, routing them to Washington, DC, then making completely illegal requests for information such as the content of prayers (!), and delaying approval for years. Just because more than one ox was gored does not mean the problem is gone. The IRS has leaders who used the agency for political ends, that is an abomination.
The irony of eBooks is although they are orders of magnitude more capable of random-access reading, the only comfortable way to use them is for sequential reading. Try flipping back to an earlier part of an eBook, and then returning to your original place. Agonizing. Try looking at two or more passages at once. Impossible. Try keeping notes or a collection of citations, and on most eBooks, it's amazingly lacking.
The main problem with eBooks is that the user experience is very immature. Developers gave us an easy way to sequentially read, and apparently thought that was enough. You have to go to desktop-based ebook readers to even come close to satisfying the normal use cases for reading books.
Of course, don't get me started on how less of a value an eBook is compared to a physical book. Amazon's policies on lending ebooks are an insult (you can only lend 'x' times, for two weeks, and you have to give Amazon the email of the person you're lending to.) And that's just Amazon.
The vendors say they obey the law, respond only to direct requests for information, review those carefully, and then decided what data to release.
But how is that possible if the data is being hoovered? Would the "direct request" be something on the order of, "gives me all your data -- all of it, on everyone", in which case, that thoughtful review and careful decision is a MEANINGLESS exercise.
When the state has ultimate power, it drains the normal meanings of words. Even saying something like, "we are a nation of laws, not men" is meaningless in the face of such categorical activity. When the government is that intrusive, what's legal is whatever it wants it to be.
That's the problem. If I were a plucky startup, I would be busy getting together a technical response to this. Clearly, everyone needs to be able to encrypt everything BEFORE it gets into the hands of any information provider.
This pro-homosexual marriage summary is entirely fundamentalist in its approach: there is only one authority; there is only one correct point of view; dissent is forbidden; anyone who disagrees is a sinner (against society), and deserves to be shunned.
Such rigidness of thought richly deserves to be mocked.
What is so horrible about letting people believe what they want, and feeling free to speak one's mind either in agreement or disagreement?
Imagine that someone with an opinion contrary to mainstream Slashdot thought were to speak up in a post. People here would of course treat that person with respect, and would never stoop to calling him a bigot and worse.
Oh, wait.
Glad you brought that up, because it is such as useful comparison to ordinary book buying. Yes, you can load your books to someone, provided you give Amazon that person's email address, and only for 14 days, and only two times, ever.
For what other product do we think it acceptable to let the retailer get the person email address of the person we are lending to? You bought a sweater, and you can't lend it to your brother unless you give the store his address?
For what other product do we think it acceptable to put a time limit on lending? Or a limit on the number of times we choose to lend? These are ridiculous limits, almost insulting, really.