I certainly agree that our educational system could use some improvement. However, there will always be people that are naturally better at some tasks then others, and given the population of India and China there is bound to be a larger number of naturally talented people born there than in the US. The more that we can do to get the top 10% of people around the world to move to the US, the better of the US will be because of it. This is done by having the best research institutes, the best engineering firms, and the fewest barriers to citizenship for these people.
None of those goals are mutually exclusive with improving education here in the US. In fact, the quality of our higher education institutes is one of the main reasons we have had so many intelligent immigrants in the past.
In a no-copyright world, you could try to keep your source code secret, but it if anyone leaked the source code to the internet it would be completely legal for others to make derivative works of that source. Only the original leaker would be guilty of breaking trade secret laws. Good luck preventing leaks if you have more that 5 employees, or a less than perfect IT staff.
Just look at how many high-profile leaks occur today, where there is little financial incentive to leak source, just hax0r ego boosts. Then look at how often designs and plans and other "IP" are borrowed in places like China that have very lax copyright and patent law. Corporate espionage would become the norm not the exception, to the point where it wouldn't even make sense to try and hide your source code except for new unreleased and written from scratch products.
Of course some people would try, just like those idiots who made a WINE knock-off and kept insisting that they had written it from scratch. But that is just because some people are pathological. In practice, it wouldn't be practical to keep your source secret.
I haven't been interested in any of the existing netbooks, because I can't stand typing on the small keyboards. But I would be interested in an inexpensive tablet, if the linux build they provided was customized to work well as a tablet. I hope they have a configuration option that includes a normal dock in place of the keyboard.
The Safari 4 Beta is not being installed on new Macs or pushed out via the update system. Every person that is using it had to download it manually, just like with Google Chrome.
You are forgetting that had they not spent that money on flowers, it could have otherwise been spent breaking RIAA lawyer's windows instead. Let's not forget basic economics here, please.
Also, when I write software for a living, I like spending the free time I have on other hobbies that I don't get to do at work. If I was jobless, I would likely have more interest in writing software at home than I do now.
According to arstechnica Microsoft has confirmed that she was banned due to violating their policy against including anything of a sexual nature in users profiles, including sexual orientation.
For all the faults that myspace has (and there are many), it is still the best place to listen to music from a band you just heard about.
Most band websites are either flash-based monstrosities that take take pride in being as obscure and unnavigable as possible, or are geocities throwbacks don't have media content because the band doesn't know how to post it. Last.fm keeps making their interface worse and worse, and due to licensing issues, was never very good for listening to a specific band (as opposed to treating it as autogenerated radio). Other sites are very hit-and-miss as to whether they will have a specific artist.
But every band who has any interest in having fans has a myspace music page. More importantly, I know exactly what I'm getting when I go to a myspace music page. I know that every single one will have at least a handfull of full sample tracks that I can listen to and see if I like the band. I know I won't have to search around the site, it is right there on the front page every time.
Thanks for reminding me that I still have the same Under Construction message on my website that I did in 1997. Twelve years past and I still have nothing of value to share with the world. Well, I guess it could be worse. I could be a blogger;)
That is the second time I have seen ex-post facto used this way in this thread. I'm not a lawyer, but I have always understood ex-post facto to refer to laws that are enacted after an action occurs that changes the punishment for that action. That hasn't happened here - AFAIK the laws were already on the books when he setup the routers.
Yep, like I mentioned, without the keys the only fix would cause significant disruption. That would make the damages even higher, but it's still an issue that civil court is most appropriate for.
Agreed, but he DID hand over the passwords to the Mayor a couple of weeks after he was arrested, and without any court order to do so. That was months ago, and he is still sitting in jail awaiting trial for other criminal charges. The charges are all bunk - really stretched interpretations of laws that were already very overbearing to begin with. The set bail is bunk - there is no reason to think that Childs will skip town, in fact his stubborn behavior thus far strongly indicates that he wants his day in court to vindicate himself.
He maintained access to a system which he had no right to access, while refusing to give the owners of that system the means to remove his access in a manner that wouldn't significantly disrupt the service.
Still I have a hard time seeing this as a crime. If an employee won't give you the keys to your vault, then you fire them, call a locksmith and sue the ex-employee for damages. No criminal charges, just a civil liabilities. That is what should have happened to Childs, no more no less.
All the phones I've had, do indeed display the company that owns the tower that I'm connected to. However, because domestic roaming is free, there is no reason to pay any attention to it. In rural areas it is extremely common for only two companies (one GSM and one CDMA) to have a tower along a given stretch of highway. I've never traveled abroad, so I don't know if it is displayed any different. Furthermore, whose to say that this satellite uplink system wasn't being run by ATT?
Lastly, he was using a data card, not a phone - you plug them into your laptop and use it like it was a modem. The software that came with the card that my uncle had did not display this information prominently - you had to explicitly bring up the advanced status page to see it.
Furthermore, wouldn't Apple want developers to keep a copy of Safari 3 around for compatibility testing, even after Safari 4 goes out of beta? Yeah, I know that you can only have one official Webkit install that the rest of the system uses, but there is nothing preventing Apple from providing a standalone version of the the beta, or repackaging Safari 3 to be standalone when you install the Safari 4.
Ok... so assume a geosynchronous orbit. This is now muuuuuch worse. You're 26,000 miles from the planet.
Does that really matter? It's not like there is a huge amount of atmosphere between LEO and GSO that would increase losses due to scattering, and you can get pretty tight microwave beams provided that you have large transmitter antenna. At worst you might have to build a larger collector on the ground.
The fact that the satellite can maintain a sun-synchronous orbit, so it can be in full sunlight all the time, is not insignificant.
Do they really plan on doing this? I would have assumed geosynchronous orbit, to make beaming the power down safer and easier. If the satellites were in sun-synchronous orbit, in order to make use of that power you would then need multiple beam-down sites around the world (politically difficult) or batteries (efficiency loss + massive increase in launch weight). You would also have to be constantly changing the beam angle as the satellite moved across the sky, as well as periodically switching to a new receptor, which would be more difficult and less safe than always beaming straight down.
This is what I do, and it works great for the most part. However, you don't want to get too far behind because some games become harder to find if you don't buy them relatively soon after launch. For example, two years after launch, I wasn't able to find Beyond Good & Evil for the Gamecube on sale in any retail stores, and the few times I've looked for it online it was more expensive than at launch./Now someone will post an inexpensive link
One of my project managers has been using TIBCO Business Studio. It allows nested/linked flow-charts like you were describing and he apparently likes it much better than Visio. It is a free "lite" version of some of their other software. I've (fortunately) never had to do anything like that myself so I can only give second hand advice.
From a user perspective, both our lab techs and engineers have no problems using them. I think that nested flow charts work well on screen, but are not necessarily ideal for printed documentation.
I'm not assuming anything about the parents. If they are good parents, then they will effectively discipline her and the problem is solved. If they are lazy parents, then she will have to wait a long time to get the phone back and the problem is solved. If they are bad parents that think their child can do no wrong, then they will bitch and moan, but will be inconvenienced enough to eventually back off.
In the very rare case that the parent keeps picking up the phone and the student keeps using it then you are justified in escalating the matter to suspension, but jumping to calling the cops on the first offense is completely unnecessary.
I'm not talking out of inexperience here either. Both my parents are teachers, and the above works just fine as long as your school board doesn't back down every time some parent complains because their child was rightfully and fairly punished.
The point about physically searching her is a good one; I overlooked that. In our small town, the nurse was always the one that got that job for the girls and no-one had a problem with it, but in this day an officer might be more appropriate. And if the student forced you to go so far as call the police, then I could see letting them take it from there as a lesson. Still I don't see it as the best option if it is unavoidable.
Unless she's 18, it's not her property - it's her parents'. And schools absolutely have the right to prevent students from bringing their property to school if they are using it in a manner that clearly distracts from learning. They have to give it back - they can't steal it - but there is nothing preventing them from requiring the rightful owners, the parents, to be the ones that have to claim it.
First offense, confiscate the phone and give it back at the end of the day. Second offense, give her in detention, confiscate the phone and require the parents to pick it up in person if they want it back. Subsequent offenses, repeat step two. The parents will get sick of this pretty quickly, and she will find herself without a phone.
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I certainly agree that our educational system could use some improvement. However, there will always be people that are naturally better at some tasks then others, and given the population of India and China there is bound to be a larger number of naturally talented people born there than in the US. The more that we can do to get the top 10% of people around the world to move to the US, the better of the US will be because of it. This is done by having the best research institutes, the best engineering firms, and the fewest barriers to citizenship for these people.
None of those goals are mutually exclusive with improving education here in the US. In fact, the quality of our higher education institutes is one of the main reasons we have had so many intelligent immigrants in the past.
In a no-copyright world, you could try to keep your source code secret, but it if anyone leaked the source code to the internet it would be completely legal for others to make derivative works of that source. Only the original leaker would be guilty of breaking trade secret laws. Good luck preventing leaks if you have more that 5 employees, or a less than perfect IT staff.
Just look at how many high-profile leaks occur today, where there is little financial incentive to leak source, just hax0r ego boosts. Then look at how often designs and plans and other "IP" are borrowed in places like China that have very lax copyright and patent law. Corporate espionage would become the norm not the exception, to the point where it wouldn't even make sense to try and hide your source code except for new unreleased and written from scratch products.
Of course some people would try, just like those idiots who made a WINE knock-off and kept insisting that they had written it from scratch. But that is just because some people are pathological. In practice, it wouldn't be practical to keep your source secret.
I haven't been interested in any of the existing netbooks, because I can't stand typing on the small keyboards. But I would be interested in an inexpensive tablet, if the linux build they provided was customized to work well as a tablet. I hope they have a configuration option that includes a normal dock in place of the keyboard.
The Safari 4 Beta is not being installed on new Macs or pushed out via the update system. Every person that is using it had to download it manually, just like with Google Chrome.
You are forgetting that had they not spent that money on flowers, it could have otherwise been spent breaking RIAA lawyer's windows instead. Let's not forget basic economics here, please.
Well that's what you get for trying to smuggle British currency.
No kidding. I'm quite thankful that Aegis is not yet self-replicating.
Also, when I write software for a living, I like spending the free time I have on other hobbies that I don't get to do at work. If I was jobless, I would likely have more interest in writing software at home than I do now.
According to arstechnica Microsoft has confirmed that she was banned due to violating their policy against including anything of a sexual nature in users profiles, including sexual orientation.
For all the faults that myspace has (and there are many), it is still the best place to listen to music from a band you just heard about.
Most band websites are either flash-based monstrosities that take take pride in being as obscure and unnavigable as possible, or are geocities throwbacks don't have media content because the band doesn't know how to post it. Last.fm keeps making their interface worse and worse, and due to licensing issues, was never very good for listening to a specific band (as opposed to treating it as autogenerated radio). Other sites are very hit-and-miss as to whether they will have a specific artist.
But every band who has any interest in having fans has a myspace music page. More importantly, I know exactly what I'm getting when I go to a myspace music page. I know that every single one will have at least a handfull of full sample tracks that I can listen to and see if I like the band. I know I won't have to search around the site, it is right there on the front page every time.
Thanks for reminding me that I still have the same Under Construction message on my website that I did in 1997. Twelve years past and I still have nothing of value to share with the world. Well, I guess it could be worse. I could be a blogger ;)
That is the second time I have seen ex-post facto used this way in this thread. I'm not a lawyer, but I have always understood ex-post facto to refer to laws that are enacted after an action occurs that changes the punishment for that action. That hasn't happened here - AFAIK the laws were already on the books when he setup the routers.
Yep, like I mentioned, without the keys the only fix would cause significant disruption. That would make the damages even higher, but it's still an issue that civil court is most appropriate for.
Agreed, but he DID hand over the passwords to the Mayor a couple of weeks after he was arrested, and without any court order to do so. That was months ago, and he is still sitting in jail awaiting trial for other criminal charges. The charges are all bunk - really stretched interpretations of laws that were already very overbearing to begin with. The set bail is bunk - there is no reason to think that Childs will skip town, in fact his stubborn behavior thus far strongly indicates that he wants his day in court to vindicate himself.
He maintained access to a system which he had no right to access, while refusing to give the owners of that system the means to remove his access in a manner that wouldn't significantly disrupt the service.
Still I have a hard time seeing this as a crime. If an employee won't give you the keys to your vault, then you fire them, call a locksmith and sue the ex-employee for damages. No criminal charges, just a civil liabilities. That is what should have happened to Childs, no more no less.
All the phones I've had, do indeed display the company that owns the tower that I'm connected to. However, because domestic roaming is free, there is no reason to pay any attention to it. In rural areas it is extremely common for only two companies (one GSM and one CDMA) to have a tower along a given stretch of highway. I've never traveled abroad, so I don't know if it is displayed any different. Furthermore, whose to say that this satellite uplink system wasn't being run by ATT?
Lastly, he was using a data card, not a phone - you plug them into your laptop and use it like it was a modem. The software that came with the card that my uncle had did not display this information prominently - you had to explicitly bring up the advanced status page to see it.
Furthermore, wouldn't Apple want developers to keep a copy of Safari 3 around for compatibility testing, even after Safari 4 goes out of beta? Yeah, I know that you can only have one official Webkit install that the rest of the system uses, but there is nothing preventing Apple from providing a standalone version of the the beta, or repackaging Safari 3 to be standalone when you install the Safari 4.
Anyway, Michel Fortin was nice enough to do that for all the major stable releases of Safari. Enjoy.
Ok... so assume a geosynchronous orbit. This is now muuuuuch worse. You're 26,000 miles from the planet.
Does that really matter? It's not like there is a huge amount of atmosphere between LEO and GSO that would increase losses due to scattering, and you can get pretty tight microwave beams provided that you have large transmitter antenna. At worst you might have to build a larger collector on the ground.
The fact that the satellite can maintain a sun-synchronous orbit, so it can be in full sunlight all the time, is not insignificant.
Do they really plan on doing this? I would have assumed geosynchronous orbit, to make beaming the power down safer and easier. If the satellites were in sun-synchronous orbit, in order to make use of that power you would then need multiple beam-down sites around the world (politically difficult) or batteries (efficiency loss + massive increase in launch weight). You would also have to be constantly changing the beam angle as the satellite moved across the sky, as well as periodically switching to a new receptor, which would be more difficult and less safe than always beaming straight down.
This is what I do, and it works great for the most part. However, you don't want to get too far behind because some games become harder to find if you don't buy them relatively soon after launch. For example, two years after launch, I wasn't able to find Beyond Good & Evil for the Gamecube on sale in any retail stores, and the few times I've looked for it online it was more expensive than at launch. /Now someone will post an inexpensive link
Dammit now you got the image of flying LEGO Penises stuck in my head.
One of my project managers has been using TIBCO Business Studio. It allows nested/linked flow-charts like you were describing and he apparently likes it much better than Visio. It is a free "lite" version of some of their other software. I've (fortunately) never had to do anything like that myself so I can only give second hand advice.
From a user perspective, both our lab techs and engineers have no problems using them. I think that nested flow charts work well on screen, but are not necessarily ideal for printed documentation.
I'm not assuming anything about the parents. If they are good parents, then they will effectively discipline her and the problem is solved. If they are lazy parents, then she will have to wait a long time to get the phone back and the problem is solved. If they are bad parents that think their child can do no wrong, then they will bitch and moan, but will be inconvenienced enough to eventually back off.
In the very rare case that the parent keeps picking up the phone and the student keeps using it then you are justified in escalating the matter to suspension, but jumping to calling the cops on the first offense is completely unnecessary.
I'm not talking out of inexperience here either. Both my parents are teachers, and the above works just fine as long as your school board doesn't back down every time some parent complains because their child was rightfully and fairly punished.
The point about physically searching her is a good one; I overlooked that. In our small town, the nurse was always the one that got that job for the girls and no-one had a problem with it, but in this day an officer might be more appropriate. And if the student forced you to go so far as call the police, then I could see letting them take it from there as a lesson. Still I don't see it as the best option if it is unavoidable.
Unless she's 18, it's not her property - it's her parents'. And schools absolutely have the right to prevent students from bringing their property to school if they are using it in a manner that clearly distracts from learning. They have to give it back - they can't steal it - but there is nothing preventing them from requiring the rightful owners, the parents, to be the ones that have to claim it.
First offense, confiscate the phone and give it back at the end of the day.
Second offense, give her in detention, confiscate the phone and require the parents to pick it up in person if they want it back.
Subsequent offenses, repeat step two. The parents will get sick of this pretty quickly, and she will find herself without a phone.
It's not that hard.