Once you've spent the money to purchase the non-FOSS tools that the school requires you to use, you're not going to seek out free/open source replacements for those tools.
Key phrase there, "spent the money".
Students in general don't tend to have oodles of disposable cash. South Africa doesn't exactly have a reputation as above-average for personal incomes. Therefore, this "decree" only really means one of two things:
The SA ED has effectively ordered people to pirate Microsoft Office and Delphi, or
People will use open source tools anyway and just output in Office-compatible file formats.
A few years from now, the SA ED will scratch its head in wonderment as to why every document submitted to it has very slightly screwed up formatting, but in a mysteriously consistent way.
And considering this story comes from South Africa, they will most likely blame witches and torture a few innocent women to death.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast.
"But that bitch Marissa did it, and the analysts all rave over her! Desks? Bah, those slackers don't really need desks, buy a few thousand bean-back chairs for 'em!"
Someone explain to me why the holy bloody fuck these enemies of the American people haven't taken an involuntary 8-day vacation along with the rest of the noncritical federal government?
Though I guess even admitting you were at the scene of a crime will have caused people problems in the past.
In virtually all crimes, the criminal witnessed the crime. Therefore, one of the witnesses usually did it. Therefore, admitting you saw the crime takes your chances ending up in a cage for that particular crime from one-in-seven-billion to one of a handful of "parties of interest".
Never speak to the police unless subpoenaed. And even then, never speak to the police without a lawyer present. And even then, speak through your lawyer, not directly to the police.
Like laws have ever stopped corporations or other criminals
So... To deal with the fact that corporations and criminals ignore the law, you propose what exactly - More laws for them to ignore? Or that we simply deprive ourselves of good things to keep it out of "their" hands?
The privacy issues here really don't bother me so much - We already have fairly strong laws regarding who can store/share information about minors, and with whom.
The bigger issue IMO comes from the described use of easily-measured statistics over more difficult, but meaningful measures of learning. 55WPM with 43 correct (what does that second number even mean, anyway? "No Billy, that says potato, not aardvark" )? Useless, unless we want to train a generation of speed-readers. More importantly, did he fully appreciate the racist subtext inherent in Jane ordering Spot to run?
Sad. On the one hand, I weep for the future of humanity; On the other, I have absolutely no concerns about job security for as long as I want to stay in the workforce. But hey, I see a great future for the the trophy manufacturing industry!
That might work in the US, but here in Australia it is more common for eateries to have notices saying "no separate billing", which puts the onus on the customers to work it out for themselves.
Hmm, I can see an 0-day exploit in that protocol - "seven tables for one, please"
Careful when trying to screw Google out of their due, son.;)
More seriously - Seriously? What possible purpose does such a rule serve, except to make things more difficult for everyone (including the server, who gets handed a pile of $20s and seven distinct requests for change in bizarre amounts)?
There's a reason nobody lives in those places. It's because there's no economic activity. You can't live without money. Next obvious question.
Okay, how about: "Did you know we have literally tens of millions of acres of those those unoccupied relatively safe places, all within an hour's drive of a population center?"
Personally, I live in the "densely populated" Northeastern US - I live within an hour of two major cities. And land goes for around $1000-$2000 per acre around here. Other than an irrational-bordering-on-insane emotional attachment to a physical location that actively tries to kill them, I can't even remotely fathom why anyone would want to live in Tornado Alley rather than in my area.
And just for the record, many of the disaster-prone areas we hear about don't exactly have the most thriving economy around - NOLA makes a great example of that. We have a literal sprawling low-density ghetto, sitting below sea level in a coastal flood-plain in hurricane central, that completely unsurprisingly got washed off the face of the planet... And the morons moved back when it dried out??? Seriously, WTF, how dumb do we as a species get?
"Well, it shouldn't happen but every 20-30 years" - So I guess you want to give Mother Nature another chance to line you up in her crosshairs?
Keep in mind that while a dedicated consumer-grade wifi router draws around 5W, a netbook will draw 20-25W (possibly more).
Although that may not sound like much, a 24/7 load of 20W, at $0.15/KWH will cost you $2.16/month. You will break even vs just buying a low-end (Rosewill, etc) new router in about 10 months, or two years for a mid-consumer-grade LinkSys/DLink.
Admittedly, your solution will give you just about the highest-end wireless router you can get (limited by the radio in your netbook, of course), theoretically supporting any networking feature available with Linux. In practice though, how often do you really need anything beyond WPA2, IPv4 routing with a basic "block everything except what I allow" firewall, and perhaps (if you use VPN a lot) IPSec support?
Guess what? You can already build a concrete dome for around that much money. It will protect the whole house. OMGWTFBBQ this is a solved problem.
Holy fail to read even TFS, Batman!;)
"You could design it to be perfectly resistant. But it would not be a place you'd want to live". Most people would not want to live in a giant concrete dome (though I personally would, and I suspect you'll find a fairly unrepresentatively large sample of Slashdotters who would say the same). Simple as that.
That said...
I have an even better solution, though. Fucking move. Anyone who bought a house on a floodplain in tornado country is a goddamned idiot.
This, a thousand times this! Every time I hear about the federal government bailing out people stupid enough to live a place likely to get wiped out once a decade or so, I can't help but think exactly what you've expressed. The US has vast tracts of uninhabited, relatively safe land, yet we have people trying to live in the worst possible choices. Flood zones, tornado alley, scrub-brush tinderboxes, earthquake central.
I have nothing against having FEMA around for the freak "storm of the century" events. But if your day-to-day life at least part of the year involves always listening for that warning klaxon in the distance - You should not live where you do, should not expect the rest of us to bail you out - Period.
Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.
What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.
Dear mods:
The parent post does not count as flamebait, quite the opposite, he has very bluntly and articulately identified the root cause of the current overabundance of jellyfish.
Humans can still fish (although we really should limit ourselves to recreational fishing, and stick with farmed fish for food production). But modern supertrawlers don't just decimate fish populations, they catch the entire population in an area.
You want to get rid of jellyfish, get rid of these floating offenses to biodiversity by any means possible. Ban them, sink them, make their crew pariahs. If the fish come back, the jellyfish will vanish.
Psychologically it's a different thing. Giving someone a small sum of raw cash instead of a gift worth about the same is generally considered crass.
Only because we expect the humans giving us gifts to know us well enough to make it a bit more personal. In contrast, I want Yahoo to know as little about me as possible. They can send me $12.50 in BTC to an anonymous address, for all I care about how they reward people.
Uncle Tony writing a $12.50 check: Crass.
Yahoo writing a $12.50 check: Insultingly cheap, but otherwise okay.
So if Yahoo's recent history means anything, we can expect that the first bug bounty will pay 2 million dollars, which Marissa will claim for finding a font the wrong color, then she will immediately order the program ended for nebulous "abuses"?
Of course, that would still sound better than giving out an insulting coupon for company swag.;)
Slashdot--the only place where everyone celebrates Manning and Snowden because "all information should be free", but condem teh evil corporations for leaking information about teh other evil corporations.
If Samsung had released this information out of some desire to force more open negotiations on the whole industry, I would applaud them.
Instead, we have some weaselly Samsung exec bragging about cheating and getting away with it, solely for their own benefit in a specific contract negotiation.
If you don't see the difference between that and Snowden or Manning... You just won't.
Since when is science objective? Fat cat climate scientists riding high on the tax payer grants don't do a damn thing objective!
You have confused "idiots who can't grasp the math and instead accept Limbaugh's drivel as gospel" with "scientists". Easy mistake, apparently, since the majority of Americans make the same one.
How would one go about converting a Flash game like this to HTML5?
First, you learn HTML2 (or 3, or 4, doesn't much matter). Then you learn CSS. Then, you learn Javascript. Then, you learn HTML5. Then, you learn Flash. Then, you learn ActionScript. And finally - You break into TwinBeard HQ, steal the source code to Frog Fractions, and begin the long process of porting it.
After all that, though, you probably already have a pretty good grasp of fractions.
If I could believe he hadn't been leaned upon by the government. Can we responsibly believe that?
Unfortunately, I would have to say conclusively "no". We've already seen quite a few big names on our side tacitly admit that the NSA has pushed on them - Phil Zimmerman, PJ of Groklaw, even Linux Torvalds.
Currently, I'd say we've reached the point where we can't trust any software in the wild. At an absolute minimum, if we didn't personally compile something, it goes in the "likely compromised" pile. And even if we have do have the source code, can we trust that our own compiler hasn't already fallen to a Ken Thompson-style attack, some 50 revisions back?
Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore...
on
Did NIST Cripple SHA-3?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I say we just use the algorithms Schneier has invented and nothing else. Why do we even go to these standards approvers in the first place.
Two reasons.
1) Because having a standard means that everyone using SHA-3 will get the same result, instead of every implementation coming out with a different answer of totally unknown integrity. With a standard, I can verify the integrity of program-X's hashing simply by comparing it to a small sample of know plantexts and hash values.
2) Because most software houses dream of someday getting a government contract - Maybe military, but don't forget about the 14% of Americans that in some way work for the government. Any software they use needs to adhere to the standards issued by the government, or no dice.
Lodsys has finally encountered the perfect enemy - Queen bitch, completely self-absorbed, and very, very wealthy. Martha Stewart not only has the money, power, and influence to defend herself, but if she has taken personal offense to their tactics, she won't stop until she has completely and utterly destroyed Lodsys.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you've spent the money to purchase the non-FOSS tools that the school requires you to use, you're not going to seek out free/open source replacements for those tools.
Key phrase there, "spent the money".
Students in general don't tend to have oodles of disposable cash. South Africa doesn't exactly have a reputation as above-average for personal incomes. Therefore, this "decree" only really means one of two things:
The SA ED has effectively ordered people to pirate Microsoft Office and Delphi, or
People will use open source tools anyway and just output in Office-compatible file formats.
A few years from now, the SA ED will scratch its head in wonderment as to why every document submitted to it has very slightly screwed up formatting, but in a mysteriously consistent way.
And considering this story comes from South Africa, they will most likely blame witches and torture a few innocent women to death.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast.
"But that bitch Marissa did it, and the analysts all rave over her! Desks? Bah, those slackers don't really need desks, buy a few thousand bean-back chairs for 'em!"
Someone explain to me why the holy bloody fuck these enemies of the American people haven't taken an involuntary 8-day vacation along with the rest of the noncritical federal government?
Though I guess even admitting you were at the scene of a crime will have caused people problems in the past.
In virtually all crimes, the criminal witnessed the crime. Therefore, one of the witnesses usually did it. Therefore, admitting you saw the crime takes your chances ending up in a cage for that particular crime from one-in-seven-billion to one of a handful of "parties of interest".
Never speak to the police unless subpoenaed. And even then, never speak to the police without a lawyer present. And even then, speak through your lawyer, not directly to the police.
Like laws have ever stopped corporations or other criminals
So... To deal with the fact that corporations and criminals ignore the law, you propose what exactly - More laws for them to ignore? Or that we simply deprive ourselves of good things to keep it out of "their" hands?
The privacy issues here really don't bother me so much - We already have fairly strong laws regarding who can store/share information about minors, and with whom.
The bigger issue IMO comes from the described use of easily-measured statistics over more difficult, but meaningful measures of learning. 55WPM with 43 correct (what does that second number even mean, anyway? "No Billy, that says potato, not aardvark" )? Useless, unless we want to train a generation of speed-readers. More importantly, did he fully appreciate the racist subtext inherent in Jane ordering Spot to run?
Sad. On the one hand, I weep for the future of humanity; On the other, I have absolutely no concerns about job security for as long as I want to stay in the workforce. But hey, I see a great future for the the trophy manufacturing industry!
That might work in the US, but here in Australia it is more common for eateries to have notices saying "no separate billing", which puts the onus on the customers to work it out for themselves.
;)
Hmm, I can see an 0-day exploit in that protocol - "seven tables for one, please"
Careful when trying to screw Google out of their due, son.
More seriously - Seriously? What possible purpose does such a rule serve, except to make things more difficult for everyone (including the server, who gets handed a pile of $20s and seven distinct requests for change in bizarre amounts)?
There's a reason nobody lives in those places. It's because there's no economic activity. You can't live without money. Next obvious question.
Okay, how about: "Did you know we have literally tens of millions of acres of those those unoccupied relatively safe places, all within an hour's drive of a population center?"
Personally, I live in the "densely populated" Northeastern US - I live within an hour of two major cities. And land goes for around $1000-$2000 per acre around here. Other than an irrational-bordering-on-insane emotional attachment to a physical location that actively tries to kill them, I can't even remotely fathom why anyone would want to live in Tornado Alley rather than in my area.
And just for the record, many of the disaster-prone areas we hear about don't exactly have the most thriving economy around - NOLA makes a great example of that. We have a literal sprawling low-density ghetto, sitting below sea level in a coastal flood-plain in hurricane central, that completely unsurprisingly got washed off the face of the planet... And the morons moved back when it dried out??? Seriously, WTF, how dumb do we as a species get?
"Well, it shouldn't happen but every 20-30 years" - So I guess you want to give Mother Nature another chance to line you up in her crosshairs?
Keep in mind that while a dedicated consumer-grade wifi router draws around 5W, a netbook will draw 20-25W (possibly more).
Although that may not sound like much, a 24/7 load of 20W, at $0.15/KWH will cost you $2.16/month. You will break even vs just buying a low-end (Rosewill, etc) new router in about 10 months, or two years for a mid-consumer-grade LinkSys/DLink.
Admittedly, your solution will give you just about the highest-end wireless router you can get (limited by the radio in your netbook, of course), theoretically supporting any networking feature available with Linux. In practice though, how often do you really need anything beyond WPA2, IPv4 routing with a basic "block everything except what I allow" firewall, and perhaps (if you use VPN a lot) IPSec support?
Guess what? You can already build a concrete dome for around that much money. It will protect the whole house. OMGWTFBBQ this is a solved problem.
;)
Holy fail to read even TFS, Batman!
"You could design it to be perfectly resistant. But it would not be a place you'd want to live". Most people would not want to live in a giant concrete dome (though I personally would, and I suspect you'll find a fairly unrepresentatively large sample of Slashdotters who would say the same). Simple as that.
That said...
I have an even better solution, though. Fucking move. Anyone who bought a house on a floodplain in tornado country is a goddamned idiot.
This, a thousand times this! Every time I hear about the federal government bailing out people stupid enough to live a place likely to get wiped out once a decade or so, I can't help but think exactly what you've expressed. The US has vast tracts of uninhabited, relatively safe land, yet we have people trying to live in the worst possible choices. Flood zones, tornado alley, scrub-brush tinderboxes, earthquake central.
I have nothing against having FEMA around for the freak "storm of the century" events. But if your day-to-day life at least part of the year involves always listening for that warning klaxon in the distance - You should not live where you do, should not expect the rest of us to bail you out - Period.
Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.
What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.
Dear mods:
The parent post does not count as flamebait, quite the opposite, he has very bluntly and articulately identified the root cause of the current overabundance of jellyfish.
Humans can still fish (although we really should limit ourselves to recreational fishing, and stick with farmed fish for food production). But modern supertrawlers don't just decimate fish populations, they catch the entire population in an area.
You want to get rid of jellyfish, get rid of these floating offenses to biodiversity by any means possible. Ban them, sink them, make their crew pariahs. If the fish come back, the jellyfish will vanish.
Psychologically it's a different thing. Giving someone a small sum of raw cash instead of a gift worth about the same is generally considered crass.
Only because we expect the humans giving us gifts to know us well enough to make it a bit more personal. In contrast, I want Yahoo to know as little about me as possible. They can send me $12.50 in BTC to an anonymous address, for all I care about how they reward people.
Uncle Tony writing a $12.50 check: Crass. Yahoo writing a $12.50 check: Insultingly cheap, but otherwise okay.
So if Yahoo's recent history means anything, we can expect that the first bug bounty will pay 2 million dollars, which Marissa will claim for finding a font the wrong color, then she will immediately order the program ended for nebulous "abuses"?
;)
Of course, that would still sound better than giving out an insulting coupon for company swag.
Slashdot--the only place where everyone celebrates Manning and Snowden because "all information should be free", but condem teh evil corporations for leaking information about teh other evil corporations.
If Samsung had released this information out of some desire to force more open negotiations on the whole industry, I would applaud them.
Instead, we have some weaselly Samsung exec bragging about cheating and getting away with it, solely for their own benefit in a specific contract negotiation.
If you don't see the difference between that and Snowden or Manning... You just won't.
Can't say the other site's name here
Since when does Slashdot disallow the name "Reddit"?
Or did you mean that as some sort of meta-humor? I guess I don't get it, then.
Since when is science objective? Fat cat climate scientists riding high on the tax payer grants don't do a damn thing objective!
You have confused "idiots who can't grasp the math and instead accept Limbaugh's drivel as gospel" with "scientists". Easy mistake, apparently, since the majority of Americans make the same one.
Right. Because 3000psi hydrogen gas makes a much more convenient storage medium than a plastic gallon jug of methanol or ethanol.
However, there is little to no need for fraction in the real world
Let me guess, you find the the Big Mac button confusingly similar to the Quarter Pounder button.
Hint: One has 2/3rds of the number of buns of the other one. One bun, two buns, red bun, blue bun!
How would one go about converting a Flash game like this to HTML5?
First, you learn HTML2 (or 3, or 4, doesn't much matter). Then you learn CSS. Then, you learn Javascript. Then, you learn HTML5. Then, you learn Flash. Then, you learn ActionScript. And finally - You break into TwinBeard HQ, steal the source code to Frog Fractions, and begin the long process of porting it.
After all that, though, you probably already have a pretty good grasp of fractions.
# stty speed 300
# lynx http://www.slashdot.org
Might this have something to do with the fact that age discrimination is ripe in the workplace.
:)
No. No, it might not. Know know I can tell you didn't even make it all the way through the FP summary?
TFA means that number as only in the context of this one experiment, not as a generalization about the incomes of the elderly.
If I could believe he hadn't been leaned upon by the government. Can we responsibly believe that?
Unfortunately, I would have to say conclusively "no". We've already seen quite a few big names on our side tacitly admit that the NSA has pushed on them - Phil Zimmerman, PJ of Groklaw, even Linux Torvalds.
Currently, I'd say we've reached the point where we can't trust any software in the wild. At an absolute minimum, if we didn't personally compile something, it goes in the "likely compromised" pile. And even if we have do have the source code, can we trust that our own compiler hasn't already fallen to a Ken Thompson-style attack, some 50 revisions back?
I say we just use the algorithms Schneier has invented and nothing else. Why do we even go to these standards approvers in the first place.
Two reasons.
1) Because having a standard means that everyone using SHA-3 will get the same result, instead of every implementation coming out with a different answer of totally unknown integrity. With a standard, I can verify the integrity of program-X's hashing simply by comparing it to a small sample of know plantexts and hash values.
2) Because most software houses dream of someday getting a government contract - Maybe military, but don't forget about the 14% of Americans that in some way work for the government. Any software they use needs to adhere to the standards issued by the government, or no dice.
And really, simple as that.
Lodsys has finally encountered the perfect enemy - Queen bitch, completely self-absorbed, and very, very wealthy. Martha Stewart not only has the money, power, and influence to defend herself, but if she has taken personal offense to their tactics, she won't stop until she has completely and utterly destroyed Lodsys.
Yay!