So what exactly is ICANN going to do if they do not comply? The threat of legal action doesn't mean too much, as it can take years to resolve and based on the legal system's understanding of current technology, the outcome is completely up in the air.
IANAL but I think this is what injunctions are for. ICANN can ask a court to make VeriSign roll back the changes immediately and then let the lawsuit decide whether they can set it back up. Just like Spike Lee was able to delay the unveiling of SpikeTV until the lawsuit was settled.
The first time I really heard Canadian bashing was in South Park.
Check out Canadian Bacon, a Michael (Roger & Me) Moore flick with Alan Alda and John Candy. The U.S. in the wake of cold war has no one left to hate so under pressure from the military-industrial complex the government turns to the North for a convenient enemy. Includes such gems as the President (Alda) shouting "Surrender pronto, or we'll level Toronto!" and a Canadian highway cop busting two Americans for spraying anti-Canadian graffiti on a truck -- in only one language.
The first time I really heard Canadian bashing was in South Park. But where does the bashing originate from and why?
I think you might need a history degree to answer that one well. Here's my take (Full Disclosure: IANA historian. I am an American married to a Québécoise and I once read a book called "Canadian History for Dummies"): The US and Canada are pretty much cousins. In the mid 18th century, the English had their colonies and the French had Canada. The French and Indian War (I think they call it the Seven Years' War up there) concluded in 1763 and resulted in the French pretty much out of North America and the English in control from Georgia to Québec. To pay for this massive expense, Parliament raised taxes on the colonies.
Americans know the next part of the story. The colonists were pissed that they had to pay such huge taxes and had no voice in Parliament itself. Things escalated, yadda yadda yadda, 13 colonies declared independence. The fathers of the American revolution pretty much expected that Canada would follow their lead and join the US. That is probably the first example of the US expecting Canada to do whatever is in the best interests of the US. But they didn't. And so many battles of the Revolution were fought on the Canadian frontier because that part of North America was under British control.
The same thing happened in the war of 1812 (I forget what the Canadians call that one). The US declared war on Britain and invaded the nearest British soil, namely Canada. This one didn't work out too well for the Americans. The British army burned Washington. Many Canadians feel that they won that war, but the States got one thing they really wanted: street cred. In the treaty they signed, the British had to acknowledge the existence of an independent USA.
Nowadays, Canada and the US are great friends and allies. But they are like cousins with a big rivalry. To my mind Canada is what the US may have been if they had never declared independence. Mercantilism as a theory is crap, and Britain eventually realized it and allowed their colonies to govern themselves. The same would have happened here. But the American psyche depends a lot on fighting for independence, and I think the Canadian one depends a lot on cooler, smarter resolution of problems. Although they look and talk (mostly) just like us, their national philosophy is a lot closer to Britain and Europe, and so the more you learn about the guys across the border, the more interesting they become.
American bashing of Canada thus has historical roots, but I think it's more ignorance or indifference now. In school we (Americans) learn very little about Canada and are led to believe that it doesn't matter (heck, even our weather maps could be used to draw the conclusion that beyond Maine and Michigan lies the North Pole). Canadians deeply resent being treated as just like the States or, worse, ignored. Americans have a superiority complex, whereas Canadians have an inferiority complex.
Now I'm sure that that is FMTYWTK, and probably Offtopic, but I hope at least Interesting. Let us all join together as brothers and sisters and sing the NAFTA anthem!
Well, 1,000,000 CDs x 1/16th in is about 5,208 feet tall. Bit hard to move without tipping over, I'd think.
Yeah, that's roughly 4 times as tall as the tallest building on earth.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the height of the stack in either square or hex grids does not matter...a set of 6250 stacks of 160 CDs takes up the exact same volume (given rounding errors) as 625 stacks of 1600 CDs. Wasted volume is wasted volume.
I was just wondering about it given my original post -- can you fit this pyramid in your basement? Probably. I guess the volume problem is not as big as the weight problem.
And now that we've beat this topic into the ground, I'm going home.
Why, this was one rouge contractor who didn't meet our standards of conduct. We'll see that s/he is appropriately flogged in the public square... ...and be careful to only hire bleu et blanc contractors in the future.
The comparison isn't being made to Islamist terrorists at all. The Nation of Islam is a black-power movement following Louis Farrakan. Malcolm X was one its most influential evangelizers.
I doubt the Nation of Islam is capable of any such terrorism. The original post should be modded Offtopic, not Troll.
The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment.
There's nothing wrong with the sentence. The subject is you (understood), "people" is in the vocative case and is appositive to the subject, and the verb is "come on", which happens to be a phrasal verb.
This is the/. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically,...
Having known a few Harvard Law students, I think it's funny that you use them as examples of grammar experts. Moreover, in this sentence you string together three independent clauses with commas, which is a no-no.
I was going to keep quiet (the internet being as you say a pretty casual environment), but I didn't like seeing the pot get modded up for calling the kettle black. I'll probably get modded down for doing the exact same thing.
There must be a couple "professional" examples with 945 pages...
Unless they filled it out with appendices. My first PHP book, "Professional PHP," also published by Wrox, weighs in at 909 and is actually a decent book. But it has a function reference appendix (68 pages) which is just a dump of the online manual (and less easily searched!). There is another appendix on HTTP (15 pages), which the majority of PHP users would never need to know beyond the headers. Also an "Ultimate HTML Database" appendix (96 pages) of HTML tags. I think the "professional" PHP user is already acquainted with HTML...It goes on. Let's not forget the page-consuming style of annotating code chunk-by-chunk and then displaying all in one blob.
But maybe your point is that even if 50% of the book is fluff, that's leaves some 450 pages of good stuff. That's fair. But they seem to charge by the page, and if only 50% of the pages get read, that's not fair.
...how long it would take for such things to happen.
I've been noticing it for quite a while. Skateboarding and snowboarding competitions IRL are cluttered with ads, and so are the games. If this is the first time that a game maker has received money to draw the ads into the game, well, good for them, because they should have been getting paid for some time now.
Too bad they won't pass on that money to the consumers, but maybe that will change. Why are television, radio, web sites free? Why does a two ream Sunday newspaper only cost $1.25? Heck, if the game were free I'd sit through embedded commericals. Good time to shake out the hand cramps and go to the bathroom.
Advertising is not "bad;" it's just important to be aware of where it is and what it's worth. Does your car have a license plate holder advertising where you bought it? Does your shirt have a logo on it? Ads are everywhere and that's not going to change. But if you're going to become a NASCAT, make sure you get paid!
So I propose that a movie be made that is sort of like beavis & butthead, South Park, etc... But have a disclaimer at the beginning that tells you "DO NOT PERFORM THESE STUNTS OR YOU WILL DIE!" this of course will make the stupid people want to do them even more.
The article points out that the major suppliers of broadband are cable companies and phone companies. These are, like, my two *least* favorite services in the world! I pay way too much for the services I have; why should I reward them with more money for new services delivered just as poorly? There are some people I would pay $50/mo. for broadband, but they ain't them.
Not that they haven't asked enough. Since there is an existing business relationship, they are entitled to send you whatever junk mail or spam they want or call you whenever. Cablevision actually called me once at 8am on a Saturday asking me to sign up (these are the guys who use the NBA's most underachieving, overpaid team, the Knicks, for promotion. Pretty good symbol for the company. Oh, yeah, they own said team).
Think about it: If Microsoft started selling ice cream, even if it was 10 times better than the store brand and only cost 2.5x as much, would you buy it? What we need is the Ben and Jerry's of broadband.
Here is an expository article from the Journal of the AMS about the Langlands program. Results of Lafforgue are used to prove some very nice theorems.
Here is a link to an article by Lafforgue in Inventiones Mathematicae, one of the world's most prestigious mathematics Journals. Malheursement, cet article est en français.
Here is the Mathematical Reviews citation for the Lafforgue paper. You can browse the articles cited by him.
Also, if anyone is interested, here is a paper by Voevodsky about some of his work in motivic cohomology.
It's not true that all math you can teach in high school which is not calculus is "lower level" or "remedial." Many colleges offer alternatives to calculus for non-science majors which study game theory, cryptography, the engravings of M.C. Escher... None of these topics require calculus, but they do require (and hence reinforce the usefulness of) algebra. They are extremely interesting and sophisticated. They could easily be taught in high school as well.
Whatever happened to solid geometry (i.e. polyhedra, spherical trigonometry, etc.)? That's what used to be taught at the senior level of high school. And now students in vector calculus have trouble thinking spatially. Projective and hyperbolic geometries can be taught at the high school level, too.
The more college-level courses are brought down to high school, the more very good high school-level courses are eliminated. And I think this acceleration (and the according logic that math is a one-way street from addition to calculus) is detrimental to the nation's mathematical character. We don't lose the International Math Olympiad every year because we're not getting to calculus fast enough. We're losing because we don't teach enough math prior to calculus.
This story reminds me of one of my frequent getting-to-know-you conversations:
Stranger: What do you do? Me: I'm a mathematics professor. Stranger: Oh, math. I was pretty good at math in school, until they started throwing letters in there. I kept asking, "What is X anyway?" and they wouldn't tell me.
I think that one reason students are suffering in algebra is the "rush to calculus" phenomenon. High schools (or maybe parents, or maybe the students themselves) are trying to force students to take a year or more of calculus in high school when most of them aren't ready. The result is that nothing is learned well, not the algebra which needs shoring up, and not the calculus which is now a house built on sand.
I teach calculus to college students, and the two biggest problems I face are (a) students who think they already know the subject and try to coast until it's way too late and (2) poor algebra skills. I think that although algebra is not "needed" for calculus (as you can learn and prove every theorem without it), it becomes such an obstacle for doing homework that I wonder if that's the reason calculus is considered hard.
Students complain that algebra mistakes should be overlooked when they have some understanding of the concepts, and that's partially true. But if you build a bridge and it fails, the people on the bridge die whether your mistake was in calculus or algebra.
If the majority of college-bound students spent high school learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and analytic geometry (the last two are now called "precalculus"--but why?) well, then they would enter college ready to excel in calculus. Not only would they have a solid grasp of mathematical expressions (and better geometric thinking skills), the first strokes on the calculus canvas would be painted by a college teacher who has a better handle on it than an average high school teacher does. Instead, they are fundamentally unsound and overconfident because their high school transcript has the word "calculus" on it. A little of everything is a lot of nothing.
I was required to derive the quadratic formula w/o completing the square, which is TOUGH when you're 12 or 13.
How DO you derive the quadratic formula without completing the square?
I'm one of the minority who believes that D should be passing, but that a C truly should be an "average" grade (just like it says on the report card).
I couldn't agree more. When I taught at [Ivy League school], students want the same grades in college courses for high school work. That is, if they show up to most of the classes, they want a B+, and if they do some of the homework, they want an A-.
I am an assistant professor of mathematics at a large state school. I'm always impressed the degree to which the unix community (considered by most to be nerdier than a bird-watching club) embraces the classics and espouses a well-rounded education. This thread--nay, this whole site--is a good example.
I have been sorely tempted to borrow the following retort, which happened to a classmate of a friend of mine (which means it may have not, but it's still a good story). I think I will have to wait until I'm a little grayer:
In a physics course for pre-med majors, the professor was explaining some finer point about electromagnetism. A student questioned whether the information was relevant, and the professor said that you needed to know this to understand how batteries and generators work. The student protested further, asking how it applied to the "real world." The professor said, "Young man, this knowledge saves lives." "How?" "It keeps idiots out of medical school."
Slashdot Mirror
So what exactly is ICANN going to do if they do not comply? The threat of legal action doesn't mean too much, as it can take years to resolve and based on the legal system's understanding of current technology, the outcome is completely up in the air.
IANAL but I think this is what injunctions are for. ICANN can ask a court to make VeriSign roll back the changes immediately and then let the lawsuit decide whether they can set it back up. Just like Spike Lee was able to delay the unveiling of SpikeTV until the lawsuit was settled.
The first time I really heard Canadian bashing was in South Park.
Check out Canadian Bacon , a Michael ( Roger & Me ) Moore flick with Alan Alda and John Candy. The U.S. in the wake of cold war has no one left to hate so under pressure from the military-industrial complex the government turns to the North for a convenient enemy. Includes such gems as the President (Alda) shouting "Surrender pronto, or we'll level Toronto!" and a Canadian highway cop busting two Americans for spraying anti-Canadian graffiti on a truck -- in only one language.
The first time I really heard Canadian bashing was in South Park. But where does the bashing originate from and why?
I think you might need a history degree to answer that one well. Here's my take (Full Disclosure: IANA historian. I am an American married to a Québécoise and I once read a book called "Canadian History for Dummies"): The US and Canada are pretty much cousins. In the mid 18th century, the English had their colonies and the French had Canada. The French and Indian War (I think they call it the Seven Years' War up there) concluded in 1763 and resulted in the French pretty much out of North America and the English in control from Georgia to Québec. To pay for this massive expense, Parliament raised taxes on the colonies.
Americans know the next part of the story. The colonists were pissed that they had to pay such huge taxes and had no voice in Parliament itself. Things escalated, yadda yadda yadda, 13 colonies declared independence. The fathers of the American revolution pretty much expected that Canada would follow their lead and join the US. That is probably the first example of the US expecting Canada to do whatever is in the best interests of the US. But they didn't. And so many battles of the Revolution were fought on the Canadian frontier because that part of North America was under British control.
The same thing happened in the war of 1812 (I forget what the Canadians call that one). The US declared war on Britain and invaded the nearest British soil, namely Canada. This one didn't work out too well for the Americans. The British army burned Washington. Many Canadians feel that they won that war, but the States got one thing they really wanted: street cred. In the treaty they signed, the British had to acknowledge the existence of an independent USA.
Nowadays, Canada and the US are great friends and allies. But they are like cousins with a big rivalry. To my mind Canada is what the US may have been if they had never declared independence. Mercantilism as a theory is crap, and Britain eventually realized it and allowed their colonies to govern themselves. The same would have happened here. But the American psyche depends a lot on fighting for independence, and I think the Canadian one depends a lot on cooler, smarter resolution of problems. Although they look and talk (mostly) just like us, their national philosophy is a lot closer to Britain and Europe, and so the more you learn about the guys across the border, the more interesting they become.
American bashing of Canada thus has historical roots, but I think it's more ignorance or indifference now. In school we (Americans) learn very little about Canada and are led to believe that it doesn't matter (heck, even our weather maps could be used to draw the conclusion that beyond Maine and Michigan lies the North Pole). Canadians deeply resent being treated as just like the States or, worse, ignored. Americans have a superiority complex, whereas Canadians have an inferiority complex.
Now I'm sure that that is FMTYWTK, and probably Offtopic, but I hope at least Interesting. Let us all join together as brothers and sisters and sing the NAFTA anthem!
Well, 1,000,000 CDs x 1/16th in is about 5,208 feet tall. Bit hard to move without tipping over, I'd think.
Yeah, that's roughly 4 times as tall as the tallest building on earth.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the height of the stack in either square or hex grids does not matter...a set of 6250 stacks of 160 CDs takes up the exact same volume (given rounding errors) as 625 stacks of 1600 CDs. Wasted volume is wasted volume.
I was just wondering about it given my original post -- can you fit this pyramid in your basement?
Probably. I guess the volume problem is not as big as the weight problem.
And now that we've beat this topic into the ground, I'm going home.
Verr Naas. How tall is it then?
According to these guys, a typical CD weighs 2/3 of an ounce.
That means 10^6 CDs weigh nearly 41,6667 pounds.
Extra credit: what's the minimum amount of space they would take up? Remember that they are round so this is harder than just calculating the volume.
Why, this was one rouge contractor who didn't meet our standards of conduct. We'll see that s/he is appropriately flogged in the public square...
...and be careful to only hire bleu et blanc contractors in the future.
The comparison isn't being made to Islamist terrorists at all. The Nation of Islam is a black-power movement following Louis Farrakan. Malcolm X was one its most influential evangelizers.
I doubt the Nation of Islam is capable of any such terrorism. The original post should be modded Offtopic, not Troll.
Fair enough. Despite my crabbiness (not enough coffee, I guess) and apparent hypocrisy, I did agree with the spirit of your comment.
The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment.
/. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically, ...
There's nothing wrong with the sentence. The subject is you (understood), "people" is in the vocative case and is appositive to the subject, and the verb is "come on", which happens to be a
phrasal verb.
This is the
Having known a few Harvard Law students, I think it's funny that you use them as examples of grammar experts. Moreover, in this sentence you string together three independent clauses with commas, which is a no-no.
I was going to keep quiet (the internet being as you say a pretty casual environment), but I didn't like seeing the pot get modded up for calling the kettle black. I'll probably get modded down for doing the exact same thing.
The G in front of GNU is silent, so why not make the K silent, too?
There must be a couple "professional" examples with 945 pages...
Unless they filled it out with appendices. My first PHP book, "Professional PHP," also published by Wrox, weighs in at 909 and is actually a decent book. But it has a function reference appendix (68 pages) which is just a dump of the online manual (and less easily searched!). There is another appendix on HTTP (15 pages), which the majority of PHP users would never need to know beyond the headers. Also an "Ultimate HTML Database" appendix (96 pages) of HTML tags. I think the "professional" PHP user is already acquainted with HTML...It goes on. Let's not forget the page-consuming style of annotating code chunk-by-chunk and then displaying all in one blob.
But maybe your point is that even if 50% of the book is fluff, that's leaves some 450 pages of good stuff. That's fair. But they seem to charge by the page, and if only 50% of the pages get read, that's not fair.
what has been the most long-lived virus/worm/trojan so far?
That would the e-mail warning you about the "Good Times" virus.
I've been noticing it for quite a while. Skateboarding and snowboarding competitions IRL are cluttered with ads, and so are the games. If this is the first time that a game maker has received money to draw the ads into the game, well, good for them, because they should have been getting paid for some time now.
Too bad they won't pass on that money to the consumers, but maybe that will change. Why are television, radio, web sites free? Why does a two ream Sunday newspaper only cost $1.25? Heck, if the game were free I'd sit through embedded commericals. Good time to shake out the hand cramps and go to the bathroom.
Advertising is not "bad;" it's just important to be aware of where it is and what it's worth. Does your car have a license plate holder advertising where you bought it? Does your shirt have a logo on it? Ads are everywhere and that's not going to change. But if you're going to become a NASCAT, make sure you get paid!
The problem is rouge reviewers...
That's why I only trust reviews written by blanc and bleu reviewers.
Nothing like some good french-bashing to start your day.
So I propose that a movie be made that is sort of like beavis & butthead, South Park, etc... But have a disclaimer at the beginning that tells you "DO NOT PERFORM THESE STUNTS OR YOU WILL DIE!" this of course will make the stupid people want to do them even more.
Be careful what you wish for: Coming soon to a theater near you.
The article points out that the major suppliers of broadband are cable companies and phone companies. These are, like, my two *least* favorite services in the world! I pay way too much for the services I have; why should I reward them with more money for new services delivered just as poorly? There are some people I would pay $50/mo. for broadband, but they ain't them.
Not that they haven't asked enough. Since there is an existing business relationship, they are entitled to send you whatever junk mail or spam they want or call you whenever. Cablevision actually called me once at 8am on a Saturday asking me to sign up (these are the guys who use the NBA's most underachieving, overpaid team, the Knicks, for promotion. Pretty good symbol for the company. Oh, yeah, they own said team).
Think about it: If Microsoft started selling ice cream, even if it was 10 times better than the store brand and only cost 2.5x as much, would you buy it? What we need is the Ben and Jerry's of broadband.
Here is an expository article from the Journal of the AMS about the Langlands program. Results of Lafforgue are used to prove some very nice theorems.
Here is a link to an article by Lafforgue in Inventiones Mathematicae, one of the world's most prestigious mathematics Journals. Malheursement, cet article est en français.
Here is the Mathematical Reviews citation for the Lafforgue paper. You can browse the articles cited by him.
Also, if anyone is interested, here is a paper by Voevodsky about some of his work in motivic cohomology.
It's not true that all math you can teach in high school which is not calculus is "lower level" or "remedial." Many colleges offer alternatives to calculus for non-science majors which study game theory, cryptography, the engravings of M.C. Escher... None of these topics require calculus, but they do require (and hence reinforce the usefulness of) algebra. They are extremely interesting and sophisticated. They could easily be taught in high school as well.
Whatever happened to solid geometry (i.e. polyhedra, spherical trigonometry, etc.)? That's what used to be taught at the senior level of high school. And now students in vector calculus have trouble thinking spatially. Projective and hyperbolic geometries can be taught at the high school level, too.
The more college-level courses are brought down to high school, the more very good high school-level courses are eliminated. And I think this acceleration (and the according logic that math is a one-way street from addition to calculus) is detrimental to the nation's mathematical character. We don't lose the International Math Olympiad every year because we're not getting to calculus fast enough. We're losing because we don't teach enough math prior to calculus.
This story reminds me of one of my frequent getting-to-know-you conversations:
Stranger: What do you do?
Me: I'm a mathematics professor.
Stranger: Oh, math. I was pretty good at math in school, until they started throwing letters in there. I kept asking, "What is X anyway?" and they wouldn't tell me.
I think that one reason students are suffering in algebra is the "rush to calculus" phenomenon. High schools (or maybe parents, or maybe the students themselves) are trying to force students to take a year or more of calculus in high school when most of them aren't ready. The result is that nothing is learned well, not the algebra which needs shoring up, and not the calculus which is now a house built on sand.
I teach calculus to college students, and the two biggest problems I face are (a) students who think they already know the subject and try to coast until it's way too late and (2) poor algebra skills. I think that although algebra is not "needed" for calculus (as you can learn and prove every theorem without it), it becomes such an obstacle for doing homework that I wonder if that's the reason calculus is considered hard.
Students complain that algebra mistakes should be overlooked when they have some understanding of the concepts, and that's partially true. But if you build a bridge and it fails, the people on the bridge die whether your mistake was in calculus or algebra.
If the majority of college-bound students spent high school learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and analytic geometry (the last two are now called "precalculus"--but why?) well, then they would enter college ready to excel in calculus. Not only would they have a solid grasp of mathematical expressions (and better geometric thinking skills), the first strokes on the calculus canvas would be painted by a college teacher who has a better handle on it than an average high school teacher does. Instead, they are fundamentally unsound and overconfident because their high school transcript has the word "calculus" on it. A little of everything is a lot of nothing.
I was required to derive the quadratic formula w/o completing the square, which is TOUGH when you're 12 or 13.
How DO you derive the quadratic formula without completing the square?
I'm one of the minority who believes that D should be passing, but that a C truly should be an "average" grade (just like it says on the report card).
I couldn't agree more. When I taught at [Ivy League school], students want the same grades in college courses for high school work. That is, if they show up to most of the classes, they want a B+, and if they do some of the homework, they want an A-.
Related (tried by an old roommate of mine):
Hello, this is ABC Company. Is Mr. Asdf in?
No, Mr. Asdf is not in.
Oh, then can I speak to Mrs. Asdf?
That son of a bitch is MARRIED???
I am an assistant professor of mathematics at a large state school. I'm always impressed the degree to which the unix community (considered by most to be nerdier than a bird-watching club) embraces the classics and espouses a well-rounded education. This thread--nay, this whole site--is a good example.
I have been sorely tempted to borrow the following retort, which happened to a classmate of a friend of mine (which means it may have not, but it's still a good story). I think I will have to wait until I'm a little grayer:
In a physics course for pre-med majors, the professor was explaining some finer point about electromagnetism. A student questioned whether the information was relevant, and the professor said that you needed to know this to understand how batteries and generators work. The student protested further, asking how it applied to the "real world." The professor said, "Young man, this knowledge saves lives." "How?" "It keeps idiots out of medical school."