Yay! I'm modded flamebait, and yet the person I responded to is insightful. Where's the justice? My question was an honest one, so either the topic is inherently flamebait (in which case the whole thread should be modded as such) or someone's trying to mod down opinions they don't like... Yay!
True, that's an interesting point. There's a non-trivial philosophical question about what is the OS and what is an application. The Linux kernel clearly is part of it (and, e.g., for embedded applications that have no user access, it might be the whole thing). For a typical PC system, though, it's hard to imagine the system being at all useful without the GNU utilities or a replacement of most or all of them. I've run a lot of systems that didn't have web browsers or GUIs, so there's a case to be made for separating those from the OS logically.
There's also a question of intellectual credit -- even if you think that the GNU portion is less technically critical to the OS, you could consider whether Linux would have been developed as the free system that it is had the GPL not existed. It's not clear from the histories I've read whether Linus would have gone to a whole lot of effort to craft a careful free license had the GPL not already been written. I haven't really thought this through or researched it (and not sure if you really could), but you could consider the argument that GNU indirectly assisted the kernel development pretty profoundly.
That's not my claim at all, and it's not particularly relevant. Who's to know who would have written what if GNU hadn't done their work. Hell, Linus "just" implemented a kernel based on existing designs -- had he not done a good job and filled the niche, then perhaps someone else would have written a different kernel to fill the niche. Perhaps hurd would have been finished. Who knows.
The point is, the GNU folks did a lot of work that no one else wanted to do and built a nice system. Coupled with Linux, it makes a usable Unix-like system.
Your argument makes no sense. GNU and Linus each contributed key components of the system. You can't run the tools without a kernel, and you can't do much with the kernel without the tools. Why exactly should Linus get to name the whole system?
Yes -- you can only detect each neutrino once. After that, it ain't a neutrino no more.
However, these neutrinos are passing through 735 kilometers of solid earth between the two detectors with a negligble loss of beam intensity. Compared with the loss rate through the earth, the loss due to detections at the near detector is negligble.
Or, to put it in terms of numbers, imagine that there are 10^10 neutrinos produced in the beam. These pass through the near detector and, if you're lucky, *one* of them is detected. Now there are 10^10 - 1 which is still 10^10 neutrinos left.
So, precisely because they are hard to detect, you can put multiple detectors in the beam line without needing much of a correction. It takes longer to build up a large number in any one detector, but they'll all see very nearly the same intensity.
I'm not familiar enough with the details of neutrino physics or this project to know how much, if any, correction they do to account for scattering losses in the detector or the earth in the beam path. My instincts tell me they probably do correct for very small losses through the earth, but don't need to bother with the detector itself.
I dual boot between XP and Gentoo but have been spending nearly all my time in XP, mostly because I'm having problems configuring the wireless network. That's a bummer because nearly everything else worked almost out-of-the-box (well, as much as that is ever true of Gentoo). Oh well, I'll figure it out some day...
Two of these are pristine; half of the third has rubbed off so that it is now "Desig-- Microso-- Window--" instead. I wonder if XP will start crashing when the rest of that sticker is worn away.
Re:Implications regarding the Standard Model?
on
Neutrino Mass Confirmed
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· Score: 3, Informative
Basically, at this point, they've got measurements of the difference between the masses of the three flavors of neutrinos. They also have an upper bound of, IIRC, around 0.7eV (not from this experiment) for the absolute value of the neutrino mass. The delta sets the lower bound (if one flavor were at zero mass, the heavier ones must be at least the delta heavier).
The mass deltas are known as squared values -- the sign is unknown, so there's the question of overall mass scale plus the ordering of the various flavors.
They have two detectors. One very near to the source, one very far away. The near source measures many more hits than the far source does. Thus, they know they're being produced in larger quantities than they're being received in. Compared to a model of the test configuration assuming no oscillation, there are about 33% too few hits on the far detector as compared to the near. This amounts to a 4 or 5 sigma detection of the missing neutrinos (in other words, there is approximtely a 0.7%-1.8% chance that this is due to a statistical coincidence). It's typically at 2 or 3 sigma that you start making a confident announcement of a discovery, so a 4 or 5 sigma confirmation of an already reported result is very, very strong evidence.
They don't yet have enough data to rule out some alternative explanations. At this point, though, neutrino oscillation (and mass) would really be the simplest, least "out there" explanation. These experimenters would like nothing more than to find that even the oscillation theories don't explain the data. That would open a whole new field of inquiry and possibly lead to Nobel Prizes.
The seminar talks go into a fair bit of detail about their data analysis, which included "blind analysis." In other words, they kept a significant (and unknown until the end) fraction of their data secret from those doing the analysis. Using the other fraction, they went through their testing procedures -- figuring out how to detect false events, how to deal with various , etc -- using a limited piece of the data. Once they were confident that they had done everything correctly, they opened the whole data set and ran their procedure without changing it.
This protected them from tainting their data by, e.g., throwing out data points that didn't match expectations. That is a common problem, even among good scientists. It's very easy to subconsciously make decisions that bias your results toward the expected answer.
Anyway, I am a physicist, and I think you should believe these guys. Everything I've seen indicates they've done a good, careful job with the experiment.
I disagree about 100% with everything you say except for your last paragraph. I don't care how many men my wife has "lain with." I have pity for those afflicted with AIDS, even if they could have been more careful -- I don't have the arrogance to pretend I've never made a stupid decision. I understand that my opinions and beliefs are not facts and I would not present them as such. I think your parable is pointless; it certainly doesn't really demonstrate anything about how porn hurts families.
That said, I started to post a very angry flame until I re-read your last paragraph. You are absolutely right. The government should not regulate porn because "it might incite people to commit sexual crimes." The only victims of porn[*] are those who hold particular moral views on the subject, and that's not something the government should regulate.
Thank you for having a sensible view of your morality. Trying to legislate it is a futile misuse of government. While it's clear that you and I differ in opinion on many subjects, I do respect your right to try to convince people to see things your way.
[*] That is, assuming it was made by individuals who meaningfully consented to it.
Works for me. Just don't get bent out of shape that I interrupted long enough to say, "Hey, at least one of your students hasn't understood what you're saying." I agree -- I'm not saying that questions aren't appropriate at all, just that not all questions fit the forum. There's nothing wrong with asking and answering, and some amount of that will make it a better class. Also, as you say, if the lecture is flat out horrible and none of the students are following at all, then the professor is not doing his job.
Your generalization about contempt for professors is simply not that general, or at least, not applicable to the cases I have in mind. Sadly, I had a few fellow students who were quite happy to disrupt lectures trying to one-up the professor and ask pointless questions apparently for the sake of hearing themselves speak. These were in classes taught by some of the best lecturers I've had -- nothing had been done to earn contempt, and none of the other students were benefitting from these jackasses' questions.
As for the importance of deadlines and the meaning of grades...
It's one thing to arrange with a professor ahead of time to do something other than the assigned work and expect credit for it. It's another to blow off the assigned work and do your own thing, then expect him to do the extra work to figure out what you did and whether it's equivalent. The latter is imposing an awful lot on the prof and certainly doesn't respect his time.
If he is willing and able to do it, then great. I'm not arguing that the world would not be a better place if every student got enough attention from the professor to do his own personalized assignments, but the number of students who could get a college education would have to be slashed by a lot to support that.
Like it or not, a course has a syllabus. This is not an arbitrary set of things the professor wants to get through, it's usually the most important things that you need to get from that class in order to understand the next one. If you fall behind, you're setting yourself up for problems later on.
I've said this many times, but I'm going to keep repeating it. Lecture is not a discussion section. Lecture is a presentation of the material by the professor to the students. It's fine to ask a question there, but if it's too detailed, should have been covered by a prerequisite, or simply delves into something the professor has decided there's not time for in that class, then he has every right to refer you to ask again after class or in recitation or in office hours. He's not denying you the answer, he's just managing his limited class time.
A lecture is fundamentally different from reading a book. First, you typically get a different overall persective on the material since the book was not usually written by the lecturer. Plus, seeing things presented gives a different temporal sense. For me, even if it's the same derivation, seeing it done in real time and hearing the professor talk about the steps makes it a very different experience.
As for your infuriating experience... well, I dunno about yours, but every class I've ever taken made it very clear what the penalty for late work was. If you don't want to suffer that penalty, then turn your damn project in on time. Hell, you turned it in late and still got a passing grade, that seems reasonable. How many other students would have debugged their B-grade programs and handed in working ones if they'd taken an extra day? As a comparative measure, you weren't graded on equal footing because you had extra time.
Welcome to real life. You have deadlines and those need to be met. If you have a real, unforseen hardship that prevents you from getting your work done on time, that's one thing. If not, then learn how to manage your time. It is an inconvenience to the graders to get late work to grade, it's unfair to students who actually respect the deadlines, and it's in your own interest to keep up with the course. If you don't have time to do the work, then either don't take the class or audit it instead. If you don't actually need to do the work to learn the material, then why are you taking the class?
This sense of entitlement among students really bothers me. Yeah, a professor should have respect for his students and do what he can to help them succeed, but respect is a two-way street. If you don't show respect to him in the first place, do you seriously expect that he's going to be interested in interacting with you? Respecting a teacher means paying attention in class, asking questions politely, and doing the homework he assigns, among other things. It doesn't mean whining and threatening him when he enforces his (what sounds to be fair) late homework policy.
Every school I've been to layers most of their courses into lectures and recitation sections, then supports these with office hours and sometimes tutorial sessions as well. Each of these elements is intended to provide a different educational purpose. You seem to think that every moment of every interaction needs to be of the office hours variety. I simply don't think that's true and, furthermore, is an inefficient use of everyone's time.
The idea is that you read the material, go to lecture to hear it talked about, read it some more, then go into smaller groups to discuss it. Lectures are aimed at being relatively high-level presentations of material. It is not an efficient forum for interactive discussions and isn't intended to serve that purpose. Recitations, tutorials, and office hours are all aimed at being interactive sessions. These are the best times to ask detailed questions and expect that they'll be answered in full, excruciating detail.
To insist that every detailed question must be addressed in full detail in lecture, to me, indicates a misunderstanding of the structure of the course. There is limited lecture time available, and the prof needs to strike a balance between forest and trees. He's the one who has the best idea what is ultimately important for the students to get through, and should be expected (and trusted) to use his judgement to maintain that balance.
Some classes don't follow this format -- smaller classes, especially at the graduate level, tend to either be lecture only (or usually lecture+office hours). In these, sure, you can expect to have more of your questions answered. Really, it's more like they're recitation only, generally.
Anyway, you are showing a complete lack of understanding of my "attitude." I agree that a professor who won't discuss the material should not have his job. However, LECTURES ARE NOT DISCUSSION SECTIONS. The professor's time is valuable, too (remember, he's not ONLY paid to teach), and it's the student's responsibility to do his homework first and then to ask the question in the appropriate forum.
Not every question is a good one, and not every moment with a professor is an appropriate time for Q & A. Lectures are designed to be primarily presentations -- brief questions can be appropriate, but in-depth discussions are usually better relegated to office hours or recitation sections. Asking for clarification is fine, but expecting to put the entire lecture on hold is inappropriate.
I've had obnoxious students stall physics lectures to debate fine details of derivations. Sure, there is educational value in the discussion, but the middle of lecture is NOT the time to ask that sort of question. If a student refuses to respect the lecturer's decision to gloss over details until later and instead insists on disrupting the lecture, then he is impeding everyone else's education and deserves to be thrown out of class until he can learn to respect others.
And how exactly is a prof supposed to do his(*) job without authority to control the classroom environment? Is he supposed to stop lecture and debate every point with anyone who has a question, even if derails the course syllabus? Is he supposed to restructure the lectures if anyone in the class doesn't like the organization?
The point is, the professor is expected to be able to manage teaching a class. He has the authority to run it in the way he finds to be most effective. If it's truly not effective, then there will be review and ideally the prof will be re-educated or de-employed.
Obviously, there are bad apples out there, but it's not pompous of a professor to expect to be allowed to run his classroom.
(*) BTW, I'm not assuming that professors are male, there's just no effective way to write this post using gender-neutral language.
I dunno, with my WPA-PSK connection to my home router, I just set the security type and typed in the passphrase on XP and it worked. After struggling to find the right software for the linux side, I got it up and running, wrote an ascii configuration file, and after a couple weeks of struggling and contacting support mailing lists, still find that I have to restart the wireless connection every 5-15 minutes when it stalls.
Granted, WPA-PSK is not full enterprise class WPA in all its full complexity, but still, this simple exercise (trying to avoid WEP) has relegated me to using a wire when I'm booted into linux. And this is after close to a decade of familiarity with linux. I'm not sure why the wireless situation is so pathetic, but it simply is. Hopefully it's about to be fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.
That's true of most existing schemes, but more and more, manufacturers and end users are interested in actually encoding data in the tag itself. Some modern RFID tag protocols allow for an arbitrarily large address space on the tag. They also include security measures (basically, a password) to make it difficult to access the tag in order to prevent unauthorized altering of the data. Most if not all also include a mechanism for locking the tag down once and for all.
There is a lot of value in this. It allows the tag to be updated to contain supply chain information all the way through to the sales floor without needing to coordinate databases between the handlers. It does complicate the handling of data on the tags, though.
1) Be very careful about issuing a CC chargeback on questionable grounds as it opens the possibility of your committing fraud if your interpretation of what you've been wrongly charged for doesn't turn out to be legally correct. Personally (IANAL), I think you'd be justified if they charged you for the period during which you were banned, but I think it'd be a real stretch to say that you have any legitimate claim for payments for service you already fully received.
2) If you decide to chargeback, you may not be able to do so for anything you've already paid off. I've done chargebacks to a couple of different cards with different banks and they both advise not to pay a balance that you dispute as you may waive your right to dispute it later. If you do formally dispute a charge in writing, they won't charge interest on that balance.
Your argument is that anyone who defends DRM is doing so as a knee-jerk reaction from someone who's bought into the scam. Sure, you didn't phrase it as an argument, but you can't make a statement like yours and then pretend that you were not making that argument. If your whole point is that people will respond in disagreement when you call them fools, well, I'm not sure why you think that's a clever observation.
His response is that he and others who bought DRM protected content did so knowingly and the obvious implication is that in their opinion, it was a good bargain. Your answer is, "See? I was right!" As I said before, bravo.
I guess no one can argue with you -- if they do, obviously it's because they're too embarrassed at having been taken advantage of. Only an irrational moron or someone who hates freedom could be duped into believing that you can rationally pay for something that has any technical limitations whatsoever. We know this is true because you told us that if you posted your opinion that people who disagreed with it would post in disagreement. Therefore they must have bought into a scam. Is that how your logic works?
There's nothing inherently wrong about technical limitations in a product. Every product has them. As long as the seller does not misrepresent their product and its limitations, a buyer can decide whether he is getting a fair deal. Some feel that the compromise presented is fair and provides a good value, and they'll purchase these. Some feel it's not, and they won't. This is what we call a free market.
What about the guy who put the worm into GCC? Should he be jailed? Yes, if it can be shown in a criminal court that this was a violation of the law, the violation warrants a jail term, and he was guilty of the crime.
What about the guy who got the rootkit code into the linux kernel, should he be jailed? Yes, as above.
What about all the members of the cDc? Should they be jailed? If they can be shown to be guilty of crimes, then yes. On the merits of their association alone, no.
I think you're overestimating the forethought that most companies have. A very large company probably has a detailed policy of some sort that covers usage of company equipment, but for a small company, in my experience, things are a little more fluid. However, most any company will have a non-compete of some sort. It's not particularly sophisticated -- it's more of the standard legal setup they get from their lawyer when they set up employment contracts.
I've worked for several companies and none has ever had a policy (or at least, not a policy that anyone was aware of) that laid out what files could and could not be deleted. Personally, unless they had a clear and uniformly enforced policy about deletion, I don't think they should have a claim against this guy (for the deletion -- contract violation is a different story).
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Yay! I'm modded flamebait, and yet the person I responded to is insightful. Where's the justice? My question was an honest one, so either the topic is inherently flamebait (in which case the whole thread should be modded as such) or someone's trying to mod down opinions they don't like... Yay!
True, that's an interesting point. There's a non-trivial philosophical question about what is the OS and what is an application. The Linux kernel clearly is part of it (and, e.g., for embedded applications that have no user access, it might be the whole thing). For a typical PC system, though, it's hard to imagine the system being at all useful without the GNU utilities or a replacement of most or all of them. I've run a lot of systems that didn't have web browsers or GUIs, so there's a case to be made for separating those from the OS logically.
There's also a question of intellectual credit -- even if you think that the GNU portion is less technically critical to the OS, you could consider whether Linux would have been developed as the free system that it is had the GPL not existed. It's not clear from the histories I've read whether Linus would have gone to a whole lot of effort to craft a careful free license had the GPL not already been written. I haven't really thought this through or researched it (and not sure if you really could), but you could consider the argument that GNU indirectly assisted the kernel development pretty profoundly.
That's not my claim at all, and it's not particularly relevant. Who's to know who would have written what if GNU hadn't done their work. Hell, Linus "just" implemented a kernel based on existing designs -- had he not done a good job and filled the niche, then perhaps someone else would have written a different kernel to fill the niche. Perhaps hurd would have been finished. Who knows.
The point is, the GNU folks did a lot of work that no one else wanted to do and built a nice system. Coupled with Linux, it makes a usable Unix-like system.
Your argument makes no sense. GNU and Linus each contributed key components of the system. You can't run the tools without a kernel, and you can't do much with the kernel without the tools. Why exactly should Linus get to name the whole system?
Yes -- you can only detect each neutrino once. After that, it ain't a neutrino no more.
However, these neutrinos are passing through 735 kilometers of solid earth between the two detectors with a negligble loss of beam intensity. Compared with the loss rate through the earth, the loss due to detections at the near detector is negligble.
Or, to put it in terms of numbers, imagine that there are 10^10 neutrinos produced in the beam. These pass through the near detector and, if you're lucky, *one* of them is detected. Now there are 10^10 - 1 which is still 10^10 neutrinos left.
So, precisely because they are hard to detect, you can put multiple detectors in the beam line without needing much of a correction. It takes longer to build up a large number in any one detector, but they'll all see very nearly the same intensity.
I'm not familiar enough with the details of neutrino physics or this project to know how much, if any, correction they do to account for scattering losses in the detector or the earth in the beam path. My instincts tell me they probably do correct for very small losses through the earth, but don't need to bother with the detector itself.
I dual boot between XP and Gentoo but have been spending nearly all my time in XP, mostly because I'm having problems configuring the wireless network. That's a bummer because nearly everything else worked almost out-of-the-box (well, as much as that is ever true of Gentoo). Oh well, I'll figure it out some day...
Heh. I used to have an "Intel Not Inside" sticker that I made for my old AMD K6-233 box.
Actually, no, it's been extremely stable for the couple months I've had it.
Thanks, those look interesting.
Two of these are pristine; half of the third has rubbed off so that it is now "Desig-- Microso-- Window--" instead. I wonder if XP will start crashing when the rest of that sticker is worn away.
Basically, at this point, they've got measurements of the difference between the masses of the three flavors of neutrinos. They also have an upper bound of, IIRC, around 0.7eV (not from this experiment) for the absolute value of the neutrino mass. The delta sets the lower bound (if one flavor were at zero mass, the heavier ones must be at least the delta heavier).
The mass deltas are known as squared values -- the sign is unknown, so there's the question of overall mass scale plus the ordering of the various flavors.
They have two detectors. One very near to the source, one very far away. The near source measures many more hits than the far source does. Thus, they know they're being produced in larger quantities than they're being received in. Compared to a model of the test configuration assuming no oscillation, there are about 33% too few hits on the far detector as compared to the near. This amounts to a 4 or 5 sigma detection of the missing neutrinos (in other words, there is approximtely a 0.7%-1.8% chance that this is due to a statistical coincidence). It's typically at 2 or 3 sigma that you start making a confident announcement of a discovery, so a 4 or 5 sigma confirmation of an already reported result is very, very strong evidence.
They don't yet have enough data to rule out some alternative explanations. At this point, though, neutrino oscillation (and mass) would really be the simplest, least "out there" explanation. These experimenters would like nothing more than to find that even the oscillation theories don't explain the data. That would open a whole new field of inquiry and possibly lead to Nobel Prizes.
If you're techincally inclined, read about the Minos results straight from the horses' mouths.
The seminar talks go into a fair bit of detail about their data analysis, which included "blind analysis." In other words, they kept a significant (and unknown until the end) fraction of their data secret from those doing the analysis. Using the other fraction, they went through their testing procedures -- figuring out how to detect false events, how to deal with various , etc -- using a limited piece of the data. Once they were confident that they had done everything correctly, they opened the whole data set and ran their procedure without changing it.
This protected them from tainting their data by, e.g., throwing out data points that didn't match expectations. That is a common problem, even among good scientists. It's very easy to subconsciously make decisions that bias your results toward the expected answer.
Anyway, I am a physicist, and I think you should believe these guys. Everything I've seen indicates they've done a good, careful job with the experiment.
I disagree about 100% with everything you say except for your last paragraph. I don't care how many men my wife has "lain with." I have pity for those afflicted with AIDS, even if they could have been more careful -- I don't have the arrogance to pretend I've never made a stupid decision. I understand that my opinions and beliefs are not facts and I would not present them as such. I think your parable is pointless; it certainly doesn't really demonstrate anything about how porn hurts families.
That said, I started to post a very angry flame until I re-read your last paragraph. You are absolutely right. The government should not regulate porn because "it might incite people to commit sexual crimes." The only victims of porn[*] are those who hold particular moral views on the subject, and that's not something the government should regulate.
Thank you for having a sensible view of your morality. Trying to legislate it is a futile misuse of government. While it's clear that you and I differ in opinion on many subjects, I do respect your right to try to convince people to see things your way.
[*] That is, assuming it was made by individuals who meaningfully consented to it.
Works for me. Just don't get bent out of shape that I interrupted long enough to say, "Hey, at least one of your students hasn't understood what you're saying."
I agree -- I'm not saying that questions aren't appropriate at all, just that not all questions fit the forum. There's nothing wrong with asking and answering, and some amount of that will make it a better class. Also, as you say, if the lecture is flat out horrible and none of the students are following at all, then the professor is not doing his job.
Your generalization about contempt for professors is simply not that general, or at least, not applicable to the cases I have in mind. Sadly, I had a few fellow students who were quite happy to disrupt lectures trying to one-up the professor and ask pointless questions apparently for the sake of hearing themselves speak. These were in classes taught by some of the best lecturers I've had -- nothing had been done to earn contempt, and none of the other students were benefitting from these jackasses' questions.
As for the importance of deadlines and the meaning of grades...
It's one thing to arrange with a professor ahead of time to do something other than the assigned work and expect credit for it. It's another to blow off the assigned work and do your own thing, then expect him to do the extra work to figure out what you did and whether it's equivalent. The latter is imposing an awful lot on the prof and certainly doesn't respect his time.
If he is willing and able to do it, then great. I'm not arguing that the world would not be a better place if every student got enough attention from the professor to do his own personalized assignments, but the number of students who could get a college education would have to be slashed by a lot to support that.
Like it or not, a course has a syllabus. This is not an arbitrary set of things the professor wants to get through, it's usually the most important things that you need to get from that class in order to understand the next one. If you fall behind, you're setting yourself up for problems later on.
I've said this many times, but I'm going to keep repeating it. Lecture is not a discussion section. Lecture is a presentation of the material by the professor to the students. It's fine to ask a question there, but if it's too detailed, should have been covered by a prerequisite, or simply delves into something the professor has decided there's not time for in that class, then he has every right to refer you to ask again after class or in recitation or in office hours. He's not denying you the answer, he's just managing his limited class time.
A lecture is fundamentally different from reading a book. First, you typically get a different overall persective on the material since the book was not usually written by the lecturer. Plus, seeing things presented gives a different temporal sense. For me, even if it's the same derivation, seeing it done in real time and hearing the professor talk about the steps makes it a very different experience.
As for your infuriating experience... well, I dunno about yours, but every class I've ever taken made it very clear what the penalty for late work was. If you don't want to suffer that penalty, then turn your damn project in on time. Hell, you turned it in late and still got a passing grade, that seems reasonable. How many other students would have debugged their B-grade programs and handed in working ones if they'd taken an extra day? As a comparative measure, you weren't graded on equal footing because you had extra time.
Welcome to real life. You have deadlines and those need to be met. If you have a real, unforseen hardship that prevents you from getting your work done on time, that's one thing. If not, then learn how to manage your time. It is an inconvenience to the graders to get late work to grade, it's unfair to students who actually respect the deadlines, and it's in your own interest to keep up with the course. If you don't have time to do the work, then either don't take the class or audit it instead. If you don't actually need to do the work to learn the material, then why are you taking the class?
This sense of entitlement among students really bothers me. Yeah, a professor should have respect for his students and do what he can to help them succeed, but respect is a two-way street. If you don't show respect to him in the first place, do you seriously expect that he's going to be interested in interacting with you? Respecting a teacher means paying attention in class, asking questions politely, and doing the homework he assigns, among other things. It doesn't mean whining and threatening him when he enforces his (what sounds to be fair) late homework policy.
Every school I've been to layers most of their courses into lectures and recitation sections, then supports these with office hours and sometimes tutorial sessions as well. Each of these elements is intended to provide a different educational purpose. You seem to think that every moment of every interaction needs to be of the office hours variety. I simply don't think that's true and, furthermore, is an inefficient use of everyone's time.
The idea is that you read the material, go to lecture to hear it talked about, read it some more, then go into smaller groups to discuss it. Lectures are aimed at being relatively high-level presentations of material. It is not an efficient forum for interactive discussions and isn't intended to serve that purpose. Recitations, tutorials, and office hours are all aimed at being interactive sessions. These are the best times to ask detailed questions and expect that they'll be answered in full, excruciating detail.
To insist that every detailed question must be addressed in full detail in lecture, to me, indicates a misunderstanding of the structure of the course. There is limited lecture time available, and the prof needs to strike a balance between forest and trees. He's the one who has the best idea what is ultimately important for the students to get through, and should be expected (and trusted) to use his judgement to maintain that balance.
Some classes don't follow this format -- smaller classes, especially at the graduate level, tend to either be lecture only (or usually lecture+office hours). In these, sure, you can expect to have more of your questions answered. Really, it's more like they're recitation only, generally.
Anyway, you are showing a complete lack of understanding of my "attitude." I agree that a professor who won't discuss the material should not have his job. However, LECTURES ARE NOT DISCUSSION SECTIONS. The professor's time is valuable, too (remember, he's not ONLY paid to teach), and it's the student's responsibility to do his homework first and then to ask the question in the appropriate forum.
Not every question is a good one, and not every moment with a professor is an appropriate time for Q & A. Lectures are designed to be primarily presentations -- brief questions can be appropriate, but in-depth discussions are usually better relegated to office hours or recitation sections. Asking for clarification is fine, but expecting to put the entire lecture on hold is inappropriate.
I've had obnoxious students stall physics lectures to debate fine details of derivations. Sure, there is educational value in the discussion, but the middle of lecture is NOT the time to ask that sort of question. If a student refuses to respect the lecturer's decision to gloss over details until later and instead insists on disrupting the lecture, then he is impeding everyone else's education and deserves to be thrown out of class until he can learn to respect others.
And how exactly is a prof supposed to do his(*) job without authority to control the classroom environment? Is he supposed to stop lecture and debate every point with anyone who has a question, even if derails the course syllabus? Is he supposed to restructure the lectures if anyone in the class doesn't like the organization?
The point is, the professor is expected to be able to manage teaching a class. He has the authority to run it in the way he finds to be most effective. If it's truly not effective, then there will be review and ideally the prof will be re-educated or de-employed.
Obviously, there are bad apples out there, but it's not pompous of a professor to expect to be allowed to run his classroom.
(*) BTW, I'm not assuming that professors are male, there's just no effective way to write this post using gender-neutral language.
I dunno, with my WPA-PSK connection to my home router, I just set the security type and typed in the passphrase on XP and it worked. After struggling to find the right software for the linux side, I got it up and running, wrote an ascii configuration file, and after a couple weeks of struggling and contacting support mailing lists, still find that I have to restart the wireless connection every 5-15 minutes when it stalls.
Granted, WPA-PSK is not full enterprise class WPA in all its full complexity, but still, this simple exercise (trying to avoid WEP) has relegated me to using a wire when I'm booted into linux. And this is after close to a decade of familiarity with linux. I'm not sure why the wireless situation is so pathetic, but it simply is. Hopefully it's about to be fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.
That's true of most existing schemes, but more and more, manufacturers and end users are interested in actually encoding data in the tag itself. Some modern RFID tag protocols allow for an arbitrarily large address space on the tag. They also include security measures (basically, a password) to make it difficult to access the tag in order to prevent unauthorized altering of the data. Most if not all also include a mechanism for locking the tag down once and for all.
There is a lot of value in this. It allows the tag to be updated to contain supply chain information all the way through to the sales floor without needing to coordinate databases between the handlers. It does complicate the handling of data on the tags, though.
Two comments about this.
1) Be very careful about issuing a CC chargeback on questionable grounds as it opens the possibility of your committing fraud if your interpretation of what you've been wrongly charged for doesn't turn out to be legally correct. Personally (IANAL), I think you'd be justified if they charged you for the period during which you were banned, but I think it'd be a real stretch to say that you have any legitimate claim for payments for service you already fully received.
2) If you decide to chargeback, you may not be able to do so for anything you've already paid off. I've done chargebacks to a couple of different cards with different banks and they both advise not to pay a balance that you dispute as you may waive your right to dispute it later. If you do formally dispute a charge in writing, they won't charge interest on that balance.
Oh come on.
Your argument is that anyone who defends DRM is doing so as a knee-jerk reaction from someone who's bought into the scam. Sure, you didn't phrase it as an argument, but you can't make a statement like yours and then pretend that you were not making that argument. If your whole point is that people will respond in disagreement when you call them fools, well, I'm not sure why you think that's a clever observation.
His response is that he and others who bought DRM protected content did so knowingly and the obvious implication is that in their opinion, it was a good bargain. Your answer is, "See? I was right!" As I said before, bravo.
I guess no one can argue with you -- if they do, obviously it's because they're too embarrassed at having been taken advantage of. Only an irrational moron or someone who hates freedom could be duped into believing that you can rationally pay for something that has any technical limitations whatsoever. We know this is true because you told us that if you posted your opinion that people who disagreed with it would post in disagreement. Therefore they must have bought into a scam. Is that how your logic works?
There's nothing inherently wrong about technical limitations in a product. Every product has them. As long as the seller does not misrepresent their product and its limitations, a buyer can decide whether he is getting a fair deal. Some feel that the compromise presented is fair and provides a good value, and they'll purchase these. Some feel it's not, and they won't. This is what we call a free market.
What about the guy who put the worm into GCC? Should he be jailed?
Yes, if it can be shown in a criminal court that this was a violation of the law, the violation warrants a jail term, and he was guilty of the crime.
What about the guy who got the rootkit code into the linux kernel, should he be jailed?
Yes, as above.
What about all the members of the cDc? Should they be jailed?
If they can be shown to be guilty of crimes, then yes. On the merits of their association alone, no.
Your logic is amazing! The way you refute his argument without even addressing its merits is a sight to behold. Aristotle would be proud.
I think you're overestimating the forethought that most companies have. A very large company probably has a detailed policy of some sort that covers usage of company equipment, but for a small company, in my experience, things are a little more fluid. However, most any company will have a non-compete of some sort. It's not particularly sophisticated -- it's more of the standard legal setup they get from their lawyer when they set up employment contracts.
I've worked for several companies and none has ever had a policy (or at least, not a policy that anyone was aware of) that laid out what files could and could not be deleted. Personally, unless they had a clear and uniformly enforced policy about deletion, I don't think they should have a claim against this guy (for the deletion -- contract violation is a different story).