Shouldnt this be catagorized as your rights online?
Slashdot has a separate category for books, smart guy. That's why it's in the "books" category and not the "your rights online" category. If Slashdot reviewed a book about civil rights, British history, how to grow your own pot, Microsoft's dealing with Satan, or ANY topic, it would go under "books".
I would say a book on how to snoop on people hard drives and see what they deleted is pretty privacy invasive?
Join the 21st century... I mean, join the 1990s. Hard disk forensic analysis has been a booming field in the last 10 years. It's a crucial part of most computer forensic investigations.
Do you also think that biology books on DNA testing, or texts on explosives chemistry fingerprinting, are "privacy invasive"?
More to the point, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade?
Teaching evolution in primary/secondary school has nothing to do with this. High-school kids are not working on prion detection in blood samples. The people who do this kind of research are professionals, all of them doctorates with at least 6 or 7 years of post-secondary education. How many accredited biology programs, even at the undergraduate level, teach creationism? Maybe a handful, Bob Jones U and its ilk, but they graduate maybe.001% of all the biology degrees in the USA. Probably none of these people are actually doing biology work, anyway, so it's not their lack of proper education that's holding back progress.
Sunny point #2: None of the people who are currently old enough to have PhDs would have been exposed to creationism, or ID, in primary/secondary school. The recent push to get scripturally-inspired alternatives to evolution placed in textbooks is less than 10 years old, and its had few actual successes in getting the material taught. The number of schools and districts that are becoming receptive to the ID discussion is growing, but still only represents a TINY fraction of the total number of kids educated in the USA.
For comparison, there are several hundred thousand US children being educated every year at religiously-affilated schools that could be called "evangelical" or "fundamentalist" based on the sponsoring sect's view of biblical literalism. Since the literalist interpretation of scripture is in large part the intellectual parent of the ID movement, it's reasonable to assume that a good portion of these kids are being taught alternatives to evolution, at the very least.
In short, you're looking for a reason to bash religious people who support the teaching of ID in public schools. I suspect you probably have issues with religion in general, probably related to poor experiences with religion, religious people, or a religious upbringing in your formative years. I'm sorry about that, but you should probably try to be a little more open-minded--
Something tells me there's a reason there weren't enough eyeballs looking at this problem.
And the reason we don't have world peace, flying cars, and ponies for everybody is that there aren't enough eyeballs looking at THOSE problems.
It's generally true that, ceteris paribus, spending more man-hours on a given field of research will yield more results in a shorter time, but this is not as useful a principle as you might think. Here's why:
- Dependencies between disciplines: sometimes, a crucial advance in one field is held back by a lack of progress in another, apparantly unrelated field. Often the dependency isn't recognized until after a cross-applicable discovery is made, pointing the relationship out to everyone. Case in point: using Folding@Home to do genetics research. Who'd've thunk that the Internet would represent a huge bonus to the study of protein functions?
- The tendency for new discoveries to happen is, at best, a statistical tendency. You cannot know in advance of pursuing a particular avenue of research whether it will pan out or not--take Cold Fusion, or even Hot Fusion, as an example of this. Even if you throw billions of dollars at a problem, you still have to get lucky, and you still have to pick problems that you're reasonably sure will pan out.
I second the sibling poster who wants you to take an Econ course or two before you start in on the subject. You sound marginally less informed than Rush Limbaugh.
What exactly is a "foreign" company? If Microsoft contracts with a Canadian developer to write a device driver, is MS now.001% "foreign"? How are you going to treat them? What if a UK firm, like Vogon, opens a lab in the US but takes all the profits and IP ownership home to England? Is that foreign software?
What about F/OSS projects that have foreign contributors? Obviously, this free work is competing with American business interests and is keeping American programmers out of work. We SHOULD ban all those foreign-polluted OSS programs from ever being used in the US.
If software is game, why not apply the exact same rules to hardware? Import a Penitum4 that Intel made in Indonesia, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.
And why stop at computers? Why not ban all those imports of other complex electronics, like VCRS, cameras, appliances, and even cars?
Think of how much better off our economy would be if we didn't trade with anybody else, ever, but made everything in the good ol' U.S. of A!
but she offers excellent, neutral advice for any IT department considering a fundamental systems switch
Since when does a statement like "If you can't properly account for your network, you can't discuss how much it's costing you" become "excellent" advice? That's just common sense. You can't make intelligent decisions on ANY business cost without having some metrics on what your environment looks like. This is true of routers and servers, and it's also true of paper clips and donuts.
Have standards have slipped so much that a truly neutral "anonymous reader" would start singing Didio's praises because she suddenly said something that's true.
Actually, now that I've gone back and read the article submission, it smells like some SERIOUS astroturfing. Slashdot editors should take heed: if the submission reads like a press release, it probably is!
with 9M posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that.001%?/i
Either I don't understand this question, or it's a completely idiotic question. What the fuck does "real value" mean? The maxim "One man's trash is another man's treasure " is especially important when talking about information--the asymmetry of value from person to person is even bigger than when you're talking about physical goods.
Considering the second half of the question, though, one might re-phrase the whole thing as "How do you find the posts that have value to you, individually?" That IS an important question... but like most econ majors, I figure the market will probably solve.
If your kids can't deal with anything else, you're raising a bunch of pansy-assed prima donnas with an over-active sense of entitlement.
And your parents raised a complete jackass who tries to use the Internet to make everyone think he's got Big Balls. You're a troll, birge.
I'll bet you're the type of guy who can barely stammer "Hello" when facing a real person, let alone gather the courage to make a statement like you did in real life.
No, it wouldn't. The 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted to mean that the government can't look/listen in on you when you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
So the cops and the FBI aren't allowed to tap your phone on demand. They need to obtain a warrant first, from a judge. (FYI: it's not a subpoena--you get a subpoena to compel someone else to do something, while you get a warrant to demonstrate that you've satisfied a judge that you've met a certain standard.)
But they're also not allowed to put a tape recorder in your house to tape your phone calls, unless they get a warrant. Any method of tapping phone conversations, regardless of HOW it works, is considered an invasion of your expectation of privacy.
This gets more complex when we take into account federal wiretapping laws, but the short version is that law-enforcement people in pursuit on an investigation are exempted from wiretap laws IF they have a valid warrant. So if the cops are tapping your phone without a warrant, they have more to answer for than getting the evidence tossed out in court--they could go to jail.
The best way would be to make it a condition of their tax exempt status. Want your copyrights? Pay taxes!
Churches don't become tax exempt because they're churches... they're exempt because they're nonprofit organizations. Same as the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, my college debate league, and lots of other groups.
Or did you intend for your proposal to include all these other organizations?
Anyway, what about individuals? If I don't have any income, I don't pay taxes (say I'm a house-husband). Should I be denied copyright protections?
And what if I've paid lots of taxes in the past, and suddenly stop working? Do I lose the protections, or have I already bought them?
Do some more of these thought experiments, and then try to tell me your idea makes sense.
They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used.
Why the hell not? If YOU don't like the terms, YOU shouldn't accept the deal, whether it's from Disney or your cable company or whoever.
The stupidity of your proposed "solution" to the problem of people getting capped on usage is obvious when you consider that if your usage approaches the cable company's cap, you're using FAR more bandwidth than the bulk of their customers.
You're saying that the cable company should be forced to ONLY offer "unlimited", uncapped service... So you use 100 GB/mo. of transfer on porn and BT, while your neighbors use maybe 10 MB/mo. on email and WWW browsing, but you all pay the same rate??!! That's stupid--your neighbors are just paying for your incredibly high bandwidth usage.
If you want unlimited service, there are ISPs that will charge you based on monthly transfer instead of a flat-rate with a cap. And there are ISPs (like mine) that don't have caps, but that cost somewhat more to cover the additional bandwidth that it's assumed you'll use.
Remember: your ISP pays for traffic by the bit--their offering a flat-rate service is just a billing convenience to customers, not a fucking license for you to free-ride on everybody else's dime.
When was the last time you installed Linux, 2002? You might be surprised to learn that some things have changed, lately. Try DLing Fedora Core 4, or Knoppix, or Ubuntu, just to see how it works.
The amount of hardware not supported by Linux is pretty small, and the Windows/Linux gap gets smaller every month. Driver development is being driven more and more by projects funded or staffed by the companies that make the hardware--witness how fast stable Linux drivers have been created for wireless networking hardware, as opposed to the slower pickup for traditional ethernet stuff in the late 90s/early 00s.
I don't know about Gnome, but KDE has gone from the problems you describe (substandard beta apps, shitty default configs that don't work) to a damn near fire-and-forget process. Especially when you pick up a distro like FC or Ubuntu that makes a point of streamlining and checking the KDE team's work, finding and removing those gotchas that you describe.
I would bet that the past 3 years have seen at least as much time/effort/money poured into Linux-based OSS development (in the OS, the apps, and the desktop) as in the previous 12 years combined. The results are starting to show. It's not perfect, yet, but neither is the competing solution (MS).
In order to take a significant amount of MS desktop market share, Linux and pals will probably have to do better for cheaper than MS for a couple of years running in order to overcome the momentum of the current status quo. But they're on track to do it, assuming that the current levels of corporate-sponsored development effort don't flag.
(Seriously--go grab Ubuntu and throw down a laptop install. It will knock your socks off, to see how easy and clean it's gotten.)
People in NYC don't move, I take it? Businesses don't tinker with their WAP settings/signal strengths? Gee, I do, regularly; and my workplace does also. Cause it's a system that we are continually tweaking for performance/security reasons. Not to mention intermittent environmental influences, like microwaves.
People in NYC move all the time, and some tweak their wireless settings, too. But neither of those things matter, because of the massive number of WiFi devices around. Take a drive through Times Square (the heart of midtown Manhattan), down Broadway from 50th to 42nd street, and you'll experience this. You can probably count more than 100, in those 8 blocks, with a decent card.
I did a site survey for a client in the financial district, downtown. On the 11th floor, Kismet claimed to see more than 130 APs--some were just ghosts, but there were more than 40 that had significant traffic levels. When we came back a month later, I cross-checked the current list of active APs against the earlier data, and a few had changed.
Point is, when there are a gazillion APs, you can ignore a few changes because it just doesn't matter significantly in the results.
You're probably coming form a city where "a lot of wireless" is being able to see a handful of APs from most spots, so I'm not surprised that you didn't see it this way.
If the idea is the build in interface to neurons in the brain, why would you need to grow something organic? Chip implants that extend inorganic electrodes into the brain are already a reality, and they seem to work fine for research (I'm too lazy to look up the reference on that quadripelegic dude who got one, recently).
Referring the that story, I recall that there were two big practical problems with the chip implant: 1) you have to drill a hole in the skull in order to make contact, and 2) the electrodes extending from the chip to the brain are too gross of a bridge to get a good signal sampling.
So something like building ultra-tiny conductors on demand in particular spots would be incredibly helpful in making the existing brain interface more practical, because it could be less invasive and produce much finer connections. Sounds like a hell of an application to me.
Just because some information is posted on a site called quackwatch does not make it the be all end all.
And just because some information is posted on a site about chelating does not make it the be all end all. But you know what? I'm much more inclined to trust Quackwatch, because they don't have a financial interest in convincing you that anything on their site is true. Whereas the chelating site sells more of their crap for every person (like you) who buys into their nonsense.
Did you notice something really significant about his "autism study"? There's no control group in the study, and therefore his numerical results are ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS. How are we supposed to know whether the chelating treatment makes any real difference unless there's a double-blind study with a control group?
People must judge for themselves, look at both sides, analyze the information and form your own conclusion.
Right. And in your corner, we have this bullshit website you linked to. And in the corner of accurate and responsible medical information, we have EVERYBODY ELSE. But you're free to come to the wrong conclusion.
I personally feel the medical establishment is way off. The medical system is only good for emergency medicine. Humans were not meant to live dependent on drugs. Hippocrates once wrote "Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food"
Nice hat--but shouldn't you be a little more concerned about the health effects of tinfoil on your scalp? I hear it causes hair loss.
Seriously, though... Modern medicine has one incredibly important tool at its disposal that trumps all its other contributions to human health: The double-blind statistical study. That's the only way to know whether a treatment actually works, does nothing, or makes people worse. Anecdotal evidence (which is all a study without a control group is) can never provide those answers.
Modern medicine is based on modern science: you have to prove your claims through valid experimentation, such that other can repeat your experiments and obtain agreeable results. You have to present a theory to the world as "Come and try to prove me wrong, or show that I made a mistake" with wide open arms. You only get called "right" when a whole lot of learned people try to do exactly that, and can't.
This is the system that gave us, in less than 100 years: vaccinations (saving millions of lives), effective surgery, genetic engineering and therapies, and birth control.
Don't like drugs, do ya? Well this is also what gave us the correct idea of how to exercise and eat right. The stuff your doctor tells you about how to live longer and healthier is based on science, nowadays.
You can distrust the medical establishment all you want. I'll admit that there's profit motivations corrupting large aspects of it, and mistakes get made. But what you're describing is the Dark Ages, man--it's fucking medievalism.
20 to 40 meters of accuracy? I work with various grades of GPS and even with low accuracy gps I can get within 10 feet no problem.
My FAVORITE kind of slashdot post to respond to is this one. It's a combination of "I'm missing the point entirely" AND "I think I'm a lot smarter than I am." All rolled up into four little sentences.
WHY IS WPS USEFUL: Because there are a lot of urban areas where you can't get GPS signals for shit. Try New York City, for one--you're lucky if you can get two or three satellites in Manhattan, most of the time. I've spent a LOT of time trying to make GPS work in this city, and it sucks--and I know there are probably other places where the same thing happens.
So if your GPS can't give you any kind of signal, 20-40 meters is pretty frickin' good, wouldn't you say? Sure, 2.4 and 5.8 GHz signals get attenuated by common building materials, but not so much that it throws off triangulation too badly. I can routinely do reasonbly accurate triangulations (+/- 10 meters) on access points (sort of a reverse of the WPS process) near the ground in all sorts of medium-heavy office buildings.
Now, add in the fact that there are probably at least 10 million wireless client devices in consumer hands in the US today (a number that grows as we speak!), and compare it to the distribution of GPS receivers. Chances are, most everybody with a laptop has WiFi, but there's a lot of people that don't have GPS. Cost isn't really such an issue--there are cheap-ass USB GPS receivers all over (running on Linux, even). I think it has more to do with the fact that GPS is less of a "need-to-have-it" thing, and it's rarely built into laptops and PDAs.
Point is: MANY more people have a WiFi receiver than have a GPS receiver, and it often works as well or better in urban areas or in buildings.
Do you see it, now? Sorry for the snark-attack, but man, how did you not get this?
Theoretically it is still possible to recover the undelying data that was over-written. In practice it is very expensive and not 100% guaranteed.
This should read "In common IT myths, it is still possible to recover the underlying data that was over-written. In reality, it's not possible at all." Take it from someone who spent several years working in data forensics and repeatedly dealt with statements from bosses/clients along the lines of "Well, I read on the Internet that you can recover overwritten data with a [STM|MFM|whatever], and that teh NSA and CIA know how to do it."
It's bullshit. Trust me, it's bullshit. Peter Gutmann (teaches down in NZ) wrote a paper for USENIX '96 that references a couple of laboratory-grade techniques that might have worked on hard drives manufactured before 1996. THIS IS WHERE EVERYBODY GOT THE MYTH FROM. What nobody realizes is that Gutmann published an updated version of that paper in which he retracts virtually all his conclusions about recovering data on hard drives because IT'S NOT POSSIBLE ANYMORE.
Not to mention the fact that there have been a couple of incidents where large companies have spent multi-millions trying to make such a process work, and came away entirely empty-handed.
It's bullshit. On a modern hard drive, if you overwrite your data once, you're secure. Maybe if you're dealing with some ancient disks you have stuff to worry about, but that's it.
Dude, you're just being rude, here. The parent makes a perfectly valid point--see my sibling comment to yours for some more thoughts on that. Short version: Consumer Reports did large-sample studies, and got somewhat different results from the anecdotal study in the magazine article. That suggests strongly that there's more variance in the techs' effectiveness at any given company than I originally gave credit for.
If statisticians can statistically determine who the next president of the United States is by polling 1000 people, I think making 3 calls to a tech support line is more than accurate.
Stats tells us that we can determine quite a bit about the behavior of a large population of events based on the analysis of a smaller subset, properly selected. The way the math works out, though, 1000 samples are more than enough to establish the opinions of 200 million voters... but 3 samples aren't enough to establish the effectiveness of even 1000 support techs.
The number of samples needed varies with the degree of confidence you want in your result... if you want to be 95% sure of your result, you need more samples than if you were satisfied with being 90% sure. The number of samples needed, though, is NOT a linear relation to the confidence level--there's diminishing returns.
Also, the number of samples needed varies with the total population size, but again it isn't a linear relationship. In this case, though, it's an "aggrandizing" returns situation, because as the total population gets larger, you need a smaller fraction of it to get results.
I'd love to lay the math out, but it's been five years since I took Stats, and I don't have the book handy.
You claim the logic is broken, but do you have ANY idea how to judge sample size? How many would be enough for you? 50? 100? 10,000?
There are ways of determining how many you need--you determine your population size, pick a degree of confidence, and plug in the numbers--viola, you have a minimum sample size needed to guarantee that level of confidence.
That sibling poster to my current comment sure has a bug up his ass, doesn't he? But back to our discussion...
With a larger sample size, random chance plays less of a part - if you have consistently good techs, you will get a good score, and if you have consistently bad techs you will get a bad score.
I do understand statistical methods. I think that our major difference of opinion here is in how much difference there really is between the majority of techs working at a given company. That's what most of my original post was driving at. You appear to believe that there is enough variance in the problem-solving abilities of different people at one company for it to make a big difference.
As I said in the GP, I think it's reasonable to assume that any given call to a particular company will net you a similar result, because the variance in the techs is low. Now, I can't prove that, but like I said before, it seems like most of the overriding factors in how techs perform (pay scale, hiring policies, management, etc) would tend to make for a homogenous workforce.
It's pretty striking how differently these same companies rated between Consumer Reports, which does statistical surveys using accepted statistical methods across a large number of customers, versus this magazine article, which followed the "let's try this" methodology.
My bad--I missed your earlier references to the CR stuff. That's actually some good evidence that there IS a big variance in tech effectiveness at a given company. So you may well be right on with your point in this situation.
Still, though, I want to stand behind the basic point that I'm making about the validity of non-statistical methods for stuff like this.
Although, now that I think about it, there's no way to know whether the variance is large until you actually DO a full-on statistical study, with a large sample size. So I guess the anecdotal approach is inherently flawed, though I can see it still having a place as an ultra-cheap heuristic.
That's the thing--if you're willing to assume low variance and accept the costs of being wrong in that assumption, you can do it cheap and go anecdotal. That may be a practical solution. In this case, where the magazine is just trying to do a story, it seems like they accepted the costs of being wrong, as seen by your CR comparison.
The article never claims to be a statistical study. You don't have to approach the issue in a statistical fashion to obtain an informative result.
The validity of an anecdotal study like this hinges on how strong your expectation of consistent service is. If you have good reason to believe that a single experience is probably representative of most visits, you can have a very small sample and still come back with valid conclusions.
Take restaurant reviewing as an example: The Michelin and Zagat's restaurant reviews are generally based on a single visit to each establishment. (Not only that, but different reviews are performed by different people, presumably with different tastes. But that's a side issue, here.) Each reviewer visits a restaurant and writes up a review of his or her experiences at that place, on that day.
But these restaurant guides are relatively accurate, and quite useful. A restaurant business generally provides consistent customer experiences because they TRY to provide consistent experiences. Fast food takes it to the hilt, but any place is doing it, to some degree. Therefore, you don't really need a sizable sample of identical tests to come up with a conclusion.
It's reasonable to believe that customer service operates the same way: companies generally have consistent hiring policies, management policies, and training regimens for their tech-support people. They tend to pay consistent wages and provide consistent benefits. The computer routing systems that connect you to a tech, and the on-the-phone policies that those techs follow, are also highly consistent. Therefore, it seems like the weight of factors creating the "tech support experience" would provide a consistent result.
Statistical analysis would be more useful for something like "what percentage of shipped laptops by this vendor have quality problems", or "what's the average wait time or problem resolution time for a given type of call." You're focusing on the variations and their magnitude, which are going to be pretty small in comparison to the magnitude of the values themselves.
This article is more like reviewing "how aesthetically pleasing is the laptop's case", or "which laptop model has the best feature set for the money". The latter questions, like the article, are focused on parameters that don't submit well to small measurements, and are not likely to vary that much on an absolute scale from customer to customer.
This isn't the most objective, comprehensive, or thorough study I've ever seen, but it's certainly sufficient as an informative review of laptop tech support. And that's all it claims to be.
Hahaha, funny. Whether you can be without the Internet for 12 hours depends on how much money you're willing to lose by letting your users stay down. I don't like to lose money.
I think you need to check your definition of perfect there. Wasting water has huge environmental impacts.
You missed some tongue-in-cheek impacts there, paco. Fucking Canucks and Euros take everything so goddamn seriously, if there's a chance to dog-pile on Americans.
And FWIW, as other posters have pointed out, most NYC residents are apartment renters. Therefore, the landlord pays the water bill and tucks it into the rent, without metering individual units for it (unlike gas and electricity, for instance). Why? God only knows, I'm sure there's a reason.
Point is, if anyone gets too out of control on usage, their landlord will come-a-knockin' and ask some pentrating questions about reasonable water usage. So it's not like there's a massive tragedy-of-the-commons happening.
Also, NYC rarely has water problems, mostly due to the fact that it has a generally adequete water supply at present, and it's highly unlikely to grow its residential population anytime in the next several decades--living here is so fucking expensive that it's tending to scare as many out as the nice parts attract. Even a 0.1% annualized population growth would be highly surprising, in the next 20 years.
You want practical? It's a blue-sky open source development project, you nitwit. The potential applications are legion. But let me give you a run-down of several of the uses to which I've put my own HP Ipaq (running Linux from handhelds.org!):
1) Mobile FULL-FEATURED WiFi scanner and auditing kit. Run Kismet, Airsnort, and a lot of other Linux-only tools (any Windows equivalents cost $$$ and have stripped-down handheld versions) for serious portable work. 100x easier than carting a laptop around. Break WEP keys, perform breakin demos, and hunt down rogue APs with a pocket-sized monster.
2) During the NYC blackout, my ISP was still up and laptops had juice, but my routers ran down the UPS batteries in about 30 minutes. Jury-rigging a car battery, some DC-DC conversion stuff, and an Ipaq w/ PCMCIA sleeve holding 2x PCMCIA network adapters = an instant router that stayed up, routing 1.5 Mbps DSL to five users, for 12 hours. Do you know how much a 12-hour UPS costs??
3) Since the Ipaq (like the Axim) has a microphone and WiFi, it makes a killer wireless microphone. Turn on a recording app, stream the data via wireless to a laptop somewhere nearby, and you've got at least an hour of recording time on batteries alone. Makes an excellent conference-room bug, for checking up on meetings that you can't attend or negotiations that you shouldn't know about--and you record all day if you plug your Ipaq in to charge and then "forget" about it.
4) Portable streaming MP3 player. I've got kerberos-protected NFS shares full of music, and I can stream music out of those shares from anywhere I can reach my APs.
The point is that the sky's the limit with Linux--whatever you can think up, within the limits of RAM and battery life (which are pretty substantial!) is yours to do.
It takes a cold source of water to work, and if you have none in your area (tap water wont cut it unless you happen to get fed from a pipe running through a glacier)
It's currently 7:51pm in New York City, and the temperature outside is about 85F. The high today was 94 in Brooklyn (my hood).
The tap water temp, though, is still a blissful 61F (after letting it run for about 15 seconds). That's practically icewater, compared to the outside temp.
Since very few residential customers in the city get billed for water usage, this would be a PERFECT solution. That 25-35F temperature delta takes the edge off things, and since the buildings tend to be insulated to high heaven (on account of the cold winters), it's more effective than you would think.
Last summer, I kept setting off the temperature alarms on my RAID servers at home, everytime the daytime high got over 90F outside. My GF was always bitching about how much A/C was costing us on our electric bill, so I moved the RAID arrays to the linen closet near the bathroom and set up a water-cooling rig similar to the one described in this article (I cheated and used an aquarium pump).
I left the A/C off when we were at work, for the rest of the summer, and the disk temps never got above 70F. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Look, I haven't got the time to refute this whole thing, point-by-point, so I'll leave you with this:
1) I AM A LIBERAL. Self-described, loving the term "liberal", and totally OK with it even if Jon Stewart doesn't like it. Screw him. I was not trying to attack liberals.
2) You misinterpreted me big-time: To say that "liberals do it, too" does NOT mean "ALL liberals to it"--it merely means that liberals, conservatives, and people of all political affiliations have been willing to attack or deny scientific work because it's conclusions are inconvenient. YOU were the jackass that took it all wrong (notice how nobody else, in 11 responses, made that same mistake?), and started a flaming unproductive bitch-fest. Which does prove that you can't read, BTW.
3) Whether IQ tests are valid or not is beside the point. Your attacks on IQ further proves that either a) you can't read, or b) you didn't bother to read my post. The concept of "g", a sort of generalized intelligence that expresses itself as a generic problem-solving and pattern recognition skill, is widely accepted in the psychological community. There are tests that have been formulated specifically to measure it, regardless of language/culture/upbringing influences. Your examples:
- street kid: could score well on a "g" test as easily as a Harvard graduate. A good test won't ask anything that education could influence.
- "idiot-savants" (horrible term, BTW): their skills in number-crunching or eidetic memory aren't a part of "g"--those are separate facilities that would have to be measured by different tests.
- "dislexia" (spelled "dyslexia", BTW): generally score just as well on tests like Ravens as their non-impaired counterparts do. Dyslexia makes reading/writing difficult, but a proper "g" test won't have any reading/writing components.
- "great creative minds": may have high "g", may have low "g'. Like the savants, these abilites are something other than "g".
Now, is "g" a valid concept? Like I said, most of the scientific community agrees that there is a generalizable intelligence. Go read the literature.
4) No matter who your parents are or what they do, you have to learn these things for yourself. My dad has a PhD. in electrical engineering, and a MA in CS, but anything I know about those subjects is largely a result of what I learned on my own. You haven't got any advantage in judging "The Bell Curve" or anything else, because YOU are not an expert in shit. I can't believe you even tried to pull a logical fallacy like that--it's just silly.
5) You took a discussion that is otherwise insightful, respectful, and intelligent, and barfed a flame on me for no particular reason, without even reading or understanding most of my post. Go piss up a rope.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldnt this be catagorized as your rights online?
Slashdot has a separate category for books, smart guy. That's why it's in the "books" category and not the "your rights online" category. If Slashdot reviewed a book about civil rights, British history, how to grow your own pot, Microsoft's dealing with Satan, or ANY topic, it would go under "books".
I would say a book on how to snoop on people hard drives and see what they deleted is pretty privacy invasive?
Join the 21st century... I mean, join the 1990s. Hard disk forensic analysis has been a booming field in the last 10 years. It's a crucial part of most computer forensic investigations.
Do you also think that biology books on DNA testing, or texts on explosives chemistry fingerprinting, are "privacy invasive"?
More to the point, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade?
I could be wrong....
NOW you're on to something...
Teaching evolution in primary/secondary school has nothing to do with this. High-school kids are not working on prion detection in blood samples. The people who do this kind of research are professionals, all of them doctorates with at least 6 or 7 years of post-secondary education. How many accredited biology programs, even at the undergraduate level, teach creationism? Maybe a handful, Bob Jones U and its ilk, but they graduate maybe .001% of all the biology degrees in the USA. Probably none of these people are actually doing biology work, anyway, so it's not their lack of proper education that's holding back progress.
Sunny point #2: None of the people who are currently old enough to have PhDs would have been exposed to creationism, or ID, in primary/secondary school. The recent push to get scripturally-inspired alternatives to evolution placed in textbooks is less than 10 years old, and its had few actual successes in getting the material taught. The number of schools and districts that are becoming receptive to the ID discussion is growing, but still only represents a TINY fraction of the total number of kids educated in the USA.
For comparison, there are several hundred thousand US children being educated every year at religiously-affilated schools that could be called "evangelical" or "fundamentalist" based on the sponsoring sect's view of biblical literalism. Since the literalist interpretation of scripture is in large part the intellectual parent of the ID movement, it's reasonable to assume that a good portion of these kids are being taught alternatives to evolution, at the very least.
In short, you're looking for a reason to bash religious people who support the teaching of ID in public schools. I suspect you probably have issues with religion in general, probably related to poor experiences with religion, religious people, or a religious upbringing in your formative years. I'm sorry about that, but you should probably try to be a little more open-minded--
Something tells me there's a reason there weren't enough eyeballs looking at this problem.
And the reason we don't have world peace, flying cars, and ponies for everybody is that there aren't enough eyeballs looking at THOSE problems.
It's generally true that, ceteris paribus, spending more man-hours on a given field of research will yield more results in a shorter time, but this is not as useful a principle as you might think. Here's why:
- Dependencies between disciplines: sometimes, a crucial advance in one field is held back by a lack of progress in another, apparantly unrelated field. Often the dependency isn't recognized until after a cross-applicable discovery is made, pointing the relationship out to everyone. Case in point: using Folding@Home to do genetics research. Who'd've thunk that the Internet would represent a huge bonus to the study of protein functions?
- The tendency for new discoveries to happen is, at best, a statistical tendency. You cannot know in advance of pursuing a particular avenue of research whether it will pan out or not--take Cold Fusion, or even Hot Fusion, as an example of this. Even if you throw billions of dollars at a problem, you still have to get lucky, and you still have to pick problems that you're reasonably sure will pan out.
I second the sibling poster who wants you to take an Econ course or two before you start in on the subject. You sound marginally less informed than Rush Limbaugh.
.001% "foreign"? How are you going to treat them? What if a UK firm, like Vogon, opens a lab in the US but takes all the profits and IP ownership home to England? Is that foreign software?
What exactly is a "foreign" company? If Microsoft contracts with a Canadian developer to write a device driver, is MS now
What about F/OSS projects that have foreign contributors? Obviously, this free work is competing with American business interests and is keeping American programmers out of work. We SHOULD ban all those foreign-polluted OSS programs from ever being used in the US.
If software is game, why not apply the exact same rules to hardware? Import a Penitum4 that Intel made in Indonesia, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.
And why stop at computers? Why not ban all those imports of other complex electronics, like VCRS, cameras, appliances, and even cars?
Think of how much better off our economy would be if we didn't trade with anybody else, ever, but made everything in the good ol' U.S. of A!
but she offers excellent, neutral advice for any IT department considering a fundamental systems switch
Since when does a statement like "If you can't properly account for your network, you can't discuss how much it's costing you" become "excellent" advice? That's just common sense. You can't make intelligent decisions on ANY business cost without having some metrics on what your environment looks like. This is true of routers and servers, and it's also true of paper clips and donuts.
Have standards have slipped so much that a truly neutral "anonymous reader" would start singing Didio's praises because she suddenly said something that's true.
Actually, now that I've gone back and read the article submission, it smells like some SERIOUS astroturfing. Slashdot editors should take heed: if the submission reads like a press release, it probably is!
with 9M posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that .001%?/i
Either I don't understand this question, or it's a completely idiotic question. What the fuck does "real value" mean? The maxim "One man's trash is another man's treasure " is especially important when talking about information--the asymmetry of value from person to person is even bigger than when you're talking about physical goods.
Considering the second half of the question, though, one might re-phrase the whole thing as "How do you find the posts that have value to you, individually?" That IS an important question... but like most econ majors, I figure the market will probably solve.
If your kids can't deal with anything else, you're raising a bunch of pansy-assed prima donnas with an over-active sense of entitlement.
And your parents raised a complete jackass who tries to use the Internet to make everyone think he's got Big Balls. You're a troll, birge.
I'll bet you're the type of guy who can barely stammer "Hello" when facing a real person, let alone gather the courage to make a statement like you did in real life.
For your edification:
http://wigu.com/overcompensating/2005/06/sdt.html
No, it wouldn't. The 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted to mean that the government can't look/listen in on you when you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
So the cops and the FBI aren't allowed to tap your phone on demand. They need to obtain a warrant first, from a judge. (FYI: it's not a subpoena--you get a subpoena to compel someone else to do something, while you get a warrant to demonstrate that you've satisfied a judge that you've met a certain standard.)
But they're also not allowed to put a tape recorder in your house to tape your phone calls, unless they get a warrant. Any method of tapping phone conversations, regardless of HOW it works, is considered an invasion of your expectation of privacy.
This gets more complex when we take into account federal wiretapping laws, but the short version is that law-enforcement people in pursuit on an investigation are exempted from wiretap laws IF they have a valid warrant. So if the cops are tapping your phone without a warrant, they have more to answer for than getting the evidence tossed out in court--they could go to jail.
That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, though.
The best way would be to make it a condition of their tax exempt status. Want your copyrights? Pay taxes!
Churches don't become tax exempt because they're churches... they're exempt because they're nonprofit organizations. Same as the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, my college debate league, and lots of other groups.
Or did you intend for your proposal to include all these other organizations?
Anyway, what about individuals? If I don't have any income, I don't pay taxes (say I'm a house-husband). Should I be denied copyright protections?
And what if I've paid lots of taxes in the past, and suddenly stop working? Do I lose the protections, or have I already bought them?
Do some more of these thought experiments, and then try to tell me your idea makes sense.
They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used.
Why the hell not? If YOU don't like the terms, YOU shouldn't accept the deal, whether it's from Disney or your cable company or whoever.
The stupidity of your proposed "solution" to the problem of people getting capped on usage is obvious when you consider that if your usage approaches the cable company's cap, you're using FAR more bandwidth than the bulk of their customers.
You're saying that the cable company should be forced to ONLY offer "unlimited", uncapped service... So you use 100 GB/mo. of transfer on porn and BT, while your neighbors use maybe 10 MB/mo. on email and WWW browsing, but you all pay the same rate??!! That's stupid--your neighbors are just paying for your incredibly high bandwidth usage.
If you want unlimited service, there are ISPs that will charge you based on monthly transfer instead of a flat-rate with a cap. And there are ISPs (like mine) that don't have caps, but that cost somewhat more to cover the additional bandwidth that it's assumed you'll use.
Remember: your ISP pays for traffic by the bit--their offering a flat-rate service is just a billing convenience to customers, not a fucking license for you to free-ride on everybody else's dime.
When was the last time you installed Linux, 2002? You might be surprised to learn that some things have changed, lately. Try DLing Fedora Core 4, or Knoppix, or Ubuntu, just to see how it works.
The amount of hardware not supported by Linux is pretty small, and the Windows/Linux gap gets smaller every month. Driver development is being driven more and more by projects funded or staffed by the companies that make the hardware--witness how fast stable Linux drivers have been created for wireless networking hardware, as opposed to the slower pickup for traditional ethernet stuff in the late 90s/early 00s.
I don't know about Gnome, but KDE has gone from the problems you describe (substandard beta apps, shitty default configs that don't work) to a damn near fire-and-forget process. Especially when you pick up a distro like FC or Ubuntu that makes a point of streamlining and checking the KDE team's work, finding and removing those gotchas that you describe.
I would bet that the past 3 years have seen at least as much time/effort/money poured into Linux-based OSS development (in the OS, the apps, and the desktop) as in the previous 12 years combined. The results are starting to show. It's not perfect, yet, but neither is the competing solution (MS).
In order to take a significant amount of MS desktop market share, Linux and pals will probably have to do better for cheaper than MS for a couple of years running in order to overcome the momentum of the current status quo. But they're on track to do it, assuming that the current levels of corporate-sponsored development effort don't flag.
(Seriously--go grab Ubuntu and throw down a laptop install. It will knock your socks off, to see how easy and clean it's gotten.)
You can't win. This sonamchauhan guy is a bona fide tinfoil hat wearer, and you won't be able to convince him that he's wrong.
It's usually best just to ignore these people, just like you would ignore a foul-smelling mutterer sitting next to you on a bus.
People in NYC don't move, I take it? Businesses don't tinker with their WAP settings/signal strengths? Gee, I do, regularly; and my workplace does also. Cause it's a system that we are continually tweaking for performance/security reasons. Not to mention intermittent environmental influences, like microwaves.
People in NYC move all the time, and some tweak their wireless settings, too. But neither of those things matter, because of the massive number of WiFi devices around. Take a drive through Times Square (the heart of midtown Manhattan), down Broadway from 50th to 42nd street, and you'll experience this. You can probably count more than 100, in those 8 blocks, with a decent card.
I did a site survey for a client in the financial district, downtown. On the 11th floor, Kismet claimed to see more than 130 APs--some were just ghosts, but there were more than 40 that had significant traffic levels. When we came back a month later, I cross-checked the current list of active APs against the earlier data, and a few had changed.
Point is, when there are a gazillion APs, you can ignore a few changes because it just doesn't matter significantly in the results.
You're probably coming form a city where "a lot of wireless" is being able to see a handful of APs from most spots, so I'm not surprised that you didn't see it this way.
If the idea is the build in interface to neurons in the brain, why would you need to grow something organic? Chip implants that extend inorganic electrodes into the brain are already a reality, and they seem to work fine for research (I'm too lazy to look up the reference on that quadripelegic dude who got one, recently).
Referring the that story, I recall that there were two big practical problems with the chip implant: 1) you have to drill a hole in the skull in order to make contact, and 2) the electrodes extending from the chip to the brain are too gross of a bridge to get a good signal sampling.
So something like building ultra-tiny conductors on demand in particular spots would be incredibly helpful in making the existing brain interface more practical, because it could be less invasive and produce much finer connections. Sounds like a hell of an application to me.
You're an idiot.
Just because some information is posted on a site called quackwatch does not make it the be all end all.
And just because some information is posted on a site about chelating does not make it the be all end all. But you know what? I'm much more inclined to trust Quackwatch, because they don't have a financial interest in convincing you that anything on their site is true. Whereas the chelating site sells more of their crap for every person (like you) who buys into their nonsense.
Did you notice something really significant about his "autism study"? There's no control group in the study, and therefore his numerical results are ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS. How are we supposed to know whether the chelating treatment makes any real difference unless there's a double-blind study with a control group?
People must judge for themselves, look at both sides, analyze the information and form your own conclusion.
Right. And in your corner, we have this bullshit website you linked to. And in the corner of accurate and responsible medical information, we have EVERYBODY ELSE. But you're free to come to the wrong conclusion.
I personally feel the medical establishment is way off. The medical system is only good for emergency medicine. Humans were not meant to live dependent on drugs. Hippocrates once wrote "Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food"
Nice hat--but shouldn't you be a little more concerned about the health effects of tinfoil on your scalp? I hear it causes hair loss.
Seriously, though... Modern medicine has one incredibly important tool at its disposal that trumps all its other contributions to human health: The double-blind statistical study. That's the only way to know whether a treatment actually works, does nothing, or makes people worse. Anecdotal evidence (which is all a study without a control group is) can never provide those answers.
Modern medicine is based on modern science: you have to prove your claims through valid experimentation, such that other can repeat your experiments and obtain agreeable results. You have to present a theory to the world as "Come and try to prove me wrong, or show that I made a mistake" with wide open arms. You only get called "right" when a whole lot of learned people try to do exactly that, and can't.
This is the system that gave us, in less than 100 years: vaccinations (saving millions of lives), effective surgery, genetic engineering and therapies, and birth control.
Don't like drugs, do ya? Well this is also what gave us the correct idea of how to exercise and eat right. The stuff your doctor tells you about how to live longer and healthier is based on science, nowadays.
You can distrust the medical establishment all you want. I'll admit that there's profit motivations corrupting large aspects of it, and mistakes get made. But what you're describing is the Dark Ages, man--it's fucking medievalism.
20 to 40 meters of accuracy? I work with various grades of GPS and even with low accuracy gps I can get within 10 feet no problem.
My FAVORITE kind of slashdot post to respond to is this one. It's a combination of "I'm missing the point entirely" AND "I think I'm a lot smarter than I am." All rolled up into four little sentences.
WHY IS WPS USEFUL: Because there are a lot of urban areas where you can't get GPS signals for shit. Try New York City, for one--you're lucky if you can get two or three satellites in Manhattan, most of the time. I've spent a LOT of time trying to make GPS work in this city, and it sucks--and I know there are probably other places where the same thing happens.
So if your GPS can't give you any kind of signal, 20-40 meters is pretty frickin' good, wouldn't you say? Sure, 2.4 and 5.8 GHz signals get attenuated by common building materials, but not so much that it throws off triangulation too badly. I can routinely do reasonbly accurate triangulations (+/- 10 meters) on access points (sort of a reverse of the WPS process) near the ground in all sorts of medium-heavy office buildings.
Now, add in the fact that there are probably at least 10 million wireless client devices in consumer hands in the US today (a number that grows as we speak!), and compare it to the distribution of GPS receivers. Chances are, most everybody with a laptop has WiFi, but there's a lot of people that don't have GPS. Cost isn't really such an issue--there are cheap-ass USB GPS receivers all over (running on Linux, even). I think it has more to do with the fact that GPS is less of a "need-to-have-it" thing, and it's rarely built into laptops and PDAs.
Point is: MANY more people have a WiFi receiver than have a GPS receiver, and it often works as well or better in urban areas or in buildings.
Do you see it, now? Sorry for the snark-attack, but man, how did you not get this?
You don't know, man! You weren't THERE!
Theoretically it is still possible to recover the undelying data that was over-written. In practice it is very expensive and not 100% guaranteed.
This should read "In common IT myths, it is still possible to recover the underlying data that was over-written. In reality, it's not possible at all." Take it from someone who spent several years working in data forensics and repeatedly dealt with statements from bosses/clients along the lines of "Well, I read on the Internet that you can recover overwritten data with a [STM|MFM|whatever], and that teh NSA and CIA know how to do it."
It's bullshit. Trust me, it's bullshit. Peter Gutmann (teaches down in NZ) wrote a paper for USENIX '96 that references a couple of laboratory-grade techniques that might have worked on hard drives manufactured before 1996. THIS IS WHERE EVERYBODY GOT THE MYTH FROM. What nobody realizes is that Gutmann published an updated version of that paper in which he retracts virtually all his conclusions about recovering data on hard drives because IT'S NOT POSSIBLE ANYMORE.
Not to mention the fact that there have been a couple of incidents where large companies have spent multi-millions trying to make such a process work, and came away entirely empty-handed.
It's bullshit. On a modern hard drive, if you overwrite your data once, you're secure. Maybe if you're dealing with some ancient disks you have stuff to worry about, but that's it.
Dude, you're just being rude, here. The parent makes a perfectly valid point--see my sibling comment to yours for some more thoughts on that. Short version: Consumer Reports did large-sample studies, and got somewhat different results from the anecdotal study in the magazine article. That suggests strongly that there's more variance in the techs' effectiveness at any given company than I originally gave credit for.
If statisticians can statistically determine who the next president of the United States is by polling 1000 people, I think making 3 calls to a tech support line is more than accurate.
Stats tells us that we can determine quite a bit about the behavior of a large population of events based on the analysis of a smaller subset, properly selected. The way the math works out, though, 1000 samples are more than enough to establish the opinions of 200 million voters... but 3 samples aren't enough to establish the effectiveness of even 1000 support techs.
The number of samples needed varies with the degree of confidence you want in your result... if you want to be 95% sure of your result, you need more samples than if you were satisfied with being 90% sure. The number of samples needed, though, is NOT a linear relation to the confidence level--there's diminishing returns.
Also, the number of samples needed varies with the total population size, but again it isn't a linear relationship. In this case, though, it's an "aggrandizing" returns situation, because as the total population gets larger, you need a smaller fraction of it to get results.
I'd love to lay the math out, but it's been five years since I took Stats, and I don't have the book handy.
You claim the logic is broken, but do you have ANY idea how to judge sample size? How many would be enough for you? 50? 100? 10,000?
There are ways of determining how many you need--you determine your population size, pick a degree of confidence, and plug in the numbers--viola, you have a minimum sample size needed to guarantee that level of confidence.
That sibling poster to my current comment sure has a bug up his ass, doesn't he? But back to our discussion...
With a larger sample size, random chance plays less of a part - if you have consistently good techs, you will get a good score, and if you have consistently bad techs you will get a bad score.
I do understand statistical methods. I think that our major difference of opinion here is in how much difference there really is between the majority of techs working at a given company. That's what most of my original post was driving at. You appear to believe that there is enough variance in the problem-solving abilities of different people at one company for it to make a big difference.
As I said in the GP, I think it's reasonable to assume that any given call to a particular company will net you a similar result, because the variance in the techs is low. Now, I can't prove that, but like I said before, it seems like most of the overriding factors in how techs perform (pay scale, hiring policies, management, etc) would tend to make for a homogenous workforce.
It's pretty striking how differently these same companies rated between Consumer Reports, which does statistical surveys using accepted statistical methods across a large number of customers, versus this magazine article, which followed the "let's try this" methodology.
My bad--I missed your earlier references to the CR stuff. That's actually some good evidence that there IS a big variance in tech effectiveness at a given company. So you may well be right on with your point in this situation.
Still, though, I want to stand behind the basic point that I'm making about the validity of non-statistical methods for stuff like this.
Although, now that I think about it, there's no way to know whether the variance is large until you actually DO a full-on statistical study, with a large sample size. So I guess the anecdotal approach is inherently flawed, though I can see it still having a place as an ultra-cheap heuristic.
That's the thing--if you're willing to assume low variance and accept the costs of being wrong in that assumption, you can do it cheap and go anecdotal. That may be a practical solution. In this case, where the magazine is just trying to do a story, it seems like they accepted the costs of being wrong, as seen by your CR comparison.
The article never claims to be a statistical study. You don't have to approach the issue in a statistical fashion to obtain an informative result.
The validity of an anecdotal study like this hinges on how strong your expectation of consistent service is. If you have good reason to believe that a single experience is probably representative of most visits, you can have a very small sample and still come back with valid conclusions.
Take restaurant reviewing as an example: The Michelin and Zagat's restaurant reviews are generally based on a single visit to each establishment. (Not only that, but different reviews are performed by different people, presumably with different tastes. But that's a side issue, here.) Each reviewer visits a restaurant and writes up a review of his or her experiences at that place, on that day.
But these restaurant guides are relatively accurate, and quite useful. A restaurant business generally provides consistent customer experiences because they TRY to provide consistent experiences. Fast food takes it to the hilt, but any place is doing it, to some degree. Therefore, you don't really need a sizable sample of identical tests to come up with a conclusion.
It's reasonable to believe that customer service operates the same way: companies generally have consistent hiring policies, management policies, and training regimens for their tech-support people. They tend to pay consistent wages and provide consistent benefits. The computer routing systems that connect you to a tech, and the on-the-phone policies that those techs follow, are also highly consistent. Therefore, it seems like the weight of factors creating the "tech support experience" would provide a consistent result.
Statistical analysis would be more useful for something like "what percentage of shipped laptops by this vendor have quality problems", or "what's the average wait time or problem resolution time for a given type of call." You're focusing on the variations and their magnitude, which are going to be pretty small in comparison to the magnitude of the values themselves.
This article is more like reviewing "how aesthetically pleasing is the laptop's case", or "which laptop model has the best feature set for the money". The latter questions, like the article, are focused on parameters that don't submit well to small measurements, and are not likely to vary that much on an absolute scale from customer to customer.
This isn't the most objective, comprehensive, or thorough study I've ever seen, but it's certainly sufficient as an informative review of laptop tech support. And that's all it claims to be.
Hahaha, funny. Whether you can be without the Internet for 12 hours depends on how much money you're willing to lose by letting your users stay down. I don't like to lose money.
I think you need to check your definition of perfect there. Wasting water has huge environmental impacts.
You missed some tongue-in-cheek impacts there, paco. Fucking Canucks and Euros take everything so goddamn seriously, if there's a chance to dog-pile on Americans.
And FWIW, as other posters have pointed out, most NYC residents are apartment renters. Therefore, the landlord pays the water bill and tucks it into the rent, without metering individual units for it (unlike gas and electricity, for instance). Why? God only knows, I'm sure there's a reason.
Point is, if anyone gets too out of control on usage, their landlord will come-a-knockin' and ask some pentrating questions about reasonable water usage. So it's not like there's a massive tragedy-of-the-commons happening.
Also, NYC rarely has water problems, mostly due to the fact that it has a generally adequete water supply at present, and it's highly unlikely to grow its residential population anytime in the next several decades--living here is so fucking expensive that it's tending to scare as many out as the nice parts attract. Even a 0.1% annualized population growth would be highly surprising, in the next 20 years.
You want practical? It's a blue-sky open source development project, you nitwit. The potential applications are legion. But let me give you a run-down of several of the uses to which I've put my own HP Ipaq (running Linux from handhelds.org!):
1) Mobile FULL-FEATURED WiFi scanner and auditing kit. Run Kismet, Airsnort, and a lot of other Linux-only tools (any Windows equivalents cost $$$ and have stripped-down handheld versions) for serious portable work. 100x easier than carting a laptop around. Break WEP keys, perform breakin demos, and hunt down rogue APs with a pocket-sized monster.
2) During the NYC blackout, my ISP was still up and laptops had juice, but my routers ran down the UPS batteries in about 30 minutes. Jury-rigging a car battery, some DC-DC conversion stuff, and an Ipaq w/ PCMCIA sleeve holding 2x PCMCIA network adapters = an instant router that stayed up, routing 1.5 Mbps DSL to five users, for 12 hours. Do you know how much a 12-hour UPS costs??
3) Since the Ipaq (like the Axim) has a microphone and WiFi, it makes a killer wireless microphone. Turn on a recording app, stream the data via wireless to a laptop somewhere nearby, and you've got at least an hour of recording time on batteries alone. Makes an excellent conference-room bug, for checking up on meetings that you can't attend or negotiations that you shouldn't know about--and you record all day if you plug your Ipaq in to charge and then "forget" about it.
4) Portable streaming MP3 player. I've got kerberos-protected NFS shares full of music, and I can stream music out of those shares from anywhere I can reach my APs.
The point is that the sky's the limit with Linux--whatever you can think up, within the limits of RAM and battery life (which are pretty substantial!) is yours to do.
It takes a cold source of water to work, and if you have none in your area (tap water wont cut it unless you happen to get fed from a pipe running through a glacier)
It's currently 7:51pm in New York City, and the temperature outside is about 85F. The high today was 94 in Brooklyn (my hood).
The tap water temp, though, is still a blissful 61F (after letting it run for about 15 seconds). That's practically icewater, compared to the outside temp.
Since very few residential customers in the city get billed for water usage, this would be a PERFECT solution. That 25-35F temperature delta takes the edge off things, and since the buildings tend to be insulated to high heaven (on account of the cold winters), it's more effective than you would think.
Last summer, I kept setting off the temperature alarms on my RAID servers at home, everytime the daytime high got over 90F outside. My GF was always bitching about how much A/C was costing us on our electric bill, so I moved the RAID arrays to the linen closet near the bathroom and set up a water-cooling rig similar to the one described in this article (I cheated and used an aquarium pump).
I left the A/C off when we were at work, for the rest of the summer, and the disk temps never got above 70F. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Look, I haven't got the time to refute this whole thing, point-by-point, so I'll leave you with this:
1) I AM A LIBERAL. Self-described, loving the term "liberal", and totally OK with it even if Jon Stewart doesn't like it. Screw him. I was not trying to attack liberals.
2) You misinterpreted me big-time: To say that "liberals do it, too" does NOT mean "ALL liberals to it"--it merely means that liberals, conservatives, and people of all political affiliations have been willing to attack or deny scientific work because it's conclusions are inconvenient. YOU were the jackass that took it all wrong (notice how nobody else, in 11 responses, made that same mistake?), and started a flaming unproductive bitch-fest. Which does prove that you can't read, BTW.
3) Whether IQ tests are valid or not is beside the point. Your attacks on IQ further proves that either a) you can't read, or b) you didn't bother to read my post. The concept of "g", a sort of generalized intelligence that expresses itself as a generic problem-solving and pattern recognition skill, is widely accepted in the psychological community. There are tests that have been formulated specifically to measure it, regardless of language/culture/upbringing influences. Your examples:
- street kid: could score well on a "g" test as easily as a Harvard graduate. A good test won't ask anything that education could influence.
- "idiot-savants" (horrible term, BTW): their skills in number-crunching or eidetic memory aren't a part of "g"--those are separate facilities that would have to be measured by different tests.
- "dislexia" (spelled "dyslexia", BTW): generally score just as well on tests like Ravens as their non-impaired counterparts do. Dyslexia makes reading/writing difficult, but a proper "g" test won't have any reading/writing components.
- "great creative minds": may have high "g", may have low "g'. Like the savants, these abilites are something other than "g".
Now, is "g" a valid concept? Like I said, most of the scientific community agrees that there is a generalizable intelligence. Go read the literature.
4) No matter who your parents are or what they do, you have to learn these things for yourself. My dad has a PhD. in electrical engineering, and a MA in CS, but anything I know about those subjects is largely a result of what I learned on my own. You haven't got any advantage in judging "The Bell Curve" or anything else, because YOU are not an expert in shit. I can't believe you even tried to pull a logical fallacy like that--it's just silly.
5) You took a discussion that is otherwise insightful, respectful, and intelligent, and barfed a flame on me for no particular reason, without even reading or understanding most of my post. Go piss up a rope.