Sounds like the controversy recently in my home province. A teacher was fired for giving high school students a zero mark on assignments and tests they did not complete. The school board defended the decision stating that the school had a policy of not giving out zero grades no matter what. Even if the student repeatedly refused to do any work at all. Apparently the teacher was supposed to assign the particular assignment a "did not complete" and then not include it in the student's final mark, instead averaging their other work. After a significant amount of public outcry the school board has agreed to "review" the policy, but as of yet they still seem to side more with the school than the teacher in question.
And this is why I have an Iconia. It is the only tablet available in my location with a full sized USB host port. it also happens to have a micro-sd slot and micro-HDMI output. The USB port was an absolute requirement of mine, and the lack of a needed dongle to convert to full sized is even better. As for the Nexus 7... they lost me at "7" I have absolutely zero interest in a tablet less than 10inches. my phone is over 4, I don't need anything that's only marginally bigger than the phone. I'd buy a 12" tablet if they made one. (my ideal tablet would be 8-1/2"x11", same as a standard sheet of paper)
And that's the problem, I actually used gnome ages ago, but KDE felt faster and less bloated so I switched, then I enjoyed KDE for a while, and then it seemed to get quite bloated and slow, so I moved back to gnome (though a newer version) and now gnome went all unity on me... It often does feel like desktop developers are making a race for the bottom. see who can remove the most functionality, and at the same time increase the resources needed to run the silly thing.
Of course I've started to get quite comfortable with ubuntu of various flavours, so I'm not sure I want to try something completely different. I've used other things over the years, (redhat (pre-fedora), slackware, gentoo) but in the past few years I keep coming back to various ubuntu distributions. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but in general they just work, and make life easy. In the end, that's what's important to me, I like a computer that just works. That's why I run Linux in the first place, it "just works", something I've never found true under windows, or even OSX.
Depends how the law is written. When the police around here wanted to introduce photo-radar speed traps and red light cameras it actually required the government to re-write the law. The offence you are charged with if you are pulled over for speeding is "operating a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit on a roadway", however if you are caught by photo radar it's actually a different offence called "being the owner of a motor vehicle being operated above the posted speed limit on a roadway" (the latter being added to the law specifically to allow for photo-radar where they'd have no proof of who was driving) The two different offences actually carry different penalties as well, they each carry identical monetary fines, however the former also includes demerit points, whereas the latter does not. My guess is that the law for your parking example is worded in such a way that the owner of the vehicle is responsible, regardless of who drove it there.
Just wait for another re-write of copyright laws making it an offence to be the account holder of an internet connection where unauthorized copying has taken place. makes it much easier to prove then the current situation where only the person actually downloading the content can be nailed.
And this is exactly why the RIAA/MPAA and all the similar organizations around the world exist. Their sole purpose is to introduce a separation in people's minds between the companies that make them up, and the lobbying and enforcement done on their behalves. The media industry isn't stupid. they know how unpopular this all is, they also know that people are too stupid to link the hated organization to the entertainment people like.
The only solution is to, at every possible opportunity, point out that this is NOT some anonymous organization pushing for all these evil laws and suing grandmothers and schoolkids, point out that this is each and every individual record label and movie studio which are members of those organizations. Now punish them appropriately, with your wallet.
Price per litre in Canada trended upwards with the price of oil right until about $1.20/L (at about $120/barrel) then the price of oil fell and the price of gas... well... that never really falls. And don't blame the provincial government either, it's the same in all provinces. You can't really blame the federal government either though, because they don't have much of a hand in it. Unless you count their continued refusal to investigate price fixing by the major gas station chains... (Funnily enough, every time they actually do investigate they find the chains guilty, but they usually refuse to investigate)
I think this depends on what your employer is willing to do for you. many employers will be reasonable, and I'll be reasonable in return. but the more they tighten their grip, the more I work to the rules. I used to leave my work phone on 24/7 and answered all sorts of calls from the company outside of work hours, then the company got picky about personal use of cell phones (keep in mind, I work for a telco... a bit of use of a company phone shouldn't cost them much!) I now turn off the cell phone the moment I finish work each day. I used to work a bit late on occasion to finish a job, without billing for overtime, then the company got anal about everyone being in at exactly 08:00 and not leaving before exactly 16:00. now I bill overtime for any work that takes me to 16:01 Now to be fair, the stricter rules have mostly come from some employees abusing their positions, but appropriate action would be to deal with those specific individuals instead of punishing everyone.
As for "business hours" what a laughable and antiquated concept... starting with the fact that the internet is global and you don't have a clue what timezone anyone is in when they post on slashdot, and down to the fact that the world is no longer 9-5 monday-friday. many people work strange shifts so you really have no way of knowing who is, or is not, supposed to be working at any given time. (and that doesn't even get in to lunch of coffee breaks)
If you disable tracking every day at the end of your shift, and turn it on again every day at the start of your shift, there isn't much they can say about it.
I'm a field technician for a major telco. My location is tracked at all times during work hours. They claim it's a safety thing, though there's a lot of debate on that point. At the end of the day I park my truck and turn off my phone and laptop. (and for the person who talks about tracking when it's off, that would be rather pointless because I don't carry it outside of business hours either). The company can call me in to work after hours on overtime if they want, they just have to call my personal cell phone (and the instant they do, I charge 2 hours at double time)
During the work day I'm driving their truck, using their equipment, and being paid for my time, so I really can't complain. After hours, well, that's a different matter, and unless they're paying me for my time, they aren't tracking me.
Speaking as someone who was gullible enough to think that nvidia had linux compatible hardware, and who bought an nvidia card with the specific intent of running linux. I don't care one bit whether the drivers are open source, or closed source. I just want them to WORK. something that has consistently not been the case. The open source drivers miss hardware acceleration, and various video resolutions/modes on my card, and the closed source ones often don't have the acceleration working right either, and sometimes cause X to crash.
I've learned my lesson, this is my last computer with an nvidia card in it.
I don't care how you support linux, but if you claim to offer support, it should be every bit as good as the support you offer to any other operating system you support. If this isn't the case, then it should be noted, clearly, on the same table that brags about that support in the first place. I was sold my current card under false pretenses, based on lies on nvidia's website. I won't make that mistake again.
And here you highlight the biggest problem with the system. There is absolutely no reason why an education needs to break the bank, or why we can't develop an online method of doing it. But a formal education isn't really about teaching you things, its about convincing an employer to hire you. You can know more about a subject than anyone else on the planet, but unless the employer sees paperwork to back it up, you won't even get an interview. How do they plan to convince employers that this isn't just another of those many mail order degree scams?
That depends, your server can just as easily be set up not to respond. Basically if you are trying to save resources that attackers are using, you either need your upstream provider to do it, or it really won't matter if your router or your server do the blocking. The only exception would be if your internal link from your router to your server is congested, but if that's the case than you really have bigger issues.
My old VPS was with vpsville.ca for $19/month, I actually just switched to a buyvm vps for $5/month instead. (and I now get about 5 times as much resources as before too.
As for a "Shared plan and called it a VPS"... I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but VPS is shared, that's the "virtual" part of it. I have a slice of a box, with specifically dedicated amounts of RAM/CPU/bandwidth.
I previously shoehorned my VPS in to a very small package with vpsville by using some very lightweight server daemons (no apache on that one!) but I'm now on a large enough plan that I can run basically anything I want.
Much cheaper than hosting it myself once I pay for the static IP and electricity, and it's more reliable too. (This also gives me a server located in a different country which can come in handy to VPN through on occasion)
While I agree that a VPS provider is the way to go, saying that AWS is free is a bit of an exaggeration, their free tier has lots of limits, the most noticeable of which is that it's a limited time trial that expires after a year.
Problem is that where I live consumer 15 meg package costs me $40/month. Business 2.5 meg package costs $80 (and that's still a dynamic IP, for static it goes up to $120) VPS is $15/month for more than I could possibly use, and it doesn't affect my home connection, doesn't eat my electricity, and is more reliable.
you suggest sign language which allows communication with only a very small subset of the population, vs a device which allows communication with anyone who speaks english. If, as you suggest, she can only do one, or the other, I would definitely recommend the one which allows communication with the most people.
The problem is you can't guarantee the continued ability to jailbreak the device after the device is upgraded. Jailbreak is usually broken by the upgrades.
so the published APIs only help half of the problem, they are no good to you if you can't load them on the device because you can't find a way to jailbreak the newest iOS version.
The only long term solution is to move to a device where that isn't an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the controversy recently in my home province. A teacher was fired for giving high school students a zero mark on assignments and tests they did not complete. The school board defended the decision stating that the school had a policy of not giving out zero grades no matter what. Even if the student repeatedly refused to do any work at all. Apparently the teacher was supposed to assign the particular assignment a "did not complete" and then not include it in the student's final mark, instead averaging their other work.
After a significant amount of public outcry the school board has agreed to "review" the policy, but as of yet they still seem to side more with the school than the teacher in question.
And this is why I have an Iconia. It is the only tablet available in my location with a full sized USB host port. it also happens to have a micro-sd slot and micro-HDMI output.
The USB port was an absolute requirement of mine, and the lack of a needed dongle to convert to full sized is even better.
As for the Nexus 7... they lost me at "7" I have absolutely zero interest in a tablet less than 10inches. my phone is over 4, I don't need anything that's only marginally bigger than the phone. I'd buy a 12" tablet if they made one. (my ideal tablet would be 8-1/2"x11", same as a standard sheet of paper)
ever re-told a joke?
And that's the problem, I actually used gnome ages ago, but KDE felt faster and less bloated so I switched, then I enjoyed KDE for a while, and then it seemed to get quite bloated and slow, so I moved back to gnome (though a newer version) and now gnome went all unity on me...
It often does feel like desktop developers are making a race for the bottom. see who can remove the most functionality, and at the same time increase the resources needed to run the silly thing.
I did try mint briefly... very briefly... I have to admit that maybe I didn't really give it a fair shot, in the end I went back to Ubuntu.
Of course I've started to get quite comfortable with ubuntu of various flavours, so I'm not sure I want to try something completely different. I've used other things over the years, (redhat (pre-fedora), slackware, gentoo) but in the past few years I keep coming back to various ubuntu distributions. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but in general they just work, and make life easy. In the end, that's what's important to me, I like a computer that just works. That's why I run Linux in the first place, it "just works", something I've never found true under windows, or even OSX.
Depends how the law is written. When the police around here wanted to introduce photo-radar speed traps and red light cameras it actually required the government to re-write the law. The offence you are charged with if you are pulled over for speeding is "operating a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit on a roadway", however if you are caught by photo radar it's actually a different offence called "being the owner of a motor vehicle being operated above the posted speed limit on a roadway" (the latter being added to the law specifically to allow for photo-radar where they'd have no proof of who was driving) The two different offences actually carry different penalties as well, they each carry identical monetary fines, however the former also includes demerit points, whereas the latter does not. My guess is that the law for your parking example is worded in such a way that the owner of the vehicle is responsible, regardless of who drove it there.
Just wait for another re-write of copyright laws making it an offence to be the account holder of an internet connection where unauthorized copying has taken place. makes it much easier to prove then the current situation where only the person actually downloading the content can be nailed.
And this is exactly why the RIAA/MPAA and all the similar organizations around the world exist. Their sole purpose is to introduce a separation in people's minds between the companies that make them up, and the lobbying and enforcement done on their behalves.
The media industry isn't stupid. they know how unpopular this all is, they also know that people are too stupid to link the hated organization to the entertainment people like.
The only solution is to, at every possible opportunity, point out that this is NOT some anonymous organization pushing for all these evil laws and suing grandmothers and schoolkids, point out that this is each and every individual record label and movie studio which are members of those organizations. Now punish them appropriately, with your wallet.
KDE4 caused me to switch to Gnome... and then unity came along and I'm not sure where to go next!
Mandatory XKCD
http://xkcd.com/605/
Price per litre in Canada trended upwards with the price of oil right until about $1.20/L (at about $120/barrel) then the price of oil fell and the price of gas... well... that never really falls. And don't blame the provincial government either, it's the same in all provinces. You can't really blame the federal government either though, because they don't have much of a hand in it. Unless you count their continued refusal to investigate price fixing by the major gas station chains... (Funnily enough, every time they actually do investigate they find the chains guilty, but they usually refuse to investigate)
I think this depends on what your employer is willing to do for you. many employers will be reasonable, and I'll be reasonable in return. but the more they tighten their grip, the more I work to the rules.
I used to leave my work phone on 24/7 and answered all sorts of calls from the company outside of work hours, then the company got picky about personal use of cell phones (keep in mind, I work for a telco... a bit of use of a company phone shouldn't cost them much!) I now turn off the cell phone the moment I finish work each day.
I used to work a bit late on occasion to finish a job, without billing for overtime, then the company got anal about everyone being in at exactly 08:00 and not leaving before exactly 16:00. now I bill overtime for any work that takes me to 16:01
Now to be fair, the stricter rules have mostly come from some employees abusing their positions, but appropriate action would be to deal with those specific individuals instead of punishing everyone.
As for "business hours" what a laughable and antiquated concept... starting with the fact that the internet is global and you don't have a clue what timezone anyone is in when they post on slashdot, and down to the fact that the world is no longer 9-5 monday-friday. many people work strange shifts so you really have no way of knowing who is, or is not, supposed to be working at any given time. (and that doesn't even get in to lunch of coffee breaks)
If you disable tracking every day at the end of your shift, and turn it on again every day at the start of your shift, there isn't much they can say about it.
I'm a field technician for a major telco. My location is tracked at all times during work hours. They claim it's a safety thing, though there's a lot of debate on that point. At the end of the day I park my truck and turn off my phone and laptop. (and for the person who talks about tracking when it's off, that would be rather pointless because I don't carry it outside of business hours either). The company can call me in to work after hours on overtime if they want, they just have to call my personal cell phone (and the instant they do, I charge 2 hours at double time)
During the work day I'm driving their truck, using their equipment, and being paid for my time, so I really can't complain. After hours, well, that's a different matter, and unless they're paying me for my time, they aren't tracking me.
Speaking as someone who was gullible enough to think that nvidia had linux compatible hardware, and who bought an nvidia card with the specific intent of running linux. I don't care one bit whether the drivers are open source, or closed source. I just want them to WORK. something that has consistently not been the case. The open source drivers miss hardware acceleration, and various video resolutions/modes on my card, and the closed source ones often don't have the acceleration working right either, and sometimes cause X to crash.
I've learned my lesson, this is my last computer with an nvidia card in it.
I don't care how you support linux, but if you claim to offer support, it should be every bit as good as the support you offer to any other operating system you support. If this isn't the case, then it should be noted, clearly, on the same table that brags about that support in the first place. I was sold my current card under false pretenses, based on lies on nvidia's website. I won't make that mistake again.
and yet nobody is buying it...
And here you highlight the biggest problem with the system. There is absolutely no reason why an education needs to break the bank, or why we can't develop an online method of doing it.
But a formal education isn't really about teaching you things, its about convincing an employer to hire you. You can know more about a subject than anyone else on the planet, but unless the employer sees paperwork to back it up, you won't even get an interview.
How do they plan to convince employers that this isn't just another of those many mail order degree scams?
That depends, your server can just as easily be set up not to respond. Basically if you are trying to save resources that attackers are using, you either need your upstream provider to do it, or it really won't matter if your router or your server do the blocking. The only exception would be if your internal link from your router to your server is congested, but if that's the case than you really have bigger issues.
My old VPS was with vpsville.ca for $19/month, I actually just switched to a buyvm vps for $5/month instead. (and I now get about 5 times as much resources as before too.
As for a "Shared plan and called it a VPS"... I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but VPS is shared, that's the "virtual" part of it. I have a slice of a box, with specifically dedicated amounts of RAM/CPU/bandwidth.
I previously shoehorned my VPS in to a very small package with vpsville by using some very lightweight server daemons (no apache on that one!) but I'm now on a large enough plan that I can run basically anything I want.
Much cheaper than hosting it myself once I pay for the static IP and electricity, and it's more reliable too. (This also gives me a server located in a different country which can come in handy to VPN through on occasion)
That was DSL, cable is less reliable, and their "static" IPs are not very static.
While I agree that a VPS provider is the way to go, saying that AWS is free is a bit of an exaggeration, their free tier has lots of limits, the most noticeable of which is that it's a limited time trial that expires after a year.
Problem is, once it gets to your router, it's too late, your bandwidth is already gone.
Problem is that where I live consumer 15 meg package costs me $40/month. Business 2.5 meg package costs $80 (and that's still a dynamic IP, for static it goes up to $120)
VPS is $15/month for more than I could possibly use, and it doesn't affect my home connection, doesn't eat my electricity, and is more reliable.
For me it was a no brainer.
you suggest sign language which allows communication with only a very small subset of the population, vs a device which allows communication with anyone who speaks english. If, as you suggest, she can only do one, or the other, I would definitely recommend the one which allows communication with the most people.
The problem is you can't guarantee the continued ability to jailbreak the device after the device is upgraded. Jailbreak is usually broken by the upgrades.
so the published APIs only help half of the problem, they are no good to you if you can't load them on the device because you can't find a way to jailbreak the newest iOS version.
The only long term solution is to move to a device where that isn't an issue.
Stephen hawking's device is slightly more complicated, but he's also not 3 years old. you have to start somewhere.