I just saw this new James Bond movie, and the computer-related thing I learned from it beats anything from NBC's movie of the week.
Apparently bombs run Microsoft Windows CE.
Not to give away the plot but there's a closeup of a bomb's extremely colorful LCD information screen shown in this movie... and clearly displayed in the lower left corner of the LCD: "Windows CE" and a logo. Watch for it, it's good for a laugh.
There's something sick with a culture that has such an obsessive need to know everything about things which really don't affect them.
Why do people care who Sarah Michelle Gellar is dating? Do they actually think they'd stand a chance with her otherwise? Who cares if a certain former football star got arrested for drug possession? Does it matter if your favourite entertainer is a satanist?
If people are honest with themselves they'll realize the only way that the fortune / misfortune of a celebrity affects them is in how it affects the entertainment they provide or provided.
This also goes beyond celebrity. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in traffic accidents all over the world, and flying is statistically much safer than driving, yet when an airplane crashes it jumps to the top of the news.
If you're a frequent traveller and this is a repeatable problem, I can see how you might be interested, but most people seem interested just in the event. It's the whole "rubbernecking at the scene of an accident" crap.
The only part of the posting I completely disagree with is the second last paragraph saying "It is, indeed, a bad thing when someone dies. (most of the time, not counting terrorists and such)"
All human life is somewhat valuable. (Though I think we place a little too much importance on it here in the "west"). To the family of a "terrorist" they may be a freedom-fighter, doing what little they can to fight back against an oppressive regime. It's just as unfair to say that someone's life is less valuable because someone else has labelled them a terrorist as it is to say someone's life is more valuable because someone has decided they're a celebrity.
I think you're forgetting something. The timeframe. VCR tapes have been around for how long? 20 years? In that 20 years, the "size" of 1 gigabyte will chage tremendously.
I remember when I first downloaded Linux it was about a hundred megs and I was using a 2400 bps connection. I just let it run for 12+ hours.
How long before someone with a fast connection decides it's worth 12 hours to download the 6 gig Matrix DVD?
The cost of DVD writers is only a short term barrier too. Sure, they're expensive now, but do you really think that in 10 years, it will be expensive to get 10 Gig of removeable storage?
In less than 10 years, the hard drive my computer uses has undergone a 100 fold increase in size. The bandwith of my internet connection has undergone a nearly 1000 fold increase in size. But during that time my VCR hasn't changed, and DVDs were supposed to last that long too.
I now (2 years later) have better than 20/20 vision
The only drawback has been a noticeable reduction in night vision, mostly haloes around things
If you have questions, ask.
Sorry if this rambles a bit, but I wanted to get it all out and submit it before the story scrolls off the end of the main slashdot page. I also hope this gets moderated up because I happen to know a lot about this. My stepdad is an eye surgeon (his specialty is the retina though, not the cornea). I've done university projects on laser eye surgery and had it done to my own eyes. I am not a doctor, and may be wrong about some of this information because it has been a while since I researched it, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly right. You can find a good chunk of this information on the web if you look hard enough.
Ok, having said that, here's what I know.
You have two options when it comes to laser surgery: LASIK and PRK (Photo Refractive Keratectomy). I know more about PRK because that is what I had done to me. I also know that my eye-surgeon stepdad recommended PRK over Lasik though I don't know if this is a general recommendation or just for my case.
Lasik involves cutting a flap in the cornea, peeling the flap back, shaping the cells with a laser, and lowering the flap back into place. Lasik can deal with a wider degree of myopia than PRK and has a faster recovery time, however there is a small amount of scarring on the eye from the healing. One flaw with Lasik is that it leaves a weak point in the eye -- the flap can come lose later, but I think this takes a lot of pressure and once the eye has fully healed this isn't an issue.
PRK does things by simply using a laser to shave sub-cellular layers off the eye. The laser used is a pulsed UV laser that basically blasts apart molecules letting it do it without heat.
There are different types of PRK machines. The differences include the width of the laser beam used, and the apeture control mechanism. The older machines have a mechanical apeture that progressively widens (at least when flattening the lens). These machines produce extremely minute step-like structures on the eye as they change size. The newer machines use different apeture techniques to make the flattening smoother.
When I talked to my stepdad about laser surgery a couple of years ago he was hesitant because there wasn't enough clinical data on long term results. About this time two years ago I asked him again and this time he recommended it. One of his colleagues is acknowledged as a leader in the field, and has all the newest eqipment.
I went to this doctor and they told me what was involved in having my eyes done. Because of my previous prescription (astigmatic with -8.5 and -9 eyes) and because of my unusually large pupils I could only have it done with a very specialized machine. Apparently there are only three of these machines in North America.
Anyhow, they suggested a treatment, I agreed, my stepdad thought it was a good idea so I went for it. They quoted me a price of $2000 Canadian ($1300 US) per eye to have the surgery done. They recommended both eyes at once so that is what I had done.
The day of the surgery I had my mother drive me to Montreal where the surgery was done. I waited in the waiting room for an hour or so, and then a nurse put drops in my eyes. The drops used are the same ones they use when you have pressure tests done on your eyes. Basically all they do is anesthatize the surface of the eyeball without affecting it in any other way. About 5 minutes later the drops had taken effect and they brought me in.
Surgery consisted of looking up at a red dot while they blasted the cornea away. While the surgical laser was on, my eye saw flashes of blue light everywhere while the laser pulsed. I guess this was the UV light losing energy and becoming visible inside my eye? Anyhow, the other thing that I noticed (which they didn't warn me about), was that I could faintly smell the burning flesh of my eye as they operated. All-in-all surgery was a pretty nervous experience (which is why they offered some strong relaxants beforehand). They do essentially nothing to immobilize your eye as they work, and trust you to keep looking at that red dot. But the good thing is it was over quickly. I think the surgery took less than two minutes in the end.
So after surgery my mom drove me home. My eyes were very irritated by the whole process and keeping them open was something I wasn't up to. One eye was irritated enough that tears were pouring out of it for at least half an hour.
The recovery weeks (2) were pretty rough. My vision was pretty similar to my glasses-less vision before the operation (when I could keep my eyes open) but it couldn't be improved by glasses or anything else. My eyes also really itched, and sometimes really burned. The tissue was healing, but that isn't a pleasant thing. And another problem was boredom. When you can't see anything at all, and you're used to seeing, life is boring! I couldn't use a computer, could hardly watch TV, couldn't read, etc. But soon enough my corneas healed.
After that the eyes took another six months or so to adjust. During this time my vision changed slowly from bad to great. Now apparently I've got slightly better than 20/20 vision... during the day.
The one problem with my eye surgery was the effect on my night vision. My eyes now have a change in their curve, which means that at night I see halos. Sometimes they're worse than other times, but they're always there. When I look at a LED in an otherwise black room I see the LED surrounded by a soft and fairly large halo. I'm sometimes bothered by this at night when driving: stoplights and car's lights are haloed. But most of the time I don't notice it (it's still there though).
The best part of this whole process, where I noticed the biggest difference was waking up. I'm sure many of you with bad eyes know the experience of waking up, and sticking your head up to your alarm clock to see the time. It was such a huge thrill to be able to wake up, open my eyes, and see the time with no effort. Being able to see the time on the clock on waking up is something everyone with good eyesight (these days me included) takes for granted. And it was such a great feeling to wake up and be able to see.
Now I might be wrong about certain things, but ask me. If you want to know more about my experiences I can tell you anything. If you have questions I can't answer I can ask my stepdad.
I programmed in Java before C and found it to be much easier. The difficulty in Java is simply in understanding object orientation. Once you understand that it's all easy.
Compare that to C where you have to understand pointers, precompiler directives, makefiles, and all kinds of nasty things.
The above example shows one thing that Java does amazingly well compared to C: strings. As a beginner programmer the concept that a string is a null-terminated array of characters, and that when you talk about the "string variable" you're actually referencing a pointer to the first element in that array... that's just plain hard. Java makes Strings super easy.
Compare: if (strcmp(blah, "bob")) to (ps, you also have to include the right libraries for this one using strange precompiler syntax but we'll ignore that for now) if (blah.equals("bob"))
Which is more intuitive?
Java is very young, very unstable, and not very well suited to certain things. But I'm convinced that if you give it about 5 years it will be a huge mainstream language. I'm actually surprised that in such a short time, and despite all its flaws, that it's already in third place!
It could be that, or it could be that Microsoft hopes that MSNBC will at least put a good spin on the news, and not blame Microsoft or NT as much as the other news sources will.
Looks like this guy(?) flipz has been pretty busy lately. He(?) got into the Department of Veterans Affairs (hack) site, the US Army Reserve Command (hack) and even the White Sands Missle Range (hack) site. They're all NT boxen. I'm no expert or nuthin, but I betcha there might be some common NT security flaw he(?)'s exploiting. All the sites mention his(?) love f0bic. I wonder how she(?) feels about this.
What do you see as the biggest obstacle for Linux as a serious desktop OS contender?
What do you see as Linux' biggest strengths in a desktop environment?
What do you think have been the most significant developments this year relating to Linux as a commercial product?
What are the possible effects on your business of a decision in the MS-DOJ court battle?
If MS is broken up is a plus for commercial Linux vendors or a minus (no common hated enemy right?)
If MS isn't broken up, they'll probably be even more likely to use strongarm tactics against other companies, how do you see that affecting you?
How important is a name in the Linux business? Amazon is huge because they're really well known and they were the first. Will RedHat be huge because they're becoming a known name in the non-tech world and IPO'd first?
Cookie Pal intercepts all cookie-setting attempts as they happen and lets you decide on a site-by-site basis whether to accept the cookie or not. It also lets you set wildcards so anything from *.doubleclick.net is rejected, and *.slashdot.org is accepted. Mine has a huge list of auto-reject sites, a small list of auto-accept sites. If the site I'm visiting isn't in either list, Cookie Pal prompts me with 4 options: Accept Always, Reject Always, Accept This Time, Reject This Time. I could just as easily have it auto-reject or auto-accept sites not in my lists. It's a very lightweight program with a simple but effective UI that I can't recommend enough.
AtGuard takes care of the banner ads (although it can do a lot more than that). It is basically a transparent firewall. Some of the more useful features: block images based on whole or partial URL matching (anything from doubleclick is rejected as is anything matching "*ad/*"), block HTTP_REFERRER fields, prevent animated gifs from looping...
Thanks to these tools I haven't seen an unwanted banner ad or animated gif in months, and the only cookies I have are the really useful ones that store preferences or enable shopping carts, etc.
I want to see if I can add some of these features to Mozilla (when I get more time) so everyone can have them available and so the internet-ad economy collapses. Call me a luddite, but I really miss the days when it was unheard of to even have a bit of promotional text on your web page.
To continue the question... as I understand it the impact of Quantum Computing is in its ability to factor immense numbers extremely quickly. Does all cryptography depend on factoring large numbers, or only a certain subset?
Unfortunately I'm not in California. I'm in Ottawa, Canada.
In case you're interested, the contract I signed reads:
The undersigned Employee hereby promises the Employer:
To promptly disclose to the Employer in writing all inventions, discoveries, developments, innovations and computer programs ("inventions") made, in whole or in part, by the Employee during the course of or in relation to the Employee's employment with the Employer, whether conceived or developed during working hours or not, including but not limited to inventions:
resulting from work performed by the Employee or any other employee of the Employer for the Employer
relating in any manner whatsoever to the present or contemplated business of the employer, or
resulting from the use of the Employer's time, equipment, materials, or work facilities;
to assign and hereby does assign to the Employer all the Employee's interest in and title to inventions required to be disclosed by the Employee to the Employer
to execute at the Employer's request, whether made during or after the Employee's employment with the Employer, any instruments prepared by or on behalf of the Employer or the Employer's successors in title acknowledging or assuming the Employer's interest in and title to inventions required to be disclosed by the Employee to the Employer or assisting the Employer or the Employer's successors in title to obtain any registered copyright, design, patent, or any other intellectual property rights whatsoever.
First let me say that was a very informative an interesting article. But while we have attention on IP law, allow me to branch the discussion.
One issue that has been bothering me lately in regards to IP law is the matter of contracts signed with an employer that gives them very broad powers.
When I signed up for my current job I was somewhat desperate and wanted a job quickly. I didn't expect to be around long and because of that I signed away some rights I probably shouldn't have.
The documents I signed included one containing non-competition clauses (I can't work directly in the same industry for some time when I leave, and can't go for work for one of our clients). They also included documents saying that any ideas I came up with on company time were theirs, and any ideas I came up with not on company time, but relating to company business were also theirs.
Lately I've been doing some contract work with another company outside of work hours (with the knowledge of my main employer). Since I'm doing a lot of unique and interesting things with this job I've been wondering if I might get in trouble. I'm not really worried about the non-competition clauses since the work is very different, but I am worried about the IP issues. If I come up with something while doing this outside work, can my employer force me to cough up the invention / idea / whatever?
How legal and enforceable are non-competition and "we own your inventions" type contracts? And if they are fully legal and enforceable, what, aside from quitting, can I do to reclaim some of my rights?
PS: Sorry this is all worded very vaguely but I don't have the contracts readily available now so I can't currently give the exact wording. (but I can find them if it really depends on the exact wording)
My company (Vitana) is currently working with both USB and FireWire / iLink / IEEE 1394. And as I've said lots of times before: they're different technologies for different purposes.
1394 is a peer-to-peer style interface. It has a lot of communications overhead and special modes designed for audio/video data. Because it's peer to peer, each node can communicate with any other node asynchronously.
USB is a host to client style interface. It also has special modes for audio/video data, for bulk transfers (like a scanner's output), control signals and regular data pipes. All communication must pass through the host, and the host initiates all transactions. While it may seem that your USB camera is shoving data into the computer, the computer is actually polling the camera all the time, asking if it has anything more to send.
There's a lot more to these protocols than just the MHz, and neither is better than the other, it's just that often one is more suited to certain tasks than the other.
It is my firm belief that the world is overpopulated. This is the result of personal experience as well as courses in biology and geography.
There are numerous signs of this human overpopulation. In certain geographical regions it's obvious: inadequate food supply and starvation. In others it's less clear. Some places like the US appear very prosperous and so the signs are less clear, but they are there when you know what to look for. Apparently biologists and animal behavioralists can see distinct links between animal populations and overcrowded human populations. Overcrowding in animal populations leads to increases in aggressive behaviour, which has been linked to the higher rate of violent crime in big cities. It also leads to increases in homosexuality in animal populations, and there may again be a link to human animal populations.
This problem is only getting worse, not better. The population of the planet has followed an exponential curve as far back as population data goes and shows no signs of changing. Because of modern medicine more people are surviving to childbearing age. But the global birthrate hasn't changed much over the millenia. Now sure, it has decreased significantly in the "first world" countries, but that's such a tiny share of the world's population that that doesn't have a very big effect.
Now the greatest problem with the exponential growth curve again comes from the comparison to biological data. Nearly every time a population grows exponentially in the wild, it rushes past the carrying capacity of the environment. After this point it very quickly depletes the resources it needs and then crashes. Eventually most biological systems tend to stabilize, but not always. Sometimes the die-off is so severe that the population is wiped out.
The carrying capacity of the planet for its human inhabitants is a huge point of debate in geographical / biological circles. Many think we've already passed it. They point to the fact that the "breadbasket of the world", the US midwest, is only able to produce as much as it is using completely unsustainable farming practices, washing away 2 or 3 cm of extremely fertile topsoil every year (which ends up in the Mississipi delta). Other scientists think there will never be a carrying capacity for the planet, saying that since we're smart humans we'll overcome any natural limits and will be able to sustain this exponential growth rate as long as we want to.
Who is right? Probably neither side is 100% right. But the results of being wrong when assuming that there's no need to worry could be disastrous. For that reason it makes sense to try to limit the population growth of the planet as soon as possible.
China has often been criticized for its alleged human rights violations. Among these are the government imposed limits on the number of children people can have. This is one issue I clearly remember from my classes. China did this because it didn't think it could support the population it knew it would have soon. They calculated that even if they successfully limited every couple to one child the lag effect from the growth of the population would still end up adding over a billion people to their population before the parents of these only-children died of old age. And of course they have been far from successful at limiting couples to one child.
At a most basic level population growth is the result of the difference between two factors, the birth rate and the mortality rate. To reduce population growth the mortality rate must be raised and/or the birth rate must be lowered. Obviously increasing the mortality rate is the easier option. Just as obviously, decreasing the birth rate is the generally more morally easy option. However it's very hard to convince people to control their procreation. Increasing the mortality rate doesn't necessarily mean throwing more wars. It can also mean doing less to help very sick people live. That is where this article comes in.
Keeping a severely damaged baby, or one that is 2 months premature alive is an enormous expense. There is no guarantee of the baby living, and no guarantee of the baby having a reasonable quality of life if it does survive. It is also spending enormous resources to lower the death rate, and doing nothing to reduce the birth rate. Aside from that, admittedly by a small margin, it increases the resource use of the average living creature, thereby reducing the carrying capacity of the planet. Clearly in purely population-centered thinking this is a bad thing.
The human race needs to decide how important the various factors involved here are. How important is the life of the child? How important is the quality of life of the child? How important is the pain and suffering of the parents, and is it reduced or lessened by the child living? And of course, how important is it to try to control the growth of the earth's human population?
As to how my views fit into this... I am undecided. I've extended the question and asked myself if I care if the human population stabilizes, crashes, or grows exponentially. I've also asked myself if I care what happens to the average human's quality of life in the future. So far the answer to both questions is I don't really care. None of these processes moves quickly and nothing is likely to affect me during my lifetime. I don't really feel any enormous allegiance to the human race, and to tell the truth, the suffering of people I haven't met and will never meet doesn't really bother me.
I believe strongly in the principle of enlightened self-interest. When I donate money to a charity I do it because it makes me feel good to know that I'm helping someone. When I play a video game it's because I enjoy the game. When I help someone out, I do it because it makes me feel good and because I know that that person is more likely to want to help me out at some point.
I also believe that everyone lives by the same philosophy, it's just that most people make these same decisions on an unconscious level and so they are able to believe in selfless behaviour.
Anyhow, this wasn't meant as flamebait, but I know many people are likely to have strong reactions to it... so flame away.
Sure, use measurements that make sense for what you're doing. An Electron-Volt is a super useful measure of energy when you're looking at elementary particles. It's the energy an electron gets after being accelerated through a 1 volt potential, something that makes more sense than a Joule (one Kg given a one Newton acceleration).
But most of these very useful measurements are used in specialized areas that don't intersect much with other areas. You're not likely to measure the energy stored in a battery. Nor are you likely to measure your height in Au. On the rare occasions when you have to convert units from eV to J, or Au to m it's easy, one constant.
The current "metric" system has lots of flaws, no doubt. Celcius doesn't have much meaning for scientific measurements, but makes a heckuva lot more sense than Farenheit for weather forcasts. At 0 water freezes, a very important weather number. At 100 water boils (another important weather number in perspective I suppose).
The main flaw with the US Standard system is that it lacks any kind of self consistency. How many square inches are there in an acre? How many pounds of force are exerted by a one slug weight being accelerated at one foot per second squared?
Where it makes sense to keep specialized units, fine, but I'll take my monitor size in cm, my car power in watts, and my height in cm. It takes a while to get used to using a different type of measurement but it's worth it.
Isn't Slashdot the home to geeks who rebel against Microsoft? Microsoft's way of doing things is the familliar, comfortable, and completely *stupid* "Standard" way. Linux is the smart, not immediately intuitive, but *correct* "metric" way of doing things.
As a quick side note though... Anybody have an idea when time will become metric? Sure days and years make great sense from an astronomical point of view, but months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds are all in these ugly multiples of 60, 24, 12, 7.... Ack. The conversion might not be too painful, afterall a minute is just 1.157 millidays...
I get a lot of email, and 40% of it is spam. Sites have posted my email address without my consent. I'm resonably sure that supposedly trustworthy sites are selling my personal information. I routinely block cookies to nearly every site, I use a Windows personal firewall program (AtGuard) to block a lot of network traffic, and surf through a proxy. Yet despite all these efforts information slips out.
So the other day I was reading a book in which a spy had a number of false identities complete with passports, credit cards, Social Security addresses. That got me thinking: "This is what I need." An identity I'd use all the time online that wasn't actually "me" so if information slipped out it wouldn't actually be my personal information.
Seeing how knowledgable some Slashdotters are when it comes to obscure things like numbered swiss bank accounts, etc. I thought I'd ask what you people know about false identities.
How hard would it be to get a credit card / bank account under another name? What are the legal issues involved with doing the above?
Help me out here. What are us males doing that's so chauvenistic or sexist?
I'd ask the female geek types I know, but unfortunately I don't know any. Not one. I work in a hardware / software company with just under 50 employees, 5 of whom are female. They are not geeks.
Now it's not like my company is hiring only guys for technical positions -- we just can't find qualified female tech types. We have a hard enough time finding qualified people to begin with. Half our recent hires have been hired from overseas after a phone interview.
Outside of work, all the women and girls I know are pretty far from being geeks. Most of them know how to use Windows, Word and Netscape, but not much more than that.
When I was in University I knew a few girls who may have qualified as "female geeks" so that's my only real experience with them. From my perspective it didn't seem that they were being treated unfairly or even differently by either the profs or the other students. Now in one sense they did have to "sacrifice their femininity" a bit, but not because of discrimination -- rather because of time. We were so overworked in our program that girls didn't have time to style their hair or paint their nails -- but then again the guys had to go days without shaving.
In my (albiet limited) experience the opression against female geeks is just as imaginary as the forces trying to make girls into barbie dolls. I don't like the "barbie doll" look and most guys I know don't either. Yet I seem to constantly hear whining about how I (as a member of some larger group) am pushing girls to anorexia, or into having boob-jobs, or discouraging them from doing science, etc.
There are only three ways I can explain the huge discrepancy between my experiences and what I'm always hearing:
Everyone else in society really is repressive and unfair to women, I'm just utterly blind to it
I'm a male chauvenist pig and I just don't realize it
The girls who are complaining are overly sensitive and see a problem where there really isn't one
Now my preference is to go with the third option, because it implies no great failing on my part. But also because it matches my experience in other areas.
I have a (very nongeeky) sister. And I've spent enough time around her to know that males and females experience the world very differently. What passes as "friendly ribbing" among guys, is serious inults among girls. And where girls tend to be loving and supportive of eachother -- the closest you see to that among guys is friendliness.
As for the original source of complaint, it didn't seem too sexist to me at all. She-Geek to me is more inane journalistic "headline eye-grabbing stupidity" than sexism. So I'll leave with a question -- what would have been a non-sexist appropriate title that's just as "eye grabbing"?
As far as I know the ad servers work when someone "clicks through" an ad, not when someone loads the image. On general principle I refuse to click through any ads on any site. So I'm just helping save bandwith by not loading any ads.
When you watch a TV show you really like, do you make sure to watch all the ads too? Do you make sure to buy all the products advertised?
Some may say I'm getting a free ride on Slashdot, and maybe that's true. I like to think I contribute by moderating, posting on-topic and informative material, and generally being a good user.
If the Slashdot powers that be disagree, they can feel free to block my access or ensure that I generate money for them in order to access the site. But I think that goes against the general idea of the values that Slashdot tends to represent.
Sure, and then they discover the data on the floppy somehow became corrupted. Or Sis had to use a floppy for her school project so she formatted it and walked off with it...
It's not like without this stored password the root account is forever unavailable. I have a strong tendancy to forget my root password since I use the account so seldom. I therefore know how insecure any machine is when you actually have physical access to it. But having said that, this solution has a few big flaws.
Take it from a guy who has worked on both. (In the last year).
FireWire, trademarked by Apple, is IEEE 1394. It is a peer-to-peer network architecture with the limit that no "loops" can be present.
While USB2 is hugely fast, that's no reason to say it will replace 1394. The next generation 1394 will be monstrously fast too. But they're intended for different uses.
The communication styles is vastly different. 1394 is peer to peer. A node can initiate a request for any other node and the data follows the path between them. USB is hub to leaf, to get data from a USB device you have to poll it and ask if it has any data to send.
1394 is ideal for connecting the various components of a home entertainment system. No one device is the root, etc. If you want to play the audio track from your camcorder you don't need to involve your VCR or TV.
USB/USB2 is ideal for connecting things to a computer. The computer is the root node, everything else branches off it. So if you have a USB camera that lets you record audio clips, and USB speakers, the data first goes to the computer, then out to the speakers.
IEEE 1394 is not proprietary, though it's true that FireWire is trademarked.
Neither technology is inherently better, they're just very different, intended for different uses.
Really? Because most British people I know don't speak perfect english. They speak some whacked-out version with no 'r' sounds and strange words I don't recognize.
But having said that, I've heard there is a real problem with "intellectual" english in black communities in the US. I've seen reports saying that blacks tend to drag eachother down. If you speak properly, or do well in school, or show an interest in science, you're insulted by your peers and are told you're "acting white".
Now I don't know any of this first-hand of course, but if it's the case, it's no wonder it's hard for a black person to succeed.
Again, I don't know if there is a need for "artificial encouragement" here - little girls *are* given Barbies and baby dolls, and boys are given mechanical toys. Girls are expected to be quiet and feminine, while boys are encouraged to get dirty and take apart the toaster. Those are generalizations, and some families are providing non-stereotypical upbringings for kids, but mainstream media (including commercials) gives the same old message.
Like most kids I know, I was given the toys I wanted. I don't know where people get the idea that parents influence kids by giving them gender-biased toys. Parents give kids the toys kids want or the kids complain.
Nearly every time I have heard of attempts to make a crossover toy it has failed miserably. Anybody remember "My Buddy", the doll for boys? It was a horrible failure.
There is a lack of good software for girls right now... The fact that girls aren't drawn to the blood-and-gore shoot-em-ups does NOT reflect a lack of ability to program!
No, but it does reflect a gender difference. Males are drawn to games that simulate the primitive hunting instincts. Girls are not.
But the lack of games out there does mean that computers may not be as attractive for young females. Hopefully this situation will improve, at least the game companies will someday want to tap that market that they are missing...
Do you honestly believe that game companies are intentionally ignoring this potential market??? The game business is incredibly competitive, and 90% of games flop when they hit the market. There's no way that game companies would intentionally not target a huge potential market like girls.
The reason you don't see more software for girls is: 1) Making a game that guys will like is easy. The formula is pretty simple. Nobody yet knows what girls will want. 2) At least in the days before the Internet exploded in size, there really wasn't a market for software for girls. Most girls just wouldn't sit down alone in front of a computer for hours.
It's not like big scholarships are being given to stupid girls or something.
Not to stupid girls, but to relatively smart people only because they're girls.
In my university program there were 3 girls in a class of about 30. One girl got a scolarship that was given out to "a female from XXX county in the Engineering Physics program". She was the only female in the program, so she didn't even have to compete to get the scolarship. If, however, the scolarship had been to the top student from that county there's a very good chance she would not have received the scolarship.
Slashdot Mirror
I just saw this new James Bond movie, and the computer-related thing I learned from it beats anything from NBC's movie of the week.
Apparently bombs run Microsoft Windows CE.
Not to give away the plot but there's a closeup of a bomb's extremely colorful LCD information screen shown in this movie... and clearly displayed in the lower left corner of the LCD: "Windows CE" and a logo. Watch for it, it's good for a laugh.
The jokes just write themselves!
There's something sick with a culture that has such an obsessive need to know everything about things which really don't affect them.
Why do people care who Sarah Michelle Gellar is dating? Do they actually think they'd stand a chance with her otherwise? Who cares if a certain former football star got arrested for drug possession? Does it matter if your favourite entertainer is a satanist?
If people are honest with themselves they'll realize the only way that the fortune / misfortune of a celebrity affects them is in how it affects the entertainment they provide or provided.
This also goes beyond celebrity. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in traffic accidents all over the world, and flying is statistically much safer than driving, yet when an airplane crashes it jumps to the top of the news.
If you're a frequent traveller and this is a repeatable problem, I can see how you might be interested, but most people seem interested just in the event. It's the whole "rubbernecking at the scene of an accident" crap.
The only part of the posting I completely disagree with is the second last paragraph saying "It is, indeed, a bad thing when someone dies. (most of the time, not counting terrorists and such)"
All human life is somewhat valuable. (Though I think we place a little too much importance on it here in the "west"). To the family of a "terrorist" they may be a freedom-fighter, doing what little they can to fight back against an oppressive regime. It's just as unfair to say that someone's life is less valuable because someone else has labelled them a terrorist as it is to say someone's life is more valuable because someone has decided they're a celebrity.
I think you're forgetting something. The timeframe. VCR tapes have been around for how long? 20 years? In that 20 years, the "size" of 1 gigabyte will chage tremendously.
I remember when I first downloaded Linux it was about a hundred megs and I was using a 2400 bps connection. I just let it run for 12+ hours.
How long before someone with a fast connection decides it's worth 12 hours to download the 6 gig Matrix DVD?
The cost of DVD writers is only a short term barrier too. Sure, they're expensive now, but do you really think that in 10 years, it will be expensive to get 10 Gig of removeable storage?
In less than 10 years, the hard drive my computer uses has undergone a 100 fold increase in size. The bandwith of my internet connection has undergone a nearly 1000 fold increase in size. But during that time my VCR hasn't changed, and DVDs were supposed to last that long too.
Executive Summary:
Sorry if this rambles a bit, but I wanted to get it all out and submit it before the story scrolls off the end of the main slashdot page. I also hope this gets moderated up because I happen to know a lot about this. My stepdad is an eye surgeon (his specialty is the retina though, not the cornea). I've done university projects on laser eye surgery and had it done to my own eyes. I am not a doctor, and may be wrong about some of this information because it has been a while since I researched it, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly right. You can find a good chunk of this information on the web if you look hard enough.
Ok, having said that, here's what I know.
You have two options when it comes to laser surgery: LASIK and PRK (Photo Refractive Keratectomy). I know more about PRK because that is what I had done to me. I also know that my eye-surgeon stepdad recommended PRK over Lasik though I don't know if this is a general recommendation or just for my case.
Lasik involves cutting a flap in the cornea, peeling the flap back, shaping the cells with a laser, and lowering the flap back into place. Lasik can deal with a wider degree of myopia than PRK and has a faster recovery time, however there is a small amount of scarring on the eye from the healing. One flaw with Lasik is that it leaves a weak point in the eye -- the flap can come lose later, but I think this takes a lot of pressure and once the eye has fully healed this isn't an issue.
PRK does things by simply using a laser to shave sub-cellular layers off the eye. The laser used is a pulsed UV laser that basically blasts apart molecules letting it do it without heat.
There are different types of PRK machines. The differences include the width of the laser beam used, and the apeture control mechanism. The older machines have a mechanical apeture that progressively widens (at least when flattening the lens). These machines produce extremely minute step-like structures on the eye as they change size. The newer machines use different apeture techniques to make the flattening smoother.
When I talked to my stepdad about laser surgery a couple of years ago he was hesitant because there wasn't enough clinical data on long term results. About this time two years ago I asked him again and this time he recommended it. One of his colleagues is acknowledged as a leader in the field, and has all the newest eqipment.
I went to this doctor and they told me what was involved in having my eyes done. Because of my previous prescription (astigmatic with -8.5 and -9 eyes) and because of my unusually large pupils I could only have it done with a very specialized machine. Apparently there are only three of these machines in North America.
Anyhow, they suggested a treatment, I agreed, my stepdad thought it was a good idea so I went for it. They quoted me a price of $2000 Canadian ($1300 US) per eye to have the surgery done. They recommended both eyes at once so that is what I had done.
The day of the surgery I had my mother drive me to Montreal where the surgery was done. I waited in the waiting room for an hour or so, and then a nurse put drops in my eyes. The drops used are the same ones they use when you have pressure tests done on your eyes. Basically all they do is anesthatize the surface of the eyeball without affecting it in any other way. About 5 minutes later the drops had taken effect and they brought me in.
Surgery consisted of looking up at a red dot while they blasted the cornea away. While the surgical laser was on, my eye saw flashes of blue light everywhere while the laser pulsed. I guess this was the UV light losing energy and becoming visible inside my eye? Anyhow, the other thing that I noticed (which they didn't warn me about), was that I could faintly smell the burning flesh of my eye as they operated. All-in-all surgery was a pretty nervous experience (which is why they offered some strong relaxants beforehand). They do essentially nothing to immobilize your eye as they work, and trust you to keep looking at that red dot. But the good thing is it was over quickly. I think the surgery took less than two minutes in the end.
So after surgery my mom drove me home. My eyes were very irritated by the whole process and keeping them open was something I wasn't up to. One eye was irritated enough that tears were pouring out of it for at least half an hour.
The recovery weeks (2) were pretty rough. My vision was pretty similar to my glasses-less vision before the operation (when I could keep my eyes open) but it couldn't be improved by glasses or anything else. My eyes also really itched, and sometimes really burned. The tissue was healing, but that isn't a pleasant thing. And another problem was boredom. When you can't see anything at all, and you're used to seeing, life is boring! I couldn't use a computer, could hardly watch TV, couldn't read, etc. But soon enough my corneas healed.
After that the eyes took another six months or so to adjust. During this time my vision changed slowly from bad to great. Now apparently I've got slightly better than 20/20 vision... during the day.
The one problem with my eye surgery was the effect on my night vision. My eyes now have a change in their curve, which means that at night I see halos. Sometimes they're worse than other times, but they're always there. When I look at a LED in an otherwise black room I see the LED surrounded by a soft and fairly large halo. I'm sometimes bothered by this at night when driving: stoplights and car's lights are haloed. But most of the time I don't notice it (it's still there though).
The best part of this whole process, where I noticed the biggest difference was waking up. I'm sure many of you with bad eyes know the experience of waking up, and sticking your head up to your alarm clock to see the time. It was such a huge thrill to be able to wake up, open my eyes, and see the time with no effort. Being able to see the time on the clock on waking up is something everyone with good eyesight (these days me included) takes for granted. And it was such a great feeling to wake up and be able to see.
Now I might be wrong about certain things, but ask me. If you want to know more about my experiences I can tell you anything. If you have questions I can't answer I can ask my stepdad.
yep, and you don't even need the extra parens "bob".equals(blah) works fine too
I programmed in Java before C and found it to be much easier. The difficulty in Java is simply in understanding object orientation. Once you understand that it's all easy.
Compare that to C where you have to understand pointers, precompiler directives, makefiles, and all kinds of nasty things.
The above example shows one thing that Java does amazingly well compared to C: strings. As a beginner programmer the concept that a string is a null-terminated array of characters, and that when you talk about the "string variable" you're actually referencing a pointer to the first element in that array... that's just plain hard. Java makes Strings super easy.
Compare:
if (strcmp(blah, "bob")) to
(ps, you also have to include the right libraries for this one using strange precompiler syntax but we'll ignore that for now)
if (blah.equals("bob"))
Which is more intuitive?
Java is very young, very unstable, and not very well suited to certain things. But I'm convinced that if you give it about 5 years it will be a huge mainstream language. I'm actually surprised that in such a short time, and despite all its flaws, that it's already in third place!
It could be that, or it could be that Microsoft hopes that MSNBC will at least put a good spin on the news, and not blame Microsoft or NT as much as the other news sources will.
Or it could be coincidence....... Naah!
Looks like this guy(?) flipz has been pretty busy lately. He(?) got into the Department of Veterans Affairs (hack) site, the US Army Reserve Command (hack) and even the White Sands Missle Range (hack) site. They're all NT boxen. I'm no expert or nuthin, but I betcha there might be some common NT security flaw he(?)'s exploiting. All the sites mention his(?) love f0bic. I wonder how she(?) feels about this.
Attrition.org's mirrors
Cookie Pal intercepts all cookie-setting attempts as they happen and lets you decide on a site-by-site basis whether to accept the cookie or not. It also lets you set wildcards so anything from *.doubleclick.net is rejected, and *.slashdot.org is accepted. Mine has a huge list of auto-reject sites, a small list of auto-accept sites. If the site I'm visiting isn't in either list, Cookie Pal prompts me with 4 options: Accept Always, Reject Always, Accept This Time, Reject This Time. I could just as easily have it auto-reject or auto-accept sites not in my lists. It's a very lightweight program with a simple but effective UI that I can't recommend enough.
AtGuard takes care of the banner ads (although it can do a lot more than that). It is basically a transparent firewall. Some of the more useful features: block images based on whole or partial URL matching (anything from doubleclick is rejected as is anything matching "*ad/*"), block HTTP_REFERRER fields, prevent animated gifs from looping...
Thanks to these tools I haven't seen an unwanted banner ad or animated gif in months, and the only cookies I have are the really useful ones that store preferences or enable shopping carts, etc.
I want to see if I can add some of these features to Mozilla (when I get more time) so everyone can have them available and so the internet-ad economy collapses. Call me a luddite, but I really miss the days when it was unheard of to even have a bit of promotional text on your web page.
What are the emerging technologies from the last few years which most affect cryptography? How important are:
To continue the question... as I understand it the impact of Quantum Computing is in its ability to factor immense numbers extremely quickly. Does all cryptography depend on factoring large numbers, or only a certain subset?
What are the odds? Something worth reading by someone named Katz?
Unfortunately I'm not in California. I'm in Ottawa, Canada.
In case you're interested, the contract I signed reads:
First let me say that was a very informative an interesting article. But while we have attention on IP law, allow me to branch the discussion.
One issue that has been bothering me lately in regards to IP law is the matter of contracts signed with an employer that gives them very broad powers.
When I signed up for my current job I was somewhat desperate and wanted a job quickly. I didn't expect to be around long and because of that I signed away some rights I probably shouldn't have.
The documents I signed included one containing non-competition clauses (I can't work directly in the same industry for some time when I leave, and can't go for work for one of our clients). They also included documents saying that any ideas I came up with on company time were theirs, and any ideas I came up with not on company time, but relating to company business were also theirs.
Lately I've been doing some contract work with another company outside of work hours (with the knowledge of my main employer). Since I'm doing a lot of unique and interesting things with this job I've been wondering if I might get in trouble. I'm not really worried about the non-competition clauses since the work is very different, but I am worried about the IP issues. If I come up with something while doing this outside work, can my employer force me to cough up the invention / idea / whatever?
How legal and enforceable are non-competition and "we own your inventions" type contracts? And if they are fully legal and enforceable, what, aside from quitting, can I do to reclaim some of my rights?
PS: Sorry this is all worded very vaguely but I don't have the contracts readily available now so I can't currently give the exact wording. (but I can find them if it really depends on the exact wording)
My company (Vitana) is currently working with both USB and FireWire / iLink / IEEE 1394. And as I've said lots of times before: they're different technologies for different purposes.
1394 is a peer-to-peer style interface. It has a lot of communications overhead and special modes designed for audio/video data. Because it's peer to peer, each node can communicate with any other node asynchronously.
USB is a host to client style interface. It also has special modes for audio/video data, for bulk transfers (like a scanner's output), control signals and regular data pipes. All communication must pass through the host, and the host initiates all transactions. While it may seem that your USB camera is shoving data into the computer, the computer is actually polling the camera all the time, asking if it has anything more to send.
There's a lot more to these protocols than just the MHz, and neither is better than the other, it's just that often one is more suited to certain tasks than the other.
It is my firm belief that the world is overpopulated. This is the result of personal experience as well as courses in biology and geography.
There are numerous signs of this human overpopulation. In certain geographical regions it's obvious: inadequate food supply and starvation. In others it's less clear. Some places like the US appear very prosperous and so the signs are less clear, but they are there when you know what to look for. Apparently biologists and animal behavioralists can see distinct links between animal populations and overcrowded human populations. Overcrowding in animal populations leads to increases in aggressive behaviour, which has been linked to the higher rate of violent crime in big cities. It also leads to increases in homosexuality in animal populations, and there may again be a link to human animal populations.
This problem is only getting worse, not better. The population of the planet has followed an exponential curve as far back as population data goes and shows no signs of changing. Because of modern medicine more people are surviving to childbearing age. But the global birthrate hasn't changed much over the millenia. Now sure, it has decreased significantly in the "first world" countries, but that's such a tiny share of the world's population that that doesn't have a very big effect.
Now the greatest problem with the exponential growth curve again comes from the comparison to biological data. Nearly every time a population grows exponentially in the wild, it rushes past the carrying capacity of the environment. After this point it very quickly depletes the resources it needs and then crashes. Eventually most biological systems tend to stabilize, but not always. Sometimes the die-off is so severe that the population is wiped out.
The carrying capacity of the planet for its human inhabitants is a huge point of debate in geographical / biological circles. Many think we've already passed it. They point to the fact that the "breadbasket of the world", the US midwest, is only able to produce as much as it is using completely unsustainable farming practices, washing away 2 or 3 cm of extremely fertile topsoil every year (which ends up in the Mississipi delta). Other scientists think there will never be a carrying capacity for the planet, saying that since we're smart humans we'll overcome any natural limits and will be able to sustain this exponential growth rate as long as we want to.
Who is right? Probably neither side is 100% right. But the results of being wrong when assuming that there's no need to worry could be disastrous. For that reason it makes sense to try to limit the population growth of the planet as soon as possible.
China has often been criticized for its alleged human rights violations. Among these are the government imposed limits on the number of children people can have. This is one issue I clearly remember from my classes. China did this because it didn't think it could support the population it knew it would have soon. They calculated that even if they successfully limited every couple to one child the lag effect from the growth of the population would still end up adding over a billion people to their population before the parents of these only-children died of old age. And of course they have been far from successful at limiting couples to one child.
At a most basic level population growth is the result of the difference between two factors, the birth rate and the mortality rate. To reduce population growth the mortality rate must be raised and/or the birth rate must be lowered. Obviously increasing the mortality rate is the easier option. Just as obviously, decreasing the birth rate is the generally more morally easy option. However it's very hard to convince people to control their procreation. Increasing the mortality rate doesn't necessarily mean throwing more wars. It can also mean doing less to help very sick people live. That is where this article comes in.
Keeping a severely damaged baby, or one that is 2 months premature alive is an enormous expense. There is no guarantee of the baby living, and no guarantee of the baby having a reasonable quality of life if it does survive. It is also spending enormous resources to lower the death rate, and doing nothing to reduce the birth rate. Aside from that, admittedly by a small margin, it increases the resource use of the average living creature, thereby reducing the carrying capacity of the planet. Clearly in purely population-centered thinking this is a bad thing.
The human race needs to decide how important the various factors involved here are. How important is the life of the child? How important is the quality of life of the child? How important is the pain and suffering of the parents, and is it reduced or lessened by the child living? And of course, how important is it to try to control the growth of the earth's human population?
As to how my views fit into this... I am undecided. I've extended the question and asked myself if I care if the human population stabilizes, crashes, or grows exponentially. I've also asked myself if I care what happens to the average human's quality of life in the future. So far the answer to both questions is I don't really care. None of these processes moves quickly and nothing is likely to affect me during my lifetime. I don't really feel any enormous allegiance to the human race, and to tell the truth, the suffering of people I haven't met and will never meet doesn't really bother me.
I believe strongly in the principle of enlightened self-interest. When I donate money to a charity I do it because it makes me feel good to know that I'm helping someone. When I play a video game it's because I enjoy the game. When I help someone out, I do it because it makes me feel good and because I know that that person is more likely to want to help me out at some point.
I also believe that everyone lives by the same philosophy, it's just that most people make these same decisions on an unconscious level and so they are able to believe in selfless behaviour.
Anyhow, this wasn't meant as flamebait, but I know many people are likely to have strong reactions to it... so flame away.
Sure, use measurements that make sense for what you're doing. An Electron-Volt is a super useful measure of energy when you're looking at elementary particles. It's the energy an electron gets after being accelerated through a 1 volt potential, something that makes more sense than a Joule (one Kg given a one Newton acceleration).
But most of these very useful measurements are used in specialized areas that don't intersect much with other areas. You're not likely to measure the energy stored in a battery. Nor are you likely to measure your height in Au. On the rare occasions when you have to convert units from eV to J, or Au to m it's easy, one constant.
The current "metric" system has lots of flaws, no doubt. Celcius doesn't have much meaning for scientific measurements, but makes a heckuva lot more sense than Farenheit for weather forcasts. At 0 water freezes, a very important weather number. At 100 water boils (another important weather number in perspective I suppose).
The main flaw with the US Standard system is that it lacks any kind of self consistency. How many square inches are there in an acre? How many pounds of force are exerted by a one slug weight being accelerated at one foot per second squared?
Where it makes sense to keep specialized units, fine, but I'll take my monitor size in cm, my car power in watts, and my height in cm. It takes a while to get used to using a different type of measurement but it's worth it.
Isn't Slashdot the home to geeks who rebel against Microsoft? Microsoft's way of doing things is the familliar, comfortable, and completely *stupid* "Standard" way. Linux is the smart, not immediately intuitive, but *correct* "metric" way of doing things.
As a quick side note though... Anybody have an idea when time will become metric? Sure days and years make great sense from an astronomical point of view, but months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds are all in these ugly multiples of 60, 24, 12, 7.... Ack. The conversion might not be too painful, afterall a minute is just 1.157 millidays...
I get a lot of email, and 40% of it is spam. Sites have posted my email address without my consent. I'm resonably sure that supposedly trustworthy sites are selling my personal information. I routinely block cookies to nearly every site, I use a Windows personal firewall program (AtGuard) to block a lot of network traffic, and surf through a proxy. Yet despite all these efforts information slips out.
So the other day I was reading a book in which a spy had a number of false identities complete with passports, credit cards, Social Security addresses. That got me thinking: "This is what I need." An identity I'd use all the time online that wasn't actually "me" so if information slipped out it wouldn't actually be my personal information.
Seeing how knowledgable some Slashdotters are when it comes to obscure things like numbered swiss bank accounts, etc. I thought I'd ask what you people know about false identities.
How hard would it be to get a credit card / bank account under another name? What are the legal issues involved with doing the above?
Help me out here. What are us males doing that's so chauvenistic or sexist?
I'd ask the female geek types I know, but unfortunately I don't know any. Not one. I work in a hardware / software company with just under 50 employees, 5 of whom are female. They are not geeks.
Now it's not like my company is hiring only guys for technical positions -- we just can't find qualified female tech types. We have a hard enough time finding qualified people to begin with. Half our recent hires have been hired from overseas after a phone interview.
Outside of work, all the women and girls I know are pretty far from being geeks. Most of them know how to use Windows, Word and Netscape, but not much more than that.
When I was in University I knew a few girls who may have qualified as "female geeks" so that's my only real experience with them. From my perspective it didn't seem that they were being treated unfairly or even differently by either the profs or the other students. Now in one sense they did have to "sacrifice their femininity" a bit, but not because of discrimination -- rather because of time. We were so overworked in our program that girls didn't have time to style their hair or paint their nails -- but then again the guys had to go days without shaving.
In my (albiet limited) experience the opression against female geeks is just as imaginary as the forces trying to make girls into barbie dolls. I don't like the "barbie doll" look and most guys I know don't either. Yet I seem to constantly hear whining about how I (as a member of some larger group) am pushing girls to anorexia, or into having boob-jobs, or discouraging them from doing science, etc.
There are only three ways I can explain the huge discrepancy between my experiences and what I'm always hearing:
Now my preference is to go with the third option, because it implies no great failing on my part. But also because it matches my experience in other areas.
I have a (very nongeeky) sister. And I've spent enough time around her to know that males and females experience the world very differently. What passes as "friendly ribbing" among guys, is serious inults among girls. And where girls tend to be loving and supportive of eachother -- the closest you see to that among guys is friendliness.
As for the original source of complaint, it didn't seem too sexist to me at all. She-Geek to me is more inane journalistic "headline eye-grabbing stupidity" than sexism. So I'll leave with a question -- what would have been a non-sexist appropriate title that's just as "eye grabbing"?
As far as I know the ad servers work when someone "clicks through" an ad, not when someone loads the image. On general principle I refuse to click through any ads on any site. So I'm just helping save bandwith by not loading any ads.
When you watch a TV show you really like, do you make sure to watch all the ads too? Do you make sure to buy all the products advertised?
Some may say I'm getting a free ride on Slashdot, and maybe that's true. I like to think I contribute by moderating, posting on-topic and informative material, and generally being a good user.
If the Slashdot powers that be disagree, they can feel free to block my access or ensure that I generate money for them in order to access the site. But I think that goes against the general idea of the values that Slashdot tends to represent.
Sure, and then they discover the data on the floppy somehow became corrupted. Or Sis had to use a floppy for her school project so she formatted it and walked off with it...
It's not like without this stored password the root account is forever unavailable. I have a strong tendancy to forget my root password since I use the account so seldom. I therefore know how insecure any machine is when you actually have physical access to it. But having said that, this solution has a few big flaws.
Take it from a guy who has worked on both. (In the last year).
FireWire, trademarked by Apple, is IEEE 1394. It is a peer-to-peer network architecture with the limit that no "loops" can be present.
While USB2 is hugely fast, that's no reason to say it will replace 1394. The next generation 1394 will be monstrously fast too. But they're intended for different uses.
The communication styles is vastly different. 1394 is peer to peer. A node can initiate a request for any other node and the data follows the path between them. USB is hub to leaf, to get data from a USB device you have to poll it and ask if it has any data to send.
1394 is ideal for connecting the various components of a home entertainment system. No one device is the root, etc. If you want to play the audio track from your camcorder you don't need to involve your VCR or TV.
USB/USB2 is ideal for connecting things to a computer. The computer is the root node, everything else branches off it. So if you have a USB camera that lets you record audio clips, and USB speakers, the data first goes to the computer, then out to the speakers.
IEEE 1394 is not proprietary, though it's true that FireWire is trademarked.
Neither technology is inherently better, they're just very different, intended for different uses.
Really? Because most British people I know don't speak perfect english. They speak some whacked-out version with no 'r' sounds and strange words I don't recognize.
But having said that, I've heard there is a real problem with "intellectual" english in black communities in the US. I've seen reports saying that blacks tend to drag eachother down. If you speak properly, or do well in school, or show an interest in science, you're insulted by your peers and are told you're "acting white".
Now I don't know any of this first-hand of course, but if it's the case, it's no wonder it's hard for a black person to succeed.
Like most kids I know, I was given the toys I wanted. I don't know where people get the idea that parents influence kids by giving them gender-biased toys. Parents give kids the toys kids want or the kids complain.
Nearly every time I have heard of attempts to make a crossover toy it has failed miserably. Anybody remember "My Buddy", the doll for boys? It was a horrible failure.
No, but it does reflect a gender difference. Males are drawn to games that simulate the primitive hunting instincts. Girls are not.
Do you honestly believe that game companies are intentionally ignoring this potential market??? The game business is incredibly competitive, and 90% of games flop when they hit the market. There's no way that game companies would intentionally not target a huge potential market like girls.
The reason you don't see more software for girls is:
1) Making a game that guys will like is easy. The formula is pretty simple. Nobody yet knows what girls will want.
2) At least in the days before the Internet exploded in size, there really wasn't a market for software for girls. Most girls just wouldn't sit down alone in front of a computer for hours.
Not to stupid girls, but to relatively smart people only because they're girls.
In my university program there were 3 girls in a class of about 30. One girl got a scolarship that was given out to "a female from XXX county in the Engineering Physics program". She was the only female in the program, so she didn't even have to compete to get the scolarship. If, however, the scolarship had been to the top student from that county there's a very good chance she would not have received the scolarship.