there might be some Western leaders as well who would not like their secret files to be made public...
No "might" necessary, there are Western leaders and others who don't want their Stasi (secret police) files public. Former West German chancellor Kohl successfully sued to keep his files under wraps.
That's for the simple reason that those files often contain the most private details of what the Stasi had assembled using bugs and other means. Besides, nobody can easily check what is true and what they might have falsified in those files. After all, we're talking about a totalitarian regime which shot people trying to leave the country illegally.
However, all that doesn't mean that there won't be investigations if German authorities find something interesting in those files. So some people do have to fear that their past surfaces, but not from publication of the files.
Movie recommendation on the topic: this year's Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards, The Lives of Others.
I don't know where your "here" is. The Soviet Russia from your signature? But in Germany you won't get "very strange looks". It may not be a word everyone uses every day, but it is used. Run it through a search engine of your choice and you'll get a lot of German language pages containing it.
Turnitin is a search engine much like Google or Yahoo. If you forbid Turnitin to index files, you'll have to shut down Google as well.
If you want your text publicly available on the Web but not in Turnitin (a strange combination, I think, who would want to be plagiarized), use robots.txt. Turnitin has visited my site regularly. The crawler's host name was always cr1.turnitin.com or cr2.turnitin.com, its user agent string "TurnitinBot/2.1 (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)".
One point of Wikipedia--or any encyclopedia, really--is to include only information for which there are reputable sources. Books, articles, documentaries, and so on. As a result, facts can be checked by anyone willing to put in the effort to gain access to the sources.
An encyclopedia is not good because some reputable person wrote about his or her field of expertise. It's only a natural and obvious correlation that experts know their subject well. And, as has been pointed out, make errors there as well. Sticking to sources has the side effect that no original research is being done, which in this context is a good thing.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia articles contain few references. If we'd remove everything that is not directly attributed to a source, I guess over 99 percent would be gone.
In theory, yes. There is a byte compression type in the PNG headers.
The PNG people (some of them?) don't want to use this, though, for maximum compatibility of readers and files. I don't have a source handy, so take this with a big grain of salt.
No matter how many children die in traffic each year, highway speed limit is of limits to everyone and any politician who suggests it automatically does a political harakiri.
Those children usually don't die on the Autobahn, which is the only type of street without a general speed limit. However, these days there are so many exceptions on the Autobahn where speed is limited that it doesn't make much of a difference anymore. You could just as well make 130 km/h mandatory.
It's a more general question because I'm not from the US. A couple of years ago H. Clinton was supposed to be that extremely polarizing figure, the one conservatives love to hate, the one which would be the best gift to the GOP if she ran because she would drive tired Republicans to the ballots. Has the situation changed? Was that an exaggeration in the first place?
Searching for "miserable failure" now brings up a million pages talking about the Googlebomb, "miserable failure". Is that much better?
Yes, it is. Because those seem to be the pages actually dealing with "miserable failure", different from the homepages of George Bush or Michael Moore (which were both victims of miserable failure Google bombs). If no other pages prominently feature "miserable failure", that's not the fault of the search engine. They can only find what's there.
Google bombs weren't a priority at Google precisely because the abuse was mostly done with irrelevant phrases like "miserable failure". You only search for those when you hear about Google bombs for the first time.
The whole reason PageRank was create was because the exsiting technologies at the time, namely keywords and before that meta tags, were being abused like hell. Now PageRank is being abused left and right. It's time to take a step back and rethink.
Google bombs don't have much to do with PageRank. They're about link text being abused.
As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.
This depends so much on your language skills that an estimate isn't really possible.
But my advice: learn only if you have some foreseeable use. I learned French as a third language, and I liked it, but it's depressing how much I've forgotten because I have no practice reading or writing French.
And do you seriously suggest that looking into the mainstream German newspapers and magazines (FAZ, SZ, Spiegel, Focus, Zeit) who all regurgitate the usual market-radical spin and are influenced by corporate lobbyism
Oh, goodness. Thanks for pointing that out. Can't argue with that. Bye.
Globalization can't be blamed for Germany's economic problems as it is the absolute export champion (above China and the U.S.) with an incredibly high trade surplus.
That's great for everyone in the high-tech industry. However, all those jobs with lower skill requirements are being transferred to other countries. Germany is more than just car production.
Wage levels in Germany have long been surpassed by a lot of other European countries so that now it has labor costs below the average of the West European EU countries.
In many areas they're still too high. Again, average values don't paint the complete picture.
In addition, you cut out some of the other factors I mentioned.
Please get your facts right first by reading OECD reports and the like.
Maybe you should learn to interpret the numbers correctly. Or look at something beyond those reports. Like a German newspaper.
If your diagnosis had anything to do with reality, the Scandinavian countries with their huge public spending would have to be among the economically worst off while in fact they are among the economically best off.
Scandinavian countries have a different population structure, history, education and social system. Comparisons between them and Germany are mostly flawed.
Look what happened when West and Eastern Germany reunited. It devasted the economy of western Germany which before unification was one of the very strongest in the world.
Germany still is one of the strongest economies in the world, and its problems arise from globalization, high labor costs, a very generous welfare system, a flawed education system and lack of flexibility, among others, not reunification. The problem with that was the outrageous misspending of the government at all levels.
You're right, but that's not what I meant, I described it incorrectly. I mean blocks of domains, like *.nyu.edu with the corresponding IP address ranges 44.123/16 and 37.220/16 (these numbers made up by myself).
Even getting a complete list of second level domain names without the IP addresses is hard, isn't it?
Not exactly a direct reply to parent, but is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk? There is the RIPE DB for the IP space and Whois lets you do single queries on domains, but is there some sort of publicly available list of valid domains with or without IP addresses belonging to them?
Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia.
My opinion exactly!
However, disappointments come when an important (yeah, whatever that means) topic is dealt with in a sub-par article. Happens rarely, but it does happen. Some argue that time should be spent on improving the "less obscure" articles instead of putting up lengthy Star Wars character descriptions. But that's just a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. The people spending all that time on obscure Star Wars topics couldn't produce a decent article on Wittgenstein or sauce béarnaise. However, the philosophers and chefs who can aren't well-versed in that galaxy far, far away. And if I do want to learn about Han Solo's early years, I know that Britannica will turn its back on me and where to look instead. So everyone should describe the things they know really well and everyone will gain from that. (Mostly weight, in the case of the sauce, but hey, there's always Dieting - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
I agree with most of what you say (although: friendly people? really?;-)), but there are two developments which render the three-tiered system less useful than it once was.
1) The average qualification requirements for a job have risen. Back in the day, the job market needed a lot of graduates of Hauptschule and Realschule. The kind of job you can get with a relatively low education is more and more in decline. Everyone strives to go to a Gymnasium in order to retain chances, which is obviously against the idea of a tiered system.
2) For some reason, those who graduate from the Hauptschule and Realschule have even less qualifications than they had some time ago. Even the most simple mathematical tasks, basics of grammar and spelling as well as fundamentals of general education (who is the current Bundeskanzler, -präsident, and so on) are missing. Potential employers go through dozens of people until they find someone suitable for the job.
What I want to express is - the system used to work or was at least going in the right direction, with the peak of working class children going to university, IIRC, 25 years ago.
The alternative, not splitting students up but keeping them in one type of school, seems tempting. Unfortunately, our implementation (the Gesamtschule) isn't that great.
I'm sure you have... thanks for confirming my original suspicion though.
"For starters" is confirming nothing. Work on your reading comprehension.
Oh yes I do. I know that you are just another "In my experience" poster on Slashdot who doesn't know what he's talking about, but still likes to post screeds full of uninformed drivel.
No, you know nothing. I'm not gonna lay out my background for some anonymous poster with a bunch of smartass comments. Your claim to knowledge on the topic so far has been "there have been studies". Great. I commented on that, and the conditions that are required to change something in the education system out there in the real world, but you conveniently left that out.
You state this as thought it were a fact. There's not the slightest evidence to suggest this is true...
For starters, I've seen it happen many times.
It is just one of those things that people who like to thing they belong in the "smart" camp take for granted without actually thinking too much about it (how ironic).
Gee, that really hurts. No, wait, it doesn't. 'Cause you have no idea what my background is or how much I have thought about these issues.
There have been many studies to show that both smarter and slower children *BENEFIT* from the mixing.
Yes, there have been studies proving everything, and the contrary. It also depends a lot on what the mix is like.
Under perfect conditions, lots of things are possible. There are terrific ways of teaching. You just need the right teachers, educated to do this, motivated to do so, not overly jaded from decades of doing the same things. You need authorization to stray from curriculums. Sometimes you need higher budgets, sometimes other resources or conditions. That's not the reality out there.
Besides, benefit can mean many things. Most situations have some sort of benefit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the overall learning progress isn't better when separating kids into groups that are roughly at the same level.
To be fair, in Hauptschule and Realschule you do internships and classes more adapted to "reality", while Gymnasium refrains from such things and remains theoretical in its courses, mainly preparing students for the university.
Splitting up kids according to what they are capable of doing isn't such a bad idea. After all, smart kids get bored when the slow learners stall their progress, and vice versa, those in need of more support are lost when fellow students get along a lot fast than they do. Although the split does happen very early in Germany (at 10 years of age). The 3-tiered system isn't permeable enough, letting students vary the level of sophistication as they go along (someone improving doesn't easily change to a more challenging school). That's what the Gesamtschule was meant for, a combination of the three others. However, after two or three decades, the Gesamtschule hasn't really won a lot of support from those questioning its egalitarian ideas.
Whenever I have traveled to foreign countries, I always find it amazing that the average foreigner seems to know far more about American culture, government, and history than the average American.
I think the reason for that is simple: US TV shows and movies are watched around the world. After several years of US pop culture, no matter where you're from and what your own system is like, you know that there's a high school with four years, followed by college for those who can afford it or get a scholarship. That there was a civil war dealing with slavery and economic issues. That the president has a lot of power, but has to struggle with congress. And so on. And I'm not talking about The West Wing and other more sophisticated shows, you learn a lot of small things from all shows and movies.
Slashdot Mirror
there might be some Western leaders as well who would not like their secret files to be made public...
No "might" necessary, there are Western leaders and others who don't want their Stasi (secret police) files public. Former West German chancellor Kohl successfully sued to keep his files under wraps.
That's for the simple reason that those files often contain the most private details of what the Stasi had assembled using bugs and other means. Besides, nobody can easily check what is true and what they might have falsified in those files. After all, we're talking about a totalitarian regime which shot people trying to leave the country illegally.
However, all that doesn't mean that there won't be investigations if German authorities find something interesting in those files. So some people do have to fear that their past surfaces, but not from publication of the files.
Movie recommendation on the topic: this year's Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards, The Lives of Others.
I don't know where your "here" is. The Soviet Russia from your signature? But in Germany you won't get "very strange looks". It may not be a word everyone uses every day, but it is used. Run it through a search engine of your choice and you'll get a lot of German language pages containing it.
That sounds extreme. I run a techy site with 52 % Firefox, 41 % IE, 3 % Opera, plus change, and I thought that was very skewed already.
No, after all they're no rocket scientists.
Turnitin is a search engine much like Google or Yahoo. If you forbid Turnitin to index files, you'll have to shut down Google as well.
.
If you want your text publicly available on the Web but not in Turnitin (a strange combination, I think, who would want to be plagiarized), use robots.txt. Turnitin has visited my site regularly. The crawler's host name was always cr1.turnitin.com or cr2.turnitin.com, its user agent string "TurnitinBot/2.1 (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)"
One point of Wikipedia--or any encyclopedia, really--is to include only information for which there are reputable sources. Books, articles, documentaries, and so on. As a result, facts can be checked by anyone willing to put in the effort to gain access to the sources.
An encyclopedia is not good because some reputable person wrote about his or her field of expertise. It's only a natural and obvious correlation that experts know their subject well. And, as has been pointed out, make errors there as well. Sticking to sources has the side effect that no original research is being done, which in this context is a good thing.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia articles contain few references. If we'd remove everything that is not directly attributed to a source, I guess over 99 percent would be gone.
Renders my entering : as a > character (German system). Any other way to change to the c: volume?
In theory, yes. There is a byte compression type in the PNG headers.
The PNG people (some of them?) don't want to use this, though, for maximum compatibility of readers and files. I don't have a source handy, so take this with a big grain of salt.
No matter how many children die in traffic each year, highway speed limit is of limits to everyone and any politician who suggests it automatically does a political harakiri.
Those children usually don't die on the Autobahn, which is the only type of street without a general speed limit. However, these days there are so many exceptions on the Autobahn where speed is limited that it doesn't make much of a difference anymore. You could just as well make 130 km/h mandatory.
It's a more general question because I'm not from the US. A couple of years ago H. Clinton was supposed to be that extremely polarizing figure, the one conservatives love to hate, the one which would be the best gift to the GOP if she ran because she would drive tired Republicans to the ballots. Has the situation changed? Was that an exaggeration in the first place?
Searching for "miserable failure" now brings up a million pages talking about the Googlebomb, "miserable failure". Is that much better?
Yes, it is. Because those seem to be the pages actually dealing with "miserable failure", different from the homepages of George Bush or Michael Moore (which were both victims of miserable failure Google bombs). If no other pages prominently feature "miserable failure", that's not the fault of the search engine. They can only find what's there.
Google bombs weren't a priority at Google precisely because the abuse was mostly done with irrelevant phrases like "miserable failure". You only search for those when you hear about Google bombs for the first time.
The whole reason PageRank was create was because the exsiting technologies at the time, namely keywords and before that meta tags, were being abused like hell. Now PageRank is being abused left and right. It's time to take a step back and rethink.
Google bombs don't have much to do with PageRank. They're about link text being abused.
As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.
This depends so much on your language skills that an estimate isn't really possible.
But my advice: learn only if you have some foreseeable use. I learned French as a third language, and I liked it, but it's depressing how much I've forgotten because I have no practice reading or writing French.
Austria. Also Germany.
And do you seriously suggest that looking into the mainstream German newspapers and magazines (FAZ, SZ, Spiegel, Focus, Zeit) who all regurgitate the usual market-radical spin and are influenced by corporate lobbyism
Oh, goodness. Thanks for pointing that out. Can't argue with that. Bye.
Globalization can't be blamed for Germany's economic problems as it is the absolute export champion (above China and the U.S.) with an incredibly high trade surplus.
That's great for everyone in the high-tech industry. However, all those jobs with lower skill requirements are being transferred to other countries. Germany is more than just car production.
Wage levels in Germany have long been surpassed by a lot of other European countries so that now it has labor costs below the average of the West European EU countries.
In many areas they're still too high. Again, average values don't paint the complete picture.
In addition, you cut out some of the other factors I mentioned.
Please get your facts right first by reading OECD reports and the like.
Maybe you should learn to interpret the numbers correctly. Or look at something beyond those reports. Like a German newspaper.
If your diagnosis had anything to do with reality, the Scandinavian countries with their huge public spending would have to be among the economically worst off while in fact they are among the economically best off.
Scandinavian countries have a different population structure, history, education and social system. Comparisons between them and Germany are mostly flawed.
Look what happened when West and Eastern Germany reunited. It devasted the economy of western Germany which before unification was one of the very strongest in the world.
Germany still is one of the strongest economies in the world, and its problems arise from globalization, high labor costs, a very generous welfare system, a flawed education system and lack of flexibility, among others, not reunification. The problem with that was the outrageous misspending of the government at all levels.
You're right, but that's not what I meant, I described it incorrectly. I mean blocks of domains, like *.nyu.edu with the corresponding IP address ranges 44.123/16 and 37.220/16 (these numbers made up by myself).
Even getting a complete list of second level domain names without the IP addresses is hard, isn't it?
Not exactly a direct reply to parent, but is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk? There is the RIPE DB for the IP space and Whois lets you do single queries on domains, but is there some sort of publicly available list of valid domains with or without IP addresses belonging to them?
Does the DoD still use Ada? Only for legacy systems? Just curious.
Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia.
My opinion exactly!
However, disappointments come when an important (yeah, whatever that means) topic is dealt with in a sub-par article. Happens rarely, but it does happen. Some argue that time should be spent on improving the "less obscure" articles instead of putting up lengthy Star Wars character descriptions. But that's just a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. The people spending all that time on obscure Star Wars topics couldn't produce a decent article on Wittgenstein or sauce béarnaise. However, the philosophers and chefs who can aren't well-versed in that galaxy far, far away. And if I do want to learn about Han Solo's early years, I know that Britannica will turn its back on me and where to look instead. So everyone should describe the things they know really well and everyone will gain from that. (Mostly weight, in the case of the sauce, but hey, there's always Dieting - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
I agree with most of what you say (although: friendly people? really? ;-)), but there are two developments which render the three-tiered system less useful than it once was.
1) The average qualification requirements for a job have risen. Back in the day, the job market needed a lot of graduates of Hauptschule and Realschule. The kind of job you can get with a relatively low education is more and more in decline. Everyone strives to go to a Gymnasium in order to retain chances, which is obviously against the idea of a tiered system.
2) For some reason, those who graduate from the Hauptschule and Realschule have even less qualifications than they had some time ago. Even the most simple mathematical tasks, basics of grammar and spelling as well as fundamentals of general education (who is the current Bundeskanzler, -präsident, and so on) are missing. Potential employers go through dozens of people until they find someone suitable for the job.
What I want to express is - the system used to work or was at least going in the right direction, with the peak of working class children going to university, IIRC, 25 years ago.
The alternative, not splitting students up but keeping them in one type of school, seems tempting. Unfortunately, our implementation (the Gesamtschule) isn't that great.
I'm sure you have... thanks for confirming my original suspicion though.
"For starters" is confirming nothing. Work on your reading comprehension.
Oh yes I do. I know that you are just another "In my experience" poster on Slashdot who doesn't know what he's talking about, but still likes to post screeds full of uninformed drivel.
No, you know nothing. I'm not gonna lay out my background for some anonymous poster with a bunch of smartass comments. Your claim to knowledge on the topic so far has been "there have been studies". Great. I commented on that, and the conditions that are required to change something in the education system out there in the real world, but you conveniently left that out.
You state this as thought it were a fact. There's not the slightest evidence to suggest this is true...
For starters, I've seen it happen many times.
It is just one of those things that people who like to thing they belong in the "smart" camp take for granted without actually thinking too much about it (how ironic).
Gee, that really hurts. No, wait, it doesn't. 'Cause you have no idea what my background is or how much I have thought about these issues.
There have been many studies to show that both smarter and slower children *BENEFIT* from the mixing.
Yes, there have been studies proving everything, and the contrary. It also depends a lot on what the mix is like.
Under perfect conditions, lots of things are possible. There are terrific ways of teaching. You just need the right teachers, educated to do this, motivated to do so, not overly jaded from decades of doing the same things. You need authorization to stray from curriculums. Sometimes you need higher budgets, sometimes other resources or conditions. That's not the reality out there.
Besides, benefit can mean many things. Most situations have some sort of benefit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the overall learning progress isn't better when separating kids into groups that are roughly at the same level.
To be fair, in Hauptschule and Realschule you do internships and classes more adapted to "reality", while Gymnasium refrains from such things and remains theoretical in its courses, mainly preparing students for the university.
Splitting up kids according to what they are capable of doing isn't such a bad idea. After all, smart kids get bored when the slow learners stall their progress, and vice versa, those in need of more support are lost when fellow students get along a lot fast than they do. Although the split does happen very early in Germany (at 10 years of age). The 3-tiered system isn't permeable enough, letting students vary the level of sophistication as they go along (someone improving doesn't easily change to a more challenging school). That's what the Gesamtschule was meant for, a combination of the three others. However, after two or three decades, the Gesamtschule hasn't really won a lot of support from those questioning its egalitarian ideas.
Whenever I have traveled to foreign countries, I always find it amazing that the average foreigner seems to know far more about American culture, government, and history than the average American.
I think the reason for that is simple: US TV shows and movies are watched around the world. After several years of US pop culture, no matter where you're from and what your own system is like, you know that there's a high school with four years, followed by college for those who can afford it or get a scholarship. That there was a civil war dealing with slavery and economic issues. That the president has a lot of power, but has to struggle with congress. And so on. And I'm not talking about The West Wing and other more sophisticated shows, you learn a lot of small things from all shows and movies.