Thank you for posting this reply, I've recently finished 5 years of university study in addition to spending a year of that working for the university and closely with professors. From what I've seen your attitude is the prevalent one. Most professors I know have gone out of their way to provide access to any necessary textbook material to the point that the majority of the time owning the required textbook can be circumvented entirely.
I know that once I was aware of this, I would only purchase required texts after a week or two of classes if either I realized that it was really necessary, or the price wasn't prohibative to the convenience, or that the book really was a useful and interesting one. (Thank you Calculus textbook, you've saved my ass on a number of occasions.)
I took a lot of Math in university... and laptops are so utterly useless unless you're going to spend a lot of time customizing it for symbols and equations, and then most of the time graphs will defeat you anyway.
I have friends who used laptops in class, and friends who used palm pilots, but overall with just my pencil and paper I took better, easier to understand, and comprehensive notes that were a godsend at exam time. Especially when your prof breaks out all the special symbols and notations that they use on the blackboard and in course notes that aren't keymapped yet on your machine.
Coincidentaly, I found that the way to succeed with the least amount of effort (every university student's goal) was to simply attend every class, and handwrite complete notes on everything in the lecture. I forced myself to think things through as I wrote (which for me takes more thought than typing) and at exam time I hardly had to study at all because I remembered most of it, and at very least understood the concepts from the writing. Just glancing at my notes was enough to bring the details back.
So I would say, forget the laptop. If they want to have a computer thats portable let them work for it and value it. A good quality desktop is a better investment, and will probably be worth more to the student in terms of learning.
Re:Quick way to colonize
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Oh great! Lots of sand, some ice that we thought shouldn't have been there... now MARS is going to have an NHL before we Winnipegers get our back!
I think that pretty much systematically destroys the purpose of the patent office although it would indeed probably stop almost everyone from applying for a patent.
I also think that it would be a bad idea to have the best people in each field working for the USPTO, those are the people we want solving problems and applying for patents, not approving or rejecting the leftovers!
And I know you added in the qualifier 'whatever is needed' so I'll only reinforce the point that $100K a year would have a tough time luring away a good general practioner doctor, let alone the best and brightest in areas of research. I mean, I have an aunt doing research in molecular biology and I know that she would detest doing patent work for any amount of money. She makes more than enough to be happy with it, and she does what she does because its making a difference and she hopes to save lives...
If you want more natural light in your life, move to Canada. Seriously.
During the winter you're at work for almost all (depending on where you live) the daylight hours anyway, so that fact that you're at work for ALL the daylight hours isn't much of a stretch. Spend your lunch time sitting in front of a big window. If you're on the praries (like I am) it's chronically sunny and clear so chances are the sun will be out and shining. (Thank you to whoever thought of making my home one of the sunniest spots on earth... excepting actual deserts).
In the summer though is when you reap the real benefits. The sun rises at 5:20 in the morning on the longest day of the year, and sets at 9:41. Although the light is usable enough, and doesn't get really dark until 11:30, and starts getting light again just after 3am. We're not quite far enough north that we don't get real darkness at night, but if you're tired of not getting enough light in the evenings during the summer, come visit us. And if you're worried about the cold, on really hot days it gets up to 100 fahrenheit, not quite 40 celcius, and is usually a comfortable 75-80 fahrenheit or about 25 celcius.
I won't comment on winter temperatures, personally I prefer hurt-your-lungs searingly crisp cold over extreme heat any day./plug
To Soyuz 1 and 11! To the 1960 refuelling and repair explosion in Tyuratam (USSR)! To the 1980 Vostok rocket explosion at Pletetsk (USSR)! To the 1993 VLS-1 rocket explosion in Brazil! And the 2004 solid fuel rocket fire in Sriharikota (India)!
USB 2.0 Hi-Speed or Full-Speed? Here is why we love naming ambiguities, because people who don't understand them don't think anything about not putting them in.
I did not say that science was about proving our theories right. I said its about plugging the holes that our current theories have. A theory is an approximate model, when new data is found we must either find a better explanation that improves on the existing theory, or select a theory that better fits the known evidence.
I was also saying that if someone DOES DO what you are railing against, then that means what they are doing ceases to be science, it is now faith. And therein lies the differentiation that having 'faith in science' is irrelevant, because science is nearly the antithesis to faith.
Its not a faith, the whole meaning of science is to construct a better theory to plug the holes in the old one and answer questions. To say that science will plugs the holes in its theory is redundant, because it is not science otherwise. Faith has nothing to do with it. Either it will, or if the current theory is proclaimed to be the absolute truth despite have holes then it ceases to be science.
Time to create some encrypted files on my harddrive with suggestive names and whose keys I generated with my eyes closed. Give them something to think about...
That, or in cities or communities where a company has its primary business interests. Although with Microsoft its hard to say how they would define location considering how pervasive their business interests are.
Non competes also usually have a very narrow focus on what kind of work constitutes competition. For example I have one as a software developer, obviously mine cannot prevent employment in software development in general within the radius of the agreement, but it is narrowly defined as a specific type of development on products that do a certain type of thing, essentially working on another product that could be used as a replacement.
Its a limited term agreement for a period of 1 year. After the 1 year has passed after termination he may then seek work at a competitor. Its really a very common thing at a lot of places, I've signed one myself. Its really not a big deal, and often if the parting is amicable the company will waive the restriction anyway. The whole purpose of it is to prevent poaching of employees by competitors in order to obtain trade secrets and hurt the competition.
I'm not so sure why they are suing Google, I imagine they should probably sue the guy who broke the contract unless Google had prior knowledge of the non-compete clause.
They already don't in your country, in some ways until they're 21. Ok, tell me this... you're 19, able to vote, drive, are no longer your parent's responsibility and are officially considered an adult. Many of you have left home, are living on your own or at College, but you can't ingest a legally available substance for 2 more years?
My country though isn't far behind, we've got 18s across the board in most places, 19s in a few others in terms of drinking. Too much parenting by the state, and not enough by the people who have it in their job description.
Its the only way to do it. A tyrant can only rule by the consent of the people, because if the people want it badely enough they will get it. (My salute to the people of Ukraine)
Ok, then the plain relevent facts are: 1) Session based state was maintained. 2) Cookies were never explicitly used in code. 3) Session ID was *definitely* not encoded in the URL. 4) Never had a single issue with pages not being accessible due to cookies being turned off in the browser.
Again, I am not aware of Sun's implementation details, so it is entirely possible that they use cookies of some form or another to maintain session state and hide the implementation details from the developer. If so, they did a damn good job because I haven't yet had any issues with it.
1) True, but if your ip changes during a session, then it does so. As long as a session remains active it isn't an issue. 2) Also true, which is why sessions are involved in the first place. IPs are the be all and end all of user identification which is why they are not used as such (although for the most part they tend to be a reasonable approximation for the purposes of collecting loose usage statistics). 3) Also true.
Now I will respond. Yes navigation can be non linear, however when a page loads you can extract the referrer as well as the current page. Along with timestamps it is a simple matter to construct a web-like approximation of usage. In addition, the exact pattern of movement is usually less important that knowing visits vs. submittals and whatever relevent statistics you want to gather about traffic on your site, but either way it can be done without much trouble.
What we used specifically were Java Session Beans. They are initialized upon first access to the site and remain valid for the entire time that session remains active until it either a) times out, or b) the user logs off. I won't go into details about establishing session keys and validation details, but needless to say it was stored on the server side session level and application level beans (which were validated against each other).
At no point did we encode the id in the URL or rely on IPs to tell us the identity, however the only security issue that arose was is a user closed their browser window before logging out (which in CERTAIN browsers failed to send a close message to the server). If a user then attempted to return and log in again, because their session has now changed they would receive a 'user already logged in error'. To help combat this relatively common problem, if the user's IP matched the currently logged in user's IP AND the logged in user has been inactive for a period of time, but not long enough yet to automatically log out we could then invalidate that session, discard it from the cache, and then allow the new user to log in and establishing a new session in the process.
Through this we were able to build a secure web application, and not once did I ever write a cookie. I'll admit that I don't know the precise details of how Sun implemented Java Server Beans, however I also verified that I could successfully use our application with cookies and JavaScript turned off.
Ok, you're obviously running a site that is not insignificant if you have an eCommerce application, GUID numbers and tracking individuals as they visit different pages. There are other ways to do this outside of cookies that gather non-aggregated data without putting anything on the user's machine.
The simplest example I can think of is one Java based web application I was one of the deveopers for. We had to deal with secure logins, we had eCommerce and a variety of other things that are mostly irrelevant. But the big thing was intercepting more than one person attempting to login with the same id, as well as session timeouts. This was further complicated by the fact that we had certain pages that users were expected to go to, and spend 10-20 minutes reading without generating another page hit.
So what we ended up doing was correlating IP addresses, user ids and page identifiers along with timestamps to track a user through the site by way of session level Java Beans and validate if a user had timed out, if it was the same one attempting to log back in after exiting their browser in a way that didn't terminate a session, or another IP attempting to log in to a busy account.
This info was stored on the server side, and from it we could assemble user flow and page use statistics without ever using a cookie or piece of Javascript.
And before anyone says anything, yes we did have strict privacy policies and agreements in place with our clients since access to the application had to be purchased in the first place.
Oi, I think that might be a little too restrictive there! Personally I rather think it'd be good for the hospital to call me if someone was in an accident, and them not having to worry about being sued because I'm on a DNC list to stop telemarketers.
I'd be more than happy with a 'No Soliciting' sign to hang on my phone and let that be that. Its something you're allowed to do at private property physical locations, so why not electronic locations?
Yes well, self-sacrifice is the only true virtue. Those who are able must contribute everything they can for those who are not. That is why you must sacrifice by working longer hours for the greater good of the United States of America!
(well, thats how it always sounds to those of us who live across the border).
Hey, if someone was willing to use the 'gained' money to actually BUILD a space elevator, I'd be the first person to volunteer to work enough extra hours to ensure that I spend the alloted amount of time each day being 100% productive...
Since no one seems to be volunteering to build it, I guess I'll just have to work in a way that retains my sanity.
Its a nice picture indeed, I like the look of it, although I agree with some previous posters that a resizing is in order so more information can be associated with each element 'bubble'.
However, I can't remember enough of the properties of individual elements to grasp the underlying structure of this periodic table. I remember my chemistry teacher explaining the elegance of the square periodic table by how the electron orbits are mapped out, the total charge of each element in vertical columns and all the neat stuff like that. What I would like to see before passing judgement on this new one is a mapping of all those cool features of the old table into the new table, so I can figure out how it works and if it truely does lend itself to a better understanding of the elements.
If all the nice relational properties of the old table are preserved in the new one in some sort of structure, then with some tweaking it might be quite useful. But until someone can point those features out to me, a pretty picture it will remain.
Nah, I enjoy baffling non-techies with jargon (just for fun though), its even better with a friend, discussing obscure and subtle points in public and observing the expressions of those who aren't part of the conversation.
Of course I'm quite aware that those same people can do the same thing to me in their area of expertise, its just that very few ever think to do so. (On a side note, when talking and explaining points TO a non-techie I am careful of the terms I use and very patient when teaching them something new. The fun is more in speaking to someone who's on the same level, where the jargon is well understood, in the presence of those who aren't knowledgable)
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Thank you for posting this reply, I've recently finished 5 years of university study in addition to spending a year of that working for the university and closely with professors. From what I've seen your attitude is the prevalent one. Most professors I know have gone out of their way to provide access to any necessary textbook material to the point that the majority of the time owning the required textbook can be circumvented entirely.
I know that once I was aware of this, I would only purchase required texts after a week or two of classes if either I realized that it was really necessary, or the price wasn't prohibative to the convenience, or that the book really was a useful and interesting one. (Thank you Calculus textbook, you've saved my ass on a number of occasions.)
I took a lot of Math in university... and laptops are so utterly useless unless you're going to spend a lot of time customizing it for symbols and equations, and then most of the time graphs will defeat you anyway.
I have friends who used laptops in class, and friends who used palm pilots, but overall with just my pencil and paper I took better, easier to understand, and comprehensive notes that were a godsend at exam time. Especially when your prof breaks out all the special symbols and notations that they use on the blackboard and in course notes that aren't keymapped yet on your machine.
Coincidentaly, I found that the way to succeed with the least amount of effort (every university student's goal) was to simply attend every class, and handwrite complete notes on everything in the lecture. I forced myself to think things through as I wrote (which for me takes more thought than typing) and at exam time I hardly had to study at all because I remembered most of it, and at very least understood the concepts from the writing. Just glancing at my notes was enough to bring the details back.
So I would say, forget the laptop. If they want to have a computer thats portable let them work for it and value it. A good quality desktop is a better investment, and will probably be worth more to the student in terms of learning.
Oh great! Lots of sand, some ice that we thought shouldn't have been there... now MARS is going to have an NHL before we Winnipegers get our back!
Umm, all I can say is... ack?!
I think that pretty much systematically destroys the purpose of the patent office although it would indeed probably stop almost everyone from applying for a patent.
I also think that it would be a bad idea to have the best people in each field working for the USPTO, those are the people we want solving problems and applying for patents, not approving or rejecting the leftovers!
And I know you added in the qualifier 'whatever is needed' so I'll only reinforce the point that $100K a year would have a tough time luring away a good general practioner doctor, let alone the best and brightest in areas of research. I mean, I have an aunt doing research in molecular biology and I know that she would detest doing patent work for any amount of money. She makes more than enough to be happy with it, and she does what she does because its making a difference and she hopes to save lives...
Its called DOS... do you really want to work in DOS?? Here, I have some old DOS installer floppies you can use, an entire operating system on 4.5 MBs!
If you want more natural light in your life, move to Canada. Seriously.
/plug
During the winter you're at work for almost all (depending on where you live) the daylight hours anyway, so that fact that you're at work for ALL the daylight hours isn't much of a stretch. Spend your lunch time sitting in front of a big window. If you're on the praries (like I am) it's chronically sunny and clear so chances are the sun will be out and shining. (Thank you to whoever thought of making my home one of the sunniest spots on earth... excepting actual deserts).
In the summer though is when you reap the real benefits. The sun rises at 5:20 in the morning on the longest day of the year, and sets at 9:41. Although the light is usable enough, and doesn't get really dark until 11:30, and starts getting light again just after 3am. We're not quite far enough north that we don't get real darkness at night, but if you're tired of not getting enough light in the evenings during the summer, come visit us. And if you're worried about the cold, on really hot days it gets up to 100 fahrenheit, not quite 40 celcius, and is usually a comfortable 75-80 fahrenheit or about 25 celcius.
I won't comment on winter temperatures, personally I prefer hurt-your-lungs searingly crisp cold over extreme heat any day.
To Soyuz 1 and 11!
To the 1960 refuelling and repair explosion in Tyuratam (USSR)!
To the 1980 Vostok rocket explosion at Pletetsk (USSR)!
To the 1993 VLS-1 rocket explosion in Brazil!
And the 2004 solid fuel rocket fire in Sriharikota (India)!
USB 2.0 Hi-Speed or Full-Speed? Here is why we love naming ambiguities, because people who don't understand them don't think anything about not putting them in.
I did not say that science was about proving our theories right. I said its about plugging the holes that our current theories have. A theory is an approximate model, when new data is found we must either find a better explanation that improves on the existing theory, or select a theory that better fits the known evidence.
I was also saying that if someone DOES DO what you are railing against, then that means what they are doing ceases to be science, it is now faith. And therein lies the differentiation that having 'faith in science' is irrelevant, because science is nearly the antithesis to faith.
Its not a faith, the whole meaning of science is to construct a better theory to plug the holes in the old one and answer questions. To say that science will plugs the holes in its theory is redundant, because it is not science otherwise. Faith has nothing to do with it. Either it will, or if the current theory is proclaimed to be the absolute truth despite have holes then it ceases to be science.
Time to create some encrypted files on my harddrive with suggestive names and whose keys I generated with my eyes closed. Give them something to think about...
That, or in cities or communities where a company has its primary business interests. Although with Microsoft its hard to say how they would define location considering how pervasive their business interests are.
Non competes also usually have a very narrow focus on what kind of work constitutes competition. For example I have one as a software developer, obviously mine cannot prevent employment in software development in general within the radius of the agreement, but it is narrowly defined as a specific type of development on products that do a certain type of thing, essentially working on another product that could be used as a replacement.
Its a limited term agreement for a period of 1 year. After the 1 year has passed after termination he may then seek work at a competitor. Its really a very common thing at a lot of places, I've signed one myself. Its really not a big deal, and often if the parting is amicable the company will waive the restriction anyway. The whole purpose of it is to prevent poaching of employees by competitors in order to obtain trade secrets and hurt the competition.
I'm not so sure why they are suing Google, I imagine they should probably sue the guy who broke the contract unless Google had prior knowledge of the non-compete clause.
They already don't in your country, in some ways until they're 21. Ok, tell me this... you're 19, able to vote, drive, are no longer your parent's responsibility and are officially considered an adult. Many of you have left home, are living on your own or at College, but you can't ingest a legally available substance for 2 more years?
My country though isn't far behind, we've got 18s across the board in most places, 19s in a few others in terms of drinking. Too much parenting by the state, and not enough by the people who have it in their job description.
Have you seen any terror attacks on American soil since 9/11? It must be working.
I also have a rock that keeps tigers away if anyone's interested.
Its the only way to do it. A tyrant can only rule by the consent of the people, because if the people want it badely enough they will get it. (My salute to the people of Ukraine)
Ok, then the plain relevent facts are:
1) Session based state was maintained.
2) Cookies were never explicitly used in code.
3) Session ID was *definitely* not encoded in the URL.
4) Never had a single issue with pages not being accessible due to cookies being turned off in the browser.
Again, I am not aware of Sun's implementation details, so it is entirely possible that they use cookies of some form or another to maintain session state and hide the implementation details from the developer. If so, they did a damn good job because I haven't yet had any issues with it.
1) True, but if your ip changes during a session, then it does so. As long as a session remains active it isn't an issue.
2) Also true, which is why sessions are involved in the first place. IPs are the be all and end all of user identification which is why they are not used as such (although for the most part they tend to be a reasonable approximation for the purposes of collecting loose usage statistics).
3) Also true.
Now I will respond. Yes navigation can be non linear, however when a page loads you can extract the referrer as well as the current page. Along with timestamps it is a simple matter to construct a web-like approximation of usage. In addition, the exact pattern of movement is usually less important that knowing visits vs. submittals and whatever relevent statistics you want to gather about traffic on your site, but either way it can be done without much trouble.
What we used specifically were Java Session Beans. They are initialized upon first access to the site and remain valid for the entire time that session remains active until it either a) times out, or b) the user logs off. I won't go into details about establishing session keys and validation details, but needless to say it was stored on the server side session level and application level beans (which were validated against each other).
At no point did we encode the id in the URL or rely on IPs to tell us the identity, however the only security issue that arose was is a user closed their browser window before logging out (which in CERTAIN browsers failed to send a close message to the server). If a user then attempted to return and log in again, because their session has now changed they would receive a 'user already logged in error'. To help combat this relatively common problem, if the user's IP matched the currently logged in user's IP AND the logged in user has been inactive for a period of time, but not long enough yet to automatically log out we could then invalidate that session, discard it from the cache, and then allow the new user to log in and establishing a new session in the process.
Through this we were able to build a secure web application, and not once did I ever write a cookie. I'll admit that I don't know the precise details of how Sun implemented Java Server Beans, however I also verified that I could successfully use our application with cookies and JavaScript turned off.
Ok, you're obviously running a site that is not insignificant if you have an eCommerce application, GUID numbers and tracking individuals as they visit different pages. There are other ways to do this outside of cookies that gather non-aggregated data without putting anything on the user's machine.
The simplest example I can think of is one Java based web application I was one of the deveopers for. We had to deal with secure logins, we had eCommerce and a variety of other things that are mostly irrelevant. But the big thing was intercepting more than one person attempting to login with the same id, as well as session timeouts. This was further complicated by the fact that we had certain pages that users were expected to go to, and spend 10-20 minutes reading without generating another page hit.
So what we ended up doing was correlating IP addresses, user ids and page identifiers along with timestamps to track a user through the site by way of session level Java Beans and validate if a user had timed out, if it was the same one attempting to log back in after exiting their browser in a way that didn't terminate a session, or another IP attempting to log in to a busy account.
This info was stored on the server side, and from it we could assemble user flow and page use statistics without ever using a cookie or piece of Javascript.
And before anyone says anything, yes we did have strict privacy policies and agreements in place with our clients since access to the application had to be purchased in the first place.
Ah true... makes me glad that I don't have to worry about medical practicioners soliciting me to use their services since I'm a Canuck ;).
Oi, I think that might be a little too restrictive there! Personally I rather think it'd be good for the hospital to call me if someone was in an accident, and them not having to worry about being sued because I'm on a DNC list to stop telemarketers.
I'd be more than happy with a 'No Soliciting' sign to hang on my phone and let that be that. Its something you're allowed to do at private property physical locations, so why not electronic locations?
Yes well, self-sacrifice is the only true virtue. Those who are able must contribute everything they can for those who are not. That is why you must sacrifice by working longer hours for the greater good of the United States of America!
(well, thats how it always sounds to those of us who live across the border).
Hey, if someone was willing to use the 'gained' money to actually BUILD a space elevator, I'd be the first person to volunteer to work enough extra hours to ensure that I spend the alloted amount of time each day being 100% productive...
Since no one seems to be volunteering to build it, I guess I'll just have to work in a way that retains my sanity.
Its a nice picture indeed, I like the look of it, although I agree with some previous posters that a resizing is in order so more information can be associated with each element 'bubble'.
However, I can't remember enough of the properties of individual elements to grasp the underlying structure of this periodic table. I remember my chemistry teacher explaining the elegance of the square periodic table by how the electron orbits are mapped out, the total charge of each element in vertical columns and all the neat stuff like that. What I would like to see before passing judgement on this new one is a mapping of all those cool features of the old table into the new table, so I can figure out how it works and if it truely does lend itself to a better understanding of the elements.
If all the nice relational properties of the old table are preserved in the new one in some sort of structure, then with some tweaking it might be quite useful. But until someone can point those features out to me, a pretty picture it will remain.
Nah, I enjoy baffling non-techies with jargon (just for fun though), its even better with a friend, discussing obscure and subtle points in public and observing the expressions of those who aren't part of the conversation.
Of course I'm quite aware that those same people can do the same thing to me in their area of expertise, its just that very few ever think to do so. (On a side note, when talking and explaining points TO a non-techie I am careful of the terms I use and very patient when teaching them something new. The fun is more in speaking to someone who's on the same level, where the jargon is well understood, in the presence of those who aren't knowledgable)