I personally appreciate this move. No, it's certainly not going to keep my kids from being able to get some game they just have to have, but it might make it just hard enough to not be worthwhile.
However, it's still nothing more than an extra tool for responsible parents. I'd much rather my kids feel comfortable asking me to buy something that they wanted than to have to sneak it in without my knowledge. I'd be happy to hear their argument for it and have the chance to accept it or explain my reasons against it. My six year old son can already mop the floor with me in Quake 2, so it's not like I'm particularly restrictive.
Which is more important? Being able to speak your mind on a whim, or lowering health care costs and taking care of people's health, education and repaying the insane debt we're in thanks to the republicans?
Would you still say the same if a different amendment from the Bill of Rights were under attack, or is the second amendment somehow less important to you than the rest? If so, ask yourself why.
The issue is simply that massive servers are not cheap. Wikimedia is already at 100+ servers, and they are barely getting by.
I ask out of ignorance of the issues involved in hosting such a site. How in the world does it take that much hardware to serve text plus a few images? I know there are lot of pages on Wikipedia, but aren't most of them text-only? Couldn't you put an extremely beefy Squid server in front of a handful of content servers so that each page doesn't get generated for every pageview? I can understand of having a (very) small set of servers optimized to transmit images and another set optimized to crank out HTML, but my mind boggles at how much is apparently required.
I think a jackass is someone who equates a discussion of 16/17 years olds with NAMBLA.
I agree. However, I was replying to someone who explicitly said his comments were for all age groups, and in fact that is the part of his post I think is insane and was speaking against.
Yes, an eight year old, hypothetically, should be able to have consensual sex with anyone regardless of age. Many societies, perhaps all, believe that someone of that age is incapable of giving consent. That's what "age of consent" is for. Your example is meaningless.
Re-read what he said, particularly the words "regardless of their age". If his argument was that 16 year olds should have adult freedoms, then I'd be happy to weigh his opinion. It wasn't. He argued that people of any age should be free to have sex.
If you don't think 15 year olds are sexually active then you are naive.
Who said that? In fact, I said I wouldn't even demand that standard of my own kids. Hope? Sure. Realistically expect it and be crushed if they didn't meet it? No, I hope to be more rational about it if and when the time comes.
Most images and videos of minors having sex are made by teens in consensual relationships. Anyone who has been in high school in the age of digital cameras knows this. These laws are made by extreme religious fundamentalists who think that any sex outside of marriage is wrong.
It's not often I say this directly, but you're a jackass. As I'm not a connoisseur of naked kid pictures, I can't confirm your hypothesis, but it seems to be exceedingly rare for minors to be prosecuted for this kind of thing. After all, if it happened 20 times a day, we probably wouldn't be reading about in on Slashdot, would we?
But the real reason your post is stupid is that it presumes that the only possible reason for discouraging the behavior is that adults don't want kids to have fun. In reality, it has huge consequences, both physical and psychological, and if it can be delayed until adulthood it probably should be.
I'm not anti-sex by any measure, and I'll probably give my kids the "try not to do it but use a condom if you must" lecture when they get older. And yet, I'm not opposed to laws that prevent people from doing things that are likely to ruin at 15-year-old's life.
Anyone should be able to share any information and anyone should be able to have any consensual contact with another.
Although I hate the "think of the children" angle, my gut reaction was to ask if that's what they told you at the NAMBLA meeting. Seriously, you don't believe there should be any restrictions whatsoever on sexual contact "regardless of their age" (your words)? That an eight year-old should be able to have consensual sex with a forty year-old? And that an eight year-old is capable of consenting to such a thing at all?
Exactly! So if you'd looked, you would have noticed that the driver was in a blind panic and honking the horn furiously because his brakes had given out. But nope, by God, you had the Right Of Way and just started walking. Congratulations on being right and dead.
Note: unlike the American system, students in UK universities are enrolled on a particular degree scheme for 3-4 years. If they drop out, then they can not simply change their modules and get a different degree, they have to re-apply the next year to a different department.
That's my experience in the US, too. I had to get permission from the Computer Science department head to choose that major. If I'd wanted to switch, then I would have had to get permission from the new department head, and only the classes directly related to the new major would have counted toward earning that degree. Bouncing between CompSci and Math would have been almost trivially easy. Switch from CompSci to something easier like Computer Information Systems (basically, IT) would have meant starting over.
...in the Debian sense of "updates roll out every few years". God help you if you need to update your DNS entries in less than a month. That's the reason I left them: their stability was more than I could stand.
Oh, and I still use Domainmonger. Their terms of service were good at the time, and while their prices aren't great (I really need to take another look at that), I've had nothing but good experiences with them. Once I accidentally renewed one domain for three years instead of three domains for one year, and one phone call to a live person later, my mistake was fixed. I never, ever, not once, resolved a problem with Network Solutions with a single phone call.
Software (at least, in principle) _is_ ready: pure functional languages, for example, are perfectly suited for parallel processing
To explain that for newcomers to the idea:
The idea in functional programming is to make functions that have no side effects whatsoever. That is, functions don't modify global variables, don't save state somewhere, and don't do screwy things like writing to buffers allocated by other functions. Therefore, it's very (almost trivially) easy to establish formally correct dependency graphs showing the order of function calls in a program, and then parallelize them aggressively.
That isn't to say that you can't write C code that avoids side effects, just that it's so much harder that you basically have to add human intervention to tell the compiler about it. From my understanding, OpenMP is basically that: you tell the compiler that certain blocks of code are explicitly parallelizable. Now, imagine that all of your code is that way by default.
This argument about viruses has absolutely no basis since if an OS is not widely used, it simply isn't an attractive commercial target for virus/adware writers.
Except that it's true. If you were a spammer, would you rather own a botnet of Win98 machines on dialup, or a cluster of Unix boxes sitting on a fiber ring? And why has Apache had so very few in-the-wild exploits compared to IIS?
There are far fewer Unix machines than Windows, true, but I'd say that the typical Unix host would be a far more attractive prize than the typical Windows desktop.
I have NEVER had a problem installing Windows XP on any system that only had a SATA drive. I guess that I must be some sort of mutant because I don't spout drivel like the above Slashdotter and I have magic installation-time powers.
Guess so, because Googling for install windows xp sata gives a few million hits, and they're not all about how fun it is.
It's also ironic that he/she mocks someone with an alleged $29 printer yet he/she wants nothing but "FREE" software.
will it recognize my canon pixma ip 1600 printer and pcmicia wireless card ? no ? little more then a toy far as my personal needs go.
It will probably recognize your PCMCIA card. It may or may not work with your $29.00 printer.
Elsewhere, people are still having problems installing Windows XP on systems that only have SATA drives. I guess that makes it "little more than a toy" by your standards?
Look at the screenshots of the Windows dialogs: the small fonts are perfectly clear and sharp. Look at the last screenshot, of the Debian GUI installer: the fonts look all smeary or out of focus or something.
In other news, people have different antialiasing settings from mine, and some even have their subpixels in a different order.
Kids can't separate the two things like adults can.
But again, that simply doesn't matter. The Constitution doesn't give the government charter to do a few specific things, plus anything that might make a kid happier or feel safer.
Then, we'll decide that *your* kid is a disrupting influence just by being in the classroom with those students he bullies outside of class and we'll expel him.
If my kid is causing problems in the classroom, I would expect him or her to pay the consequences. I'm not one of those parents who'll sue because Little Johnny got kept inside at recess to finish his work. However, what happens outside of school has no bearing whatsoever on what happens in it. If Johnny is telling the other kids "I'll see you after school, twerp", then he's threatening them and should be punished. If he's completely ignoring them and not actively causing them problems except by his sheer presence, then I'm not interested.
Personally, this is all academic. My kids are very unlikely to want to be bullies, and I wouldn't put up with it for a second if they did. But the principle stands that their home life is between me and them, and only their behavior at school should have any bearing on their treatment at school. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that it's the job of a government agent to make children act nice toward each other.
As a public school employee, I have seen far to many cases where students come to school dirty, hungry, or otherwise neglected to believe that this is possible.
But, here's the kicker: it's not your responsibility. Although I take my job as a parent seriously and have a good relationship with my kids' teachers, I do it because that's what parents are supposed to do. It is not the job of the state to ensure anything beyond compliance with minimum standards, that I'm feeding them, not beating them, etc.
As for school officials being "a well-meaning but fascist bureaucrat" please attend your local school board meetings (They are by law open to the public) realize that the school board members are elected officials.
In what way do those two statements conflict? OK, so they're well-meaning but fascist elected bureaucrats. That doesn't make their intrusions OK.
Please realize that students are at school for 9 hours a day (assuming 8-3), that means that they are at home for 15 hours a day. As a parent, you need to pull your own weight!
You've got that entirely backwards. I raise them so that they can go to school and learn. You do not teach them so that they can be raised. As an educator, your job to teach the children that I entrust to you each day. Everything else is completely my problem.
The whole concept of everything that could possibly affect a kid's education being the state's responsibility scares the hell out of me. Yeah, his point about after-hours bullying carrying through to the classroom makes a certain amount of sense, but frankly, I don't care.
We sometimes might eat food that doesn't conform to the district's nutritional guidelines. Is that the school's concern?
My kids get to play video games that the district would never allow. Is that the school's concern?
The rugrats might even play a game of tag in the yard, even though the district doesn't allow it anymore. Is that the school's concern?
No, no, and no. And neither is it the school's concern whether my kids are the source or target of bullying when they are not in school. Stay out of my living room! I am the parent here, not a well-meaning but fascist bureaucrat.
Even worse: I get 3.5in -> 9.6in^2 * 2 sides -> 124cm^2 * 100Gb/cm * 1B/8b -> 1.55GB per platter, and that's assuming the entire platter is writeable including the spindle (which obviously isn't true).
Me too unless my wife was obviously being a twat... oh wait!
No, even then she's still my wife. I might have a "what the hell were you thinking?" chat later in private, but there's no way I'd just stand by idly while someone gave her trouble, deserved or not.
Please include a link to any lengthy text so I can skip it without feeling guilty next time.
On-topic: all else aside, it's pretty big of Graef to retract his position. I'd be pretty furious if someone harassed my wife regardless of what she was doing at the time, and probably wouldn't be thinking very clearly immediately afterward. I respect the fact that he was willing to work through that and come to a more reasoned view.
Re:Open Open Open? AROS!
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You know you can tell Windows what letter to use for a drive, don't you? OK, so you can't use names, but I don't personally find that too limiting.
...because you've never used it. In AmigaOS, the idea of assigning names to directories (not just drives) was pervasive. You'd say that "FONTS:" would comprise a list of directories where you stored your fonts files. When a program tried to open "FONTS:Helvetica.font", it'd search each of those directories in order and return the first match it found. All system libraries went in LIBS:, your command-line utilities went in C:, and so on. It was exceedingly rare to use hardcoded paths instead of named search lists for anything general.
I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.
Probably, but maybe.5% of people actually use that ability. Again, the difference with AmigaOS was not that you could do it, but that everyone universally did it. I was just something you used without making a big deal of it.
I've been able to do that with both Windows since NT4 was released (97, IIRC) and Linux since the first version I tried back in 95.
No way. You might have been able to perform those exact (poorly chosen) examples, but neither Linux nor Windows were anywhere near as good at multi-tasking in '95, let alone '85. It's like hearing someone talk about a car with great handling and not understanding; your Oldsmobile can turn corners, too, right? It was just something you had to see to really understand.
I have no illusions that AmigaOS will make a comeback, and by now I wouldn't want it if it did. Still, it did a lot of things right, even by today's standards, and you can't just dismiss it by saying that other systems can do some of the same things.
If we don't use our immune systems they'll become weak, and we'll be wiped out by some bug in the next century or so.
Or just as bad: a lot of people are deciding that our overly clean environment breeds autoimmune disorders. The idea is that we have an exquisitely powerful immune system. If it doesn't find something to fight, it assumes it's not looking hard enough and turns up the sensitivity. It will eventually find a target, even if its own host.
I don't know if this is accepted fact now or mainly conjecture, but I'm steering clear of the antibiotic hand soap anyway.
What frightens me is the number of people willing to tell you to your face that you're wrong. I also remember learning about global cooling from the news and in the classroom, but have had younger people swear that never happened.
As a fallback position, they'll try to discredit one particular media outlet ("Time" isn't "Science"!), which fails in two major ways:
Almost every media outlet was saying the exact same thing. Pick up a newspaper: global cooling. Watch the news: global cooling. Magazines? Global cooling. Classrooms? Global cooling.
They expect the average citizen (the proverbial stupid Joe Sixpack) to make the distinction between incorrect scientific consensus popularized by mass media in the '70s and supposedly correct scientific consensus popularized by mass media in the '00s. Fool him once, shame on you. What makes you think he'll let himself be convinced twice, even if it's legitimate this time?
I tend to believe in human-caused global warming because I haven't heard any legitimate-sounding sources speaking against it. That's not to say that none are, but I, with my limited background in the subject, haven't heard it. Still, a part of me is definitely aware that I'm learning about it from the exact same channels that were so completely wrong about global climate change last time around.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally appreciate this move. No, it's certainly not going to keep my kids from being able to get some game they just have to have, but it might make it just hard enough to not be worthwhile.
However, it's still nothing more than an extra tool for responsible parents. I'd much rather my kids feel comfortable asking me to buy something that they wanted than to have to sneak it in without my knowledge. I'd be happy to hear their argument for it and have the chance to accept it or explain my reasons against it. My six year old son can already mop the floor with me in Quake 2, so it's not like I'm particularly restrictive.
Would you still say the same if a different amendment from the Bill of Rights were under attack, or is the second amendment somehow less important to you than the rest? If so, ask yourself why.
I ask out of ignorance of the issues involved in hosting such a site. How in the world does it take that much hardware to serve text plus a few images? I know there are lot of pages on Wikipedia, but aren't most of them text-only? Couldn't you put an extremely beefy Squid server in front of a handful of content servers so that each page doesn't get generated for every pageview? I can understand of having a (very) small set of servers optimized to transmit images and another set optimized to crank out HTML, but my mind boggles at how much is apparently required.
I agree. However, I was replying to someone who explicitly said his comments were for all age groups, and in fact that is the part of his post I think is insane and was speaking against.
Re-read what he said, particularly the words "regardless of their age". If his argument was that 16 year olds should have adult freedoms, then I'd be happy to weigh his opinion. It wasn't. He argued that people of any age should be free to have sex.
Who said that? In fact, I said I wouldn't even demand that standard of my own kids. Hope? Sure. Realistically expect it and be crushed if they didn't meet it? No, I hope to be more rational about it if and when the time comes.
It's not often I say this directly, but you're a jackass. As I'm not a connoisseur of naked kid pictures, I can't confirm your hypothesis, but it seems to be exceedingly rare for minors to be prosecuted for this kind of thing. After all, if it happened 20 times a day, we probably wouldn't be reading about in on Slashdot, would we?
But the real reason your post is stupid is that it presumes that the only possible reason for discouraging the behavior is that adults don't want kids to have fun. In reality, it has huge consequences, both physical and psychological, and if it can be delayed until adulthood it probably should be.
I'm not anti-sex by any measure, and I'll probably give my kids the "try not to do it but use a condom if you must" lecture when they get older. And yet, I'm not opposed to laws that prevent people from doing things that are likely to ruin at 15-year-old's life.
Although I hate the "think of the children" angle, my gut reaction was to ask if that's what they told you at the NAMBLA meeting. Seriously, you don't believe there should be any restrictions whatsoever on sexual contact "regardless of their age" (your words)? That an eight year-old should be able to have consensual sex with a forty year-old? And that an eight year-old is capable of consenting to such a thing at all?
Wow. Just... wow.
Exactly! So if you'd looked, you would have noticed that the driver was in a blind panic and honking the horn furiously because his brakes had given out. But nope, by God, you had the Right Of Way and just started walking. Congratulations on being right and dead.
That's my experience in the US, too. I had to get permission from the Computer Science department head to choose that major. If I'd wanted to switch, then I would have had to get permission from the new department head, and only the classes directly related to the new major would have counted toward earning that degree. Bouncing between CompSci and Math would have been almost trivially easy. Switch from CompSci to something easier like Computer Information Systems (basically, IT) would have meant starting over.
...in the Debian sense of "updates roll out every few years". God help you if you need to update your DNS entries in less than a month. That's the reason I left them: their stability was more than I could stand.
Oh, and I still use Domainmonger. Their terms of service were good at the time, and while their prices aren't great (I really need to take another look at that), I've had nothing but good experiences with them. Once I accidentally renewed one domain for three years instead of three domains for one year, and one phone call to a live person later, my mistake was fixed. I never, ever, not once, resolved a problem with Network Solutions with a single phone call.
To explain that for newcomers to the idea:
The idea in functional programming is to make functions that have no side effects whatsoever. That is, functions don't modify global variables, don't save state somewhere, and don't do screwy things like writing to buffers allocated by other functions. Therefore, it's very (almost trivially) easy to establish formally correct dependency graphs showing the order of function calls in a program, and then parallelize them aggressively.
That isn't to say that you can't write C code that avoids side effects, just that it's so much harder that you basically have to add human intervention to tell the compiler about it. From my understanding, OpenMP is basically that: you tell the compiler that certain blocks of code are explicitly parallelizable. Now, imagine that all of your code is that way by default.
Yes, where "new" equals "Lisp 45 years ago". See other comments for details.
Except that it's true. If you were a spammer, would you rather own a botnet of Win98 machines on dialup, or a cluster of Unix boxes sitting on a fiber ring? And why has Apache had so very few in-the-wild exploits compared to IIS?
There are far fewer Unix machines than Windows, true, but I'd say that the typical Unix host would be a far more attractive prize than the typical Windows desktop.
Guess so, because Googling for install windows xp sata gives a few million hits, and they're not all about how fun it is.
Who said that? You're on crack.
It will probably recognize your PCMCIA card. It may or may not work with your $29.00 printer.
Elsewhere, people are still having problems installing Windows XP on systems that only have SATA drives. I guess that makes it "little more than a toy" by your standards?
#17790056 is in the running.
In other news, people have different antialiasing settings from mine, and some even have their subpixels in a different order.
...at school...
...at school.
I'd agree with that. What they don't have a responsibility for is what happens elsewhere.
But again, that simply doesn't matter. The Constitution doesn't give the government charter to do a few specific things, plus anything that might make a kid happier or feel safer.
If my kid is causing problems in the classroom, I would expect him or her to pay the consequences. I'm not one of those parents who'll sue because Little Johnny got kept inside at recess to finish his work. However, what happens outside of school has no bearing whatsoever on what happens in it. If Johnny is telling the other kids "I'll see you after school, twerp", then he's threatening them and should be punished. If he's completely ignoring them and not actively causing them problems except by his sheer presence, then I'm not interested.
Personally, this is all academic. My kids are very unlikely to want to be bullies, and I wouldn't put up with it for a second if they did. But the principle stands that their home life is between me and them, and only their behavior at school should have any bearing on their treatment at school. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that it's the job of a government agent to make children act nice toward each other.
But, here's the kicker: it's not your responsibility. Although I take my job as a parent seriously and have a good relationship with my kids' teachers, I do it because that's what parents are supposed to do. It is not the job of the state to ensure anything beyond compliance with minimum standards, that I'm feeding them, not beating them, etc.
In what way do those two statements conflict? OK, so they're well-meaning but fascist elected bureaucrats. That doesn't make their intrusions OK.
You've got that entirely backwards. I raise them so that they can go to school and learn. You do not teach them so that they can be raised. As an educator, your job to teach the children that I entrust to you each day. Everything else is completely my problem.
The whole concept of everything that could possibly affect a kid's education being the state's responsibility scares the hell out of me. Yeah, his point about after-hours bullying carrying through to the classroom makes a certain amount of sense, but frankly, I don't care.
We sometimes might eat food that doesn't conform to the district's nutritional guidelines. Is that the school's concern?
My kids get to play video games that the district would never allow. Is that the school's concern?
The rugrats might even play a game of tag in the yard, even though the district doesn't allow it anymore. Is that the school's concern?
No, no, and no. And neither is it the school's concern whether my kids are the source or target of bullying when they are not in school. Stay out of my living room! I am the parent here, not a well-meaning but fascist bureaucrat.
Even worse: I get 3.5in -> 9.6in^2 * 2 sides -> 124cm^2 * 100Gb/cm * 1B/8b -> 1.55GB per platter, and that's assuming the entire platter is writeable including the spindle (which obviously isn't true).
No, even then she's still my wife. I might have a "what the hell were you thinking?" chat later in private, but there's no way I'd just stand by idly while someone gave her trouble, deserved or not.
Please include a link to any lengthy text so I can skip it without feeling guilty next time.
On-topic: all else aside, it's pretty big of Graef to retract his position. I'd be pretty furious if someone harassed my wife regardless of what she was doing at the time, and probably wouldn't be thinking very clearly immediately afterward. I respect the fact that he was willing to work through that and come to a more reasoned view.
...because you've never used it. In AmigaOS, the idea of assigning names to directories (not just drives) was pervasive. You'd say that "FONTS:" would comprise a list of directories where you stored your fonts files. When a program tried to open "FONTS:Helvetica.font", it'd search each of those directories in order and return the first match it found. All system libraries went in LIBS:, your command-line utilities went in C:, and so on. It was exceedingly rare to use hardcoded paths instead of named search lists for anything general.
Probably, but maybe .5% of people actually use that ability. Again, the difference with AmigaOS was not that you could do it, but that everyone universally did it. I was just something you used without making a big deal of it.
No way. You might have been able to perform those exact (poorly chosen) examples, but neither Linux nor Windows were anywhere near as good at multi-tasking in '95, let alone '85. It's like hearing someone talk about a car with great handling and not understanding; your Oldsmobile can turn corners, too, right? It was just something you had to see to really understand.
I have no illusions that AmigaOS will make a comeback, and by now I wouldn't want it if it did. Still, it did a lot of things right, even by today's standards, and you can't just dismiss it by saying that other systems can do some of the same things.
Or just as bad: a lot of people are deciding that our overly clean environment breeds autoimmune disorders. The idea is that we have an exquisitely powerful immune system. If it doesn't find something to fight, it assumes it's not looking hard enough and turns up the sensitivity. It will eventually find a target, even if its own host.
I don't know if this is accepted fact now or mainly conjecture, but I'm steering clear of the antibiotic hand soap anyway.
What frightens me is the number of people willing to tell you to your face that you're wrong. I also remember learning about global cooling from the news and in the classroom, but have had younger people swear that never happened.
As a fallback position, they'll try to discredit one particular media outlet ("Time" isn't "Science"!), which fails in two major ways:
I tend to believe in human-caused global warming because I haven't heard any legitimate-sounding sources speaking against it. That's not to say that none are, but I, with my limited background in the subject, haven't heard it. Still, a part of me is definitely aware that I'm learning about it from the exact same channels that were so completely wrong about global climate change last time around.