... anybody that gave a cluster user root access would be certifiable
Oh, I dunno; I remember back in the 90's, when MIT had these rooms full of "public" workstations. There was a sign up on the wall reminding people of the root password. They were all the same, of course. If you thought it was insecure, well, they invited you to try to use the password to damage anyone's stuff other than your own. (Every once in a long while, someone actually succeeded.;-)
If you think this is "certifiable" behavior, well, I'd agree. It would certify you as knowing something about security.
Yeah, all sorts of spyware got installed on idle systems, especially keyloggers. That's why one of the first lessons for users was how to reboot, which would download a new kernel from a secure server. The boot sequence would verify the system directories, and download anything that showed signs of tampering. Not a big deal. Your home directory would be mounted from one of the servers, too, of course. The rest of the disk was scratch; anything you used there was your problem.
Not that I'd expect your typical high-school admin to understand any of this. But they could keep a lookout for the bright "hacker" type kids, and put them in charge of the system. That should pretty much take care of it.
You cannot really expect students to be compiling their own kernels.
I certainly could, and would.
I can imagine your school. The auto shop students wouldn't learn to tune an engine or replace spark plugs. The woodshop classes wouldn't require actually assembling and finishing anything. The literature students would never write anything. The kids in the orchestra would never put together a full performance of anything.
Granted, most computer users never need to compile their OS. And most drivers never need to replace the transmission. But I certainly would expect students in appropriate classes to learn to do such things.
Or maybe you don't think that students should learn about computers; they should only learn to use them. Not much of a school, I'd say.
This is the primary reason for encouraging them to install linux (and *BSD). The obvious choice is MS Windows. But you can't really teach much about the innards of a proprietary system like that. All the details are hidden and "not accessible to the consumer". Fine for an office, maybe, but not fine for a school that wants their students to learn about how it all works.
Also, there's the ongoing problem that, with donated computers, it's illegal for them to use installed MS software without first paying for all the licenses. But they can format the disks and install linux without worrying about being sued by hords of corporate lawyers.
For a competent school administrator, this is pretty much a no-brainer. Yeah, you want a few Windows boxes (properly licensed) so that students can learn to use them. But for real teaching of computer ideas, you need access to the innards.
You might consider some Mac Minis, too, while you're at it. They are nearly as open as linux, and will give the students another model for comparison. You wouldn't expect your auto shop to have only one model car, and your computer lab shouldn't contain only one model computer system.
Heh. I really think that I should send an apology to him for mentioning his site on/.
Actually, the problem is probably even worse than just/., since I've found a similar link on Dave Barry's blog (registration required). I wonder how many readers Dave has, compared to/.? I have seen comments on his blog about how they've "slashdotted" some poor server. I wonder if the Miami Herald has the bandwidth to withstand the onslaught...;-)
I have seen several claims that the most-played jukebox selection of all time was a record produced back in the 60's that was several minutes of silence. It seems that lots of people like the idea that, for a small price, you can get a few minutes of no music at all.
Some years back, there was a bit of a fuss in the Chicago area when a local neo-Nazi, white-supremacist group applied for a permit to march through a largely-Jewish neighborhood.
The fun part was when a number of local black leaders publicly announced that the group was welcome to march through their neighborhood. For some reason, the group didn't take them up on this kind offer...
... cartoon characters like Spongebob are accused of promoting the "gay agenda" (whatever *that* is).
Actually, this case seems pretty clear. The attack on spongebob was because of the cartoon's emphasis on tolerance of people (or fish or crustacea;-) who are different from you. Earlier attacks have been made against Sesame Street characters for much the same reason.
To much of the American religious fringe, tolerance is now routinely derided as homosexual. They've found that this is a more effective way of framing the issue than earlier approaches. Their basic problem is that much of the American population approves of tolerance. So it has to be fought on some other terms.
Even this could backfire on them. Something I've had fun describing to gay friends: Back in high school, when I was involved in a lot of music, dance and theatre activities, there was a fair amount of discussion of the fact that this labelled us (especially us males) as "gay" to a lot of people. I'd argue that we shouldn't complain about this. If they think we're gay, they'll trust us around the girls. For some reason, real gays react to this with big grins.
The Linux Corp probably isn't the appropriate one to do this. It's a compiler task, so it's more logical to make it a GNU (or FSF) patent.
Also, it really should be the IsToo operator. Presumably it would work somewhat like a macro definition, stating that whatever the variable or expression X represents, Y represents the same thing. Normally X would be a complex object, and Y would be a simple variable name to be used as a shorthand symbol.
Sounds like a fun idea to me. But it would take a bit of money to pull it off.
... or we all give up tech completely and be farmers.
Won't help. DNA patents are becoming the same threat to farming as software patents are to software development.
There have already been a couple of well-publicised cases. If you're a farmer, what you're susceptible to is: Someone drives by your farm during planting time and tosses a few seed around in your field that contain patented DNA. Or maybe they drive by during flowering season and toss some pollen upwind of your field. Your crop (and/or its seeds) now tests positive to that particular DNA, you don't have a license to produce it, and you're sued for more than your farm's worth.
There has an interesting reaction to this in a few African countries, which have recntly refused "aid" shipments of patented grain. They said they would accept the grain if it was ground, but not whole seeds. There's just too much danger of the seed ended up planted in fields, and then the seed's producer would sue the farmers into bankruptcy. The end result could easily be that the seed supplier (typically a big American or European corporation) owns the local farm land.
If you switch to farming, you might want to hire a few patent lawyers to defend you in the battles to come.
I just checked with theonion.com, and found that you now have to subscribe to get to their archives. And google no longer has a cached copy of their page.
I guess we should get the word out that if you like an Onion story, you should make a copy of it now, before they hide it from non-subscribers.
Or maybe we should all subscribe. They're worth supporting, right?
It's not easy to reach the end user. Specially because it's expensive.
Well, I've tried to develop software for handhelds, smartphones mostly, and I'd say that the reason you don't see linux much is something rather different.
At least in the US, to use a smartphone, you must use one that is approved by the particular phone company. It's a violation of your TOS to attempt to use an unapproved phone with your account. In most cases, this violation will be detected and the phone part just won't work. If you want to use a non-approved PDA on the phone system, you have to plug in an external phone to do the comms part.
So the decision about what OS and software is installed can't be made by a customer. You have to use the software installed by the vendor. Your "choice" is solely among the packages that the phone company management has approved.
Not surprising, really, that smartphones have moved to a Microsoft platform. That's what you'd expect when the decision is in the hands of marketing managers rather than customers or software developers.
Linux is pretty much limited to situations where the users and/or the developers can decide what system they want to use. This isn't true with smartphones, which as others have pointed out, is most of the PDA market now.
... was that it's 128x60x25mm and weighs 210g. This isn't a pocket device, unless you've got deep pockets. It's a small laptop with a builtin phone.
I did also notice that the specs include 640x240 touchscreen. I wonder if you could use a random stylus with the screen? If so, what's the sensitivity? I do have a couple of those multi-gadget pens that include a stylus (plus pencil and red/black or red/blue pens). It'd be cool if you could use these. Of course, a stylus that hides inside the device would be more likely to be there when you need it.
They also say there's viewers for office documents - don't confuse that with "Includes Microsoft Office."
Yeah, I noticed that. But then, why would a sensible person want to produce proprietary documents? I'd much rather produce documents in a format that can be read by anyone that I send them to, without first checking to see if they have decoding software.
After stumbling through it with my high-school Deutsch, I find in the first reply that there was an English page all along. Oh, well; it's useful to maintain some semblance of an ability to read a few other languages, even if I do live in the US.;-)
Actually, no; the oxymoron would be "fundamentalist science".
There have been a great many scientists who were Christians (or other religions). Charles Darwin was trained as a minister, for a really famous example.
Most Christian denominations don't have any particular conflict with science. It's the fundamentalist churches that cause the problems, because they're the ones who insist on a "literal" interpretation of the bible, and refuse to accept that their God would speak in metaphors or other poetic language.
Also, fundamentalists in some other religions have a similar conflict with science. It's not really a Christian problem so much a fundamentalist problem.
Even the Catholic church has pretty much made its peace with science (though it did take them a few centuries to forgive Galileo;-).
See if speakeasy has service in your area. They encourage sharing of connections, especially with wifi. They will help you set up line sharing with neighbors (or tell you if you have a neighbor that's already doing this). They'll help you set it up and take care of the billing for you. Depending on the actual speed you need, you could share one DSL line among N people, and each would pay 1/N of the monthly bill. It would all be open and legal.
They also don't block any ports, so you could run an email server on your own machine if you like. For that matter, you could run your own web server, making it easy to share your pictures with friends. I've done a lot of this, just sending a URL so they can browse the thumbnails and download any pics they like.
Are there other ISPs that encourage this? You'd think they all would, if they were actually interested in giving good service to their customers.
I can vouch for the parent; my fiancee has virtually no stereo perception and functions just fine, even driving.
Nothing surprising there. Human eyes are too close together for stereo vision to be useful past 3 or 4 meters. Past that difference, your brain generates the 3-D effect, mostly be comparing small changes over time ("sequential stero"). Driving is a good example: Close things move faster than things farther away, and things grow as you approach them. You learn to infer distances at a very early age.
Stereo vision is mostly useful when interacting with things nearby. For example, when you're trying to pick something up. Not coincidentally, your stereo vision is best at about the distance of your hands.
But at the distances involved when driving, humans really don't have stereo vision. Maybe if our eyes were on ends of long stalks, if would work, but not when they are only a few cm apart.
Um, this isn't exactly secret knowledge. I grew up on the American West Coast, and I remember being taught about "tidal waves" in grade school. Not that there had been one of any size in living memory, of course. But we were taught that if we saw the ocean water retreating more rapidly than an ordinary tide, we should try to get away from the shore to avoid the incoming wave that would follow.
I'd bet that this is known to shore dwellers almost everywhere. Of course, some people are too stupid to listen when their teachers try to tell them about such things. (And some teachers are probably too stupid to teach it.;-)
But it's hardly the sort of knowledge that's restricted to a privileged few. Not if it's taught to American children.
Of course, later on they finally admitted that "tidal wave" was a bad term, unless you live in one of the estuaries that actually has tidal bores. So we were taught a funny new Japanese word...
There are species than are known to use small crystals of magnetite to detect the Earth's magnetic field. Many bacteria do this, so it's believed to be an ancient mechanism. There's debate about whether humans have this sense, because isolated magnetite crystals have been found in some human cells, but not enough to be convincing. Some birds seem to have cells with enogh magnetite to convince biologists that it's part of a magnetic sense, and those birds can be confused if you have them fly through a magnetic field that's "wrong".
Many birds are known to be sensitive to the polarization of light. Some birds use this for navigation when enough blue sky is visible to make it work. Some kinds of fish (e.g. trout), molluscs (squid, cuttlefish) and insects are also known to be able to detect polarization of light.
Quite a few years ago, I spent some time experimenting with polarizing filters on my camera. After a while, I started to realize that I could "see" the polarization of light. Ask around among photographers, and you'll find that this is common and not considered anything remarkable. In the case of humans, the physical mechanism isn't known. The light just looks different somehow, and you know how to rotate the filter to get the effect you want.
There are still a lot of things to be learned about senses, ours and other animals'.
The sense of touch is often broken up into three senses: pressure, pain, and temperature. These are handled by three physically different kinds of nerve endings that really share nothing except their location in the skin.
Similarly, the sense of sight is sometimes divided into two senses, since the retina's rods and cones are different populations of cells with very different visual properties.
The old "five senses" is basically just fuzzy thinking dating back to ancient Greek times.
The "kinesthetic sense" is a true physical sense, and it has known sensory receptors. These are the pressure-sensitive nerve endings inside your joints that send data to your brain about the angles of your joints. These are much like the pressure sensors in your skin, but they are a different population of pressure sensors whose data is handled by a different part of the brain.
This raw data isn't too useful by itself. It's used to update that model inside your brain.
One of the interesting properties of this sense is that, like the pressure sensors in your skin, the sensors in your joints only send data when there are pressure changes. This is why, when you're still, you can lose precision in your mental model and not know exactly where all your components are. But, as was pointed out with the ball-player example, all it takes is a bit of motion, the kinesthetic receptors start transmitting, and your mental model regains its precision.
Just one of many reasons why 5 is a silly number of senses. You have a lot more than that.
Slashdot Mirror
... anybody that gave a cluster user root access would be certifiable
;-)
Oh, I dunno; I remember back in the 90's, when MIT had these rooms full of "public" workstations. There was a sign up on the wall reminding people of the root password. They were all the same, of course. If you thought it was insecure, well, they invited you to try to use the password to damage anyone's stuff other than your own. (Every once in a long while, someone actually succeeded.
If you think this is "certifiable" behavior, well, I'd agree. It would certify you as knowing something about security.
Yeah, all sorts of spyware got installed on idle systems, especially keyloggers. That's why one of the first lessons for users was how to reboot, which would download a new kernel from a secure server. The boot sequence would verify the system directories, and download anything that showed signs of tampering. Not a big deal. Your home directory would be mounted from one of the servers, too, of course. The rest of the disk was scratch; anything you used there was your problem.
Not that I'd expect your typical high-school admin to understand any of this. But they could keep a lookout for the bright "hacker" type kids, and put them in charge of the system. That should pretty much take care of it.
You cannot really expect students to be compiling their own kernels.
I certainly could, and would.
I can imagine your school. The auto shop students wouldn't learn to tune an engine or replace spark plugs. The woodshop classes wouldn't require actually assembling and finishing anything. The literature students would never write anything. The kids in the orchestra would never put together a full performance of anything.
Granted, most computer users never need to compile their OS. And most drivers never need to replace the transmission. But I certainly would expect students in appropriate classes to learn to do such things.
Or maybe you don't think that students should learn about computers; they should only learn to use them. Not much of a school, I'd say.
This is the primary reason for encouraging them to install linux (and *BSD). The obvious choice is MS Windows. But you can't really teach much about the innards of a proprietary system like that. All the details are hidden and "not accessible to the consumer". Fine for an office, maybe, but not fine for a school that wants their students to learn about how it all works.
Also, there's the ongoing problem that, with donated computers, it's illegal for them to use installed MS software without first paying for all the licenses. But they can format the disks and install linux without worrying about being sued by hords of corporate lawyers.
For a competent school administrator, this is pretty much a no-brainer. Yeah, you want a few Windows boxes (properly licensed) so that students can learn to use them. But for real teaching of computer ideas, you need access to the innards.
You might consider some Mac Minis, too, while you're at it. They are nearly as open as linux, and will give the students another model for comparison. You wouldn't expect your auto shop to have only one model car, and your computer lab shouldn't contain only one model computer system.
No, actually; that's just the work's title. It's clearly legal to reproduce such a title in its entirety. Reviewers do this all the time.
Here's a reproduction of the actual work:
(Don't scroll this page for at least 1 minute 4 seconds, or the above text won't display properly.)
Heh. I really think that I should send an apology to him for mentioning his site on /.
/., since I've found a similar link on Dave Barry's blog (registration required). I wonder how many readers Dave has, compared to /.? I have seen comments on his blog about how they've "slashdotted" some poor server. I wonder if the Miami Herald has the bandwidth to withstand the onslaught ... ;-)
Actually, the problem is probably even worse than just
I have seen several claims that the most-played jukebox selection of all time was a record produced back in the 60's that was several minutes of silence. It seems that lots of people like the idea that, for a small price, you can get a few minutes of no music at all.
Some years back, there was a bit of a fuss in the Chicago area when a local neo-Nazi, white-supremacist group applied for a permit to march through a largely-Jewish neighborhood.
...
The fun part was when a number of local black leaders publicly announced that the group was welcome to march through their neighborhood. For some reason, the group didn't take them up on this kind offer
...it is difficult to find a book store freely selling copies of Mein Kampf.
...
Hey, just go to amazon.com and type it into their Search widget. They have three editions at the moment. You can get the unpublished sequel, too.
Funny thing: When I just tried it, one of the matches was for The Communst Manifesto. Talk about an oxymoron
But I think I understand why this would happen. Sun Tsu's Art of War is also included in the list.
... cartoon characters like Spongebob are accused of promoting the "gay agenda" (whatever *that* is).
;-) who are different from you. Earlier attacks have been made against Sesame Street characters for much the same reason.
Actually, this case seems pretty clear. The attack on spongebob was because of the cartoon's emphasis on tolerance of people (or fish or crustacea
To much of the American religious fringe, tolerance is now routinely derided as homosexual. They've found that this is a more effective way of framing the issue than earlier approaches. Their basic problem is that much of the American population approves of tolerance. So it has to be fought on some other terms.
Even this could backfire on them. Something I've had fun describing to gay friends: Back in high school, when I was involved in a lot of music, dance and theatre activities, there was a fair amount of discussion of the fact that this labelled us (especially us males) as "gay" to a lot of people. I'd argue that we shouldn't complain about this. If they think we're gay, they'll trust us around the girls. For some reason, real gays react to this with big grins.
The Linux Corp probably isn't the appropriate one to do this. It's a compiler task, so it's more logical to make it a GNU (or FSF) patent.
Also, it really should be the IsToo operator. Presumably it would work somewhat like a macro definition, stating that whatever the variable or expression X represents, Y represents the same thing. Normally X would be a complex object, and Y would be a simple variable name to be used as a shorthand symbol.
Sounds like a fun idea to me. But it would take a bit of money to pull it off.
... or we all give up tech completely and be farmers.
Won't help. DNA patents are becoming the same threat to farming as software patents are to software development.
There have already been a couple of well-publicised cases. If you're a farmer, what you're susceptible to is: Someone drives by your farm during planting time and tosses a few seed around in your field that contain patented DNA. Or maybe they drive by during flowering season and toss some pollen upwind of your field. Your crop (and/or its seeds) now tests positive to that particular DNA, you don't have a license to produce it, and you're sued for more than your farm's worth.
There has an interesting reaction to this in a few African countries, which have recntly refused "aid" shipments of patented grain. They said they would accept the grain if it was ground, but not whole seeds. There's just too much danger of the seed ended up planted in fields, and then the seed's producer would sue the farmers into bankruptcy. The end result could easily be that the seed supplier (typically a big American or European corporation) owns the local farm land.
If you switch to farming, you might want to hire a few patent lawyers to defend you in the battles to come.
I just checked with theonion.com, and found that you now have to subscribe to get to their archives. And google no longer has a cached copy of their page.
I guess we should get the word out that if you like an Onion story, you should make a copy of it now, before they hide it from non-subscribers.
Or maybe we should all subscribe. They're worth supporting, right?
Another shameless ripoff from the Onion. ;-)
(And right after a similar reply which did give them proper attribution.)
It's not easy to reach the end user. Specially because it's expensive.
Well, I've tried to develop software for handhelds, smartphones mostly, and I'd say that the reason you don't see linux much is something rather different.
At least in the US, to use a smartphone, you must use one that is approved by the particular phone company. It's a violation of your TOS to attempt to use an unapproved phone with your account. In most cases, this violation will be detected and the phone part just won't work. If you want to use a non-approved PDA on the phone system, you have to plug in an external phone to do the comms part.
So the decision about what OS and software is installed can't be made by a customer. You have to use the software installed by the vendor. Your "choice" is solely among the packages that the phone company management has approved.
Not surprising, really, that smartphones have moved to a Microsoft platform. That's what you'd expect when the decision is in the hands of marketing managers rather than customers or software developers.
Linux is pretty much limited to situations where the users and/or the developers can decide what system they want to use. This isn't true with smartphones, which as others have pointed out, is most of the PDA market now.
... was that it's 128x60x25mm and weighs 210g. This isn't a pocket device, unless you've got deep pockets. It's a small laptop with a builtin phone.
I did also notice that the specs include 640x240 touchscreen. I wonder if you could use a random stylus with the screen? If so, what's the sensitivity? I do have a couple of those multi-gadget pens that include a stylus (plus pencil and red/black or red/blue pens). It'd be cool if you could use these. Of course, a stylus that hides inside the device would be more likely to be there when you need it.
They also say there's viewers for office documents - don't confuse that with "Includes Microsoft Office."
Yeah, I noticed that. But then, why would a sensible person want to produce proprietary documents? I'd much rather produce documents in a format that can be read by anyone that I send them to, without first checking to see if they have decoding software.
Well, that'll teach me to RTFA first!
;-)
After stumbling through it with my high-school Deutsch, I find in the first reply that there was an English page all along. Oh, well; it's useful to maintain some semblance of an ability to read a few other languages, even if I do live in the US.
Swap houses with your neighbors? ;-)
Is christian science not an oxy-moron?
;-).
Actually, no; the oxymoron would be "fundamentalist science".
There have been a great many scientists who were Christians (or other religions). Charles Darwin was trained as a minister, for a really famous example.
Most Christian denominations don't have any particular conflict with science. It's the fundamentalist churches that cause the problems, because they're the ones who insist on a "literal" interpretation of the bible, and refuse to accept that their God would speak in metaphors or other poetic language.
Also, fundamentalists in some other religions have a similar conflict with science. It's not really a Christian problem so much a fundamentalist problem.
Even the Catholic church has pretty much made its peace with science (though it did take them a few centuries to forgive Galileo
See if speakeasy has service in your area. They encourage sharing of connections, especially with wifi. They will help you set up line sharing with neighbors (or tell you if you have a neighbor that's already doing this). They'll help you set it up and take care of the billing for you. Depending on the actual speed you need, you could share one DSL line among N people, and each would pay 1/N of the monthly bill. It would all be open and legal.
They also don't block any ports, so you could run an email server on your own machine if you like. For that matter, you could run your own web server, making it easy to share your pictures with friends. I've done a lot of this, just sending a URL so they can browse the thumbnails and download any pics they like.
Are there other ISPs that encourage this? You'd think they all would, if they were actually interested in giving good service to their customers.
Just imagine if people had eyes like those of the diopsid fly ...
I can vouch for the parent; my fiancee has virtually no stereo perception and functions just fine, even driving.
Nothing surprising there. Human eyes are too close together for stereo vision to be useful past 3 or 4 meters. Past that difference, your brain generates the 3-D effect, mostly be comparing small changes over time ("sequential stero"). Driving is a good example: Close things move faster than things farther away, and things grow as you approach them. You learn to infer distances at a very early age.
Stereo vision is mostly useful when interacting with things nearby. For example, when you're trying to pick something up. Not coincidentally, your stereo vision is best at about the distance of your hands.
But at the distances involved when driving, humans really don't have stereo vision. Maybe if our eyes were on ends of long stalks, if would work, but not when they are only a few cm apart.
Um, this isn't exactly secret knowledge. I grew up on the American West Coast, and I remember being taught about "tidal waves" in grade school. Not that there had been one of any size in living memory, of course. But we were taught that if we saw the ocean water retreating more rapidly than an ordinary tide, we should try to get away from the shore to avoid the incoming wave that would follow.
;-)
...
I'd bet that this is known to shore dwellers almost everywhere. Of course, some people are too stupid to listen when their teachers try to tell them about such things. (And some teachers are probably too stupid to teach it.
But it's hardly the sort of knowledge that's restricted to a privileged few. Not if it's taught to American children.
Of course, later on they finally admitted that "tidal wave" was a bad term, unless you live in one of the estuaries that actually has tidal bores. So we were taught a funny new Japanese word
There are species than are known to use small crystals of magnetite to detect the Earth's magnetic field. Many bacteria do this, so it's believed to be an ancient mechanism. There's debate about whether humans have this sense, because isolated magnetite crystals have been found in some human cells, but not enough to be convincing. Some birds seem to have cells with enogh magnetite to convince biologists that it's part of a magnetic sense, and those birds can be confused if you have them fly through a magnetic field that's "wrong".
Many birds are known to be sensitive to the polarization of light. Some birds use this for navigation when enough blue sky is visible to make it work. Some kinds of fish (e.g. trout), molluscs (squid, cuttlefish) and insects are also known to be able to detect polarization of light.
Quite a few years ago, I spent some time experimenting with polarizing filters on my camera. After a while, I started to realize that I could "see" the polarization of light. Ask around among photographers, and you'll find that this is common and not considered anything remarkable. In the case of humans, the physical mechanism isn't known. The light just looks different somehow, and you know how to rotate the filter to get the effect you want.
There are still a lot of things to be learned about senses, ours and other animals'.
The sense of touch is often broken up into three senses: pressure, pain, and temperature. These are handled by three physically different kinds of nerve endings that really share nothing except their location in the skin.
Similarly, the sense of sight is sometimes divided into two senses, since the retina's rods and cones are different populations of cells with very different visual properties.
The old "five senses" is basically just fuzzy thinking dating back to ancient Greek times.
Wait! You're both right! ;-)
The "kinesthetic sense" is a true physical sense, and it has known sensory receptors. These are the pressure-sensitive nerve endings inside your joints that send data to your brain about the angles of your joints. These are much like the pressure sensors in your skin, but they are a different population of pressure sensors whose data is handled by a different part of the brain.
This raw data isn't too useful by itself. It's used to update that model inside your brain.
One of the interesting properties of this sense is that, like the pressure sensors in your skin, the sensors in your joints only send data when there are pressure changes. This is why, when you're still, you can lose precision in your mental model and not know exactly where all your components are. But, as was pointed out with the ball-player example, all it takes is a bit of motion, the kinesthetic receptors start transmitting, and your mental model regains its precision.
Just one of many reasons why 5 is a silly number of senses. You have a lot more than that.