Actually, if you had real anti-gravity, I don't see why you couldn't use it to get off of the Earth. One of the easiest ways to use anti-gravity to help get off the Earth is also one of the biggest problems with anyone the claims to have an anti-gravity device.
Here's a thought experiment: Say a couple of guys are floating around in a space station in Low Earth Orbit. Gravity is going to be a little weaker there that on the surface, but not by a whole lot. They will feel "weightless" or claim they are in "zero-g" because the station is falling towards the Earth just as fast as they are. Say one of them turns on his personal anti-gravity device now. What happens?
He goes from feeling "zero-gravity" to feeling something pretty close to Earth normal gravity, only he'll feel like he is being pulled away from the Earth. While the station continues to fall towards the Earth, he won't. His friends on the shuttle will see him get mysteriously whipped over to the side of the space station. It's as though you were using the device on an elevator that started to go down. You'd smack your head on the roof, after having effectively fallen into it.
However, the Earth's gravity is not the only gravity acting on our hypothetical space station. The Earth, its contents, and all the junk in orbit around it are constantly falling towards the sun. When our subject turns on his anti-gravity device, the station will continue to fall towards the sun, but he won't. Again, it'll seem like he is being pushed by mysterious forces when he turns it on. But there's more than the sun. Everything in our solar system is constantly falling towards the center of the galaxy. All of the galaxies near us are being sucked towards the Great Attractor at high rates. Turning on his anti-gravity device would suddenly cancel out all of these forces on him, while the space station would continue to feel them. Our poor anti-gravity guy will quickly get dashed against the inside of the space station.
This is why I'm skeptical of claims of anti-gravity devices. If this guy really did have a device the cancelled 2% of gravity, it would do a _lot_ more than make the object seem 2% lighter. It would suddently experience 2% of the each of the forces of the sun, the center of the galaxy, the Great Attractor, etc (as measured from the lab frame of reference, anyway). It would get pushed and pulled in a half a dozen different directions that depend on the lattitude, time of day and season. That none of the anti-gravity "researchers" notice this effect only makes their claims all the more doubtful.
Nonetheless, if it were somehow possible to construct an anti-gravity device (which I think is unlikely), you could possibly use this effect to help get off of the Earth.
Re:Hurray!
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Nethack 3.4.0
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The deal with NetHack is that is has been in development for ~15 years, and almost all of that work has gone into the gameplay. The interface hasn't changed at all in forever, there aren't really any graphics, so all of the work that is put into the game goes into how it plays, not how it looks.
Once I get really into a game, the graphics don't much matter (excepting maybe a few select games, such as Myst). Once I've been playing for very long, I stop really seeing the details of the graphics, and see more of the abstract concepts involved. If new graphical effects are slowly leaked out over time, I may continue to pay them some attention (in Black and White, for example, I continued to pay some attention to how my creature was growing, getting fatter or thinner, and looking nicer or meaner), but it's mostly at the level of mild amusement. As long as I'm just going to see the abstracted version of what's really going on, why waste a lot of time on the interface? Put the time into game play, because that's what I really care about.
The problem, though, is that people are initially attracted to a game by the graphics, even if the graphics don't ultimately have a big impact on how much they enjoy it. I've been playing NetHack since, uhhh, shit, I dunno when. Given modern standards for graphics, most people look at it and snort in derision. I know this happens all the time when I'm playing and someone wanders by and asks what I'm up to. I can try to explain that the gameplay is _way_ more important than the graphics, but it's hard to get people to sit down and put in the effort to learn it.
I'm still happy playing, but this makes me a little nervous. How many new people are finding NetHack these days? I'm guessing it's not many. If NetHack can't keep attracting new blood, it'll eventuall stagnate and die. _Man_, that would suck.
Business such as bars and restaurants are _not_ allowed to set any requirements they please on people to enter. For example, it is illegal (and, I believe, rightly so) to require that someone be white to enter a bar or restaurant.
Now, there is obviously a big difference between a bar denying access to patrons who do not provide the prefered proof of age, and a bar denying access to blacks, asians, indians, etc. Is the former legal, though? _That_s the question you should be asking. I suspect that if you made the prefered proof of age sufficiently restrictive you might be setting yourself up for legal trouble. On the other hand if you have a relatively broad set of accepted proofs of age, or at least can provide a reasonable argument for why you've chosen what you have, I suspect you'll be fine, legally.
As far as this particular issue, the swiping of ID cards at bars, I suspect the following would be a way of preserving your "privacy": demagnetize your strip. When the bouncer swipes your card, mumble something about the magnet in your physics lab having demagnetized your wallet. Chances are he'll visually check that the card shows the right age, and let you in.
We now know that P=NP. It said so right in the Tree House of Horror VI http://snpp.com/episodes/3F04.html. Now _that_s news. I mean, e^i*pi = -1, everyone knows that, but showing that P=NP revolutionizes the whole of computing!
This doesn't sound quite right to me. If that was the case, you would trigger the keys when your fingers will still in the air, possibly even a few inches off the table. I mean, you'll start obstructing the beam to the space bar while your finger is still in the air above, say, the "y" key.
Perhaps it uses a LADAR type system to get a specific location on your finger. That sounds more feasible to me, anyway.
Re:You can prevent this...
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Chained Melodies
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The money is only useful insofar as it lets them fund their campaigns better, and therefor get more of their constituents to vote for them. Donations won't matter so much if you can either:
1) Get lots of people in your district to care about an issue enough to let it outweigh stupid ads they see on TV and such, or
2) Convince your representative that you may have done 1.
Having fat sacks of cash doesn't do you much good if no one will vote for you anyway (think Perot, here). If you can convince your elected representatives that they will piss off more constituents by supporting bad legislation than they can attract with the money they can get by doing so, they'll do the right thing.
I'm not saying this is easy, just that it is possible (in theory, if nothing else) to have an effect without any money at all, even when you are competing against lobbyists with lots of it.
I'm pretty sure that any given state can, at the very least, fine a corporation that has been misbehaving within its borders. If the corporation in question does business in many states, the other states may well feel some impact, but that hardly raises constitutional questions. Otherwise any corporation could completely ignore state laws by making sure they do business in several states.
Don't you mean 1962? I mean, if there's no violence before 40 years ago (1962), then it also holds that there's none before 50 years ago, but I still think you goofed there.
If you are going to pull out the evolutionary card, and start arguing about genetic programming, at least get things right. One of the purposes of sex is procreation. As long as an individual does successfully procreate, from an evolutionary point of view, there are no problems with having additional sex with whomever you want.
Bonobos are a close relative of the chimp. They have _massive_ amounts of sex, between males and males, females and females, males and females, children and adults. They have threesomes and orgies. They use every orifice, and all manner of positions. They are doing fine, evolutionarily.
For the bonobo, sex has many uses. One is to procreate, and that is an important one. However, sex is also used to cement relationships, make up after a fight, demonstrate dominance or submission, or just (apparently) for fun. In stark contrast to normal chimps, bonobos are peaceful and friendly, and almost never get into physically violent conflicts.
Many other species also have common homosexual encounters. Dolphins, for one, commonly have homosexual sex. I could go on listing species for which homosexual acts are common, but I won't.
The important thing for these species is that, while they do have homosexual sex, they also manage to procreate. For all of the non-human species, this means they must, at least every once in a while, have straight intercourse. Plenty of humans who are strictly homosexual manage to have children, either by planning a one-shot heterosexual encounter, by using the good old turkey baster, going to a fertility clinic, or whatever.
Not every sex act has to be intended to cause procreation. In fact, most people try to deliberately avoid conception most of the time they have sex. So as long as a gay person does manage to have a child somehow, somewhere, sometime, I don't think it really matters who they are attracted to, or who they screw the rest of the time. And it is becoming increasingly easy, technologically and culturally, for gay people to have children, so the issues you cite will continue to become less and less relevant.
Here's an example of the kind of ridiculousness that results from some institutions having lots of IP addresses. I'm a student at MIT, which has all of net 18. I've been the network administrator for my fraternity for a couple years, which uses all of 18.216.xxx.xxx. That's right, we've got some 64k IP addresses, of which maybe 60 are assigned, and 40 actually point to a running computer. That means %99.9 are being wasted.
I think there's a world of difference between the "premium" and non-premium versions of the product, in this case. As an MIT student, I'd have to say that the quality of instruction we get here is not, in general, exceptional. Those few exceptionally good professors that I've had were professors who had already written text books in the subjects they taught, so the world at large has already been able to make use of them.
The two things that make MIT a good place to get an education are 1) the student culture and 2) the opportunity to do cutting edge research in an MIT research lab as and undergrad.
Being surrounded by smart, motivated students who are passionate about their work is infectious. MIT students get a lot out of their education because they put a lot it, because that's the normal thing to do here, and because they all help each other out. While many schools have an atmosphere of cutthroat competition, MIT has an atmosphere of "we're all in this together" and "if we're going to make it through this, it'll be by helping each other out". The result of this is a whole lot of mentoring and working together amongst the undergrad population.
So, while it's all well and good to be able to look at the course materials online, I think people who do this will be missing out on the two greatest factors in MIT being a good school. You'd pro'lly be better of going to a decent state school, hanging out with some smart, motivated people, and getting involved with some sort of research group, instead of trying to use this stuff on the web to learn your shit.
Maybe by 'none', people mean the following:
God may or may not exist, but I'm not going to worship him. This could be because I don't think God is worthy of worship, or don't think he wants me to worship him, or because I don't think there will be repercussions for me not worshipping him, or because I am proud and will not worship anyone or anything.
Heck, maybe some of the 'none' people do conclusively believe that some God(s) exists, but choose not to worship.
It seems fallacious to assume that all those people who believe in God will worship him, and all those who worship God believe in him.
Re:Microsoft should be sued
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Code Red III
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· Score: 1
The important difference is this - gun manufacturers typically make a product that works as advertised, and if anyone gets hurt it's because the owner (or someone else who got their hands on the gun) used the gun in its intended manner. At this point, the gun behaved exactly as advertised, but was maliciously used to harm someone.
Microsoft's current position is closer to that of a car manufacturer that sells cars that explode when you expose them to a shock wave (as might be caused, say, by a car exploding in the next lane). You can use the car exactly the way you are supposed to, following all of the instructions in the users manual, but if you didn't notice the little publicized document from the manufacturer mentioning the problem and describing how to fix it, you still get exploded.
When car manufacturers do this, they are expected to 1) agressively try to contact any and all customers who might have their faulty product, 2) very likely perform a recall of said faulty product, and 3) still get their asses sued off anyway.
I think that's more the pertinent liability model.
I was on the net in 1991, at the ripe old age of 12.
In fact, I don't remember when I first started using the net. It's too long ago, and I was too young at the time. Granted, for the first couple of years I was just playing a couple games on an old unix box at the university my father worked at, and only knew a few commands. By 1991, though, I was playing more advanced, multi-user games like Empire and a bunch of MUDs, and starting to get comfortable using unix.
In the future, everone will be like this. People won't get their first internet access when they get to college, as was generally the case 10 years ago. Neither will they first use the internet when their family gets AOL or whatever, as is typically the case now. In 10 to 20 years, children almost all be born into houses with computers and internet access, and will start using them when (or before) they learn to read.
It's interesting to think about how this'll change things. For one, hopefully there won't be some many folks who are completely clueless about their computers. Beyond that, I won't venture to guess at the moment.
This depends on the kind of security you are talking about. People that decry security through obscurity are usually talking about trusting an obscure algorithm or method. They recommend that you instead act as though everyone knows what algorithms and methods you use, and that the only thing you trust to be obscure is your password (or your public key, or whatever).
The whole point of this is that most real world systems need to be distributed to a bunch of people, not all of whom can be trusted. Especially if you are developing a security system that's intended to be released to the public at large (a commerical software product, or open source system), you should expect that eventually the script kiddies will get their hands on the algorithm that has been distributed. And then once people figure out the algorithm, through social engineering or whatever, you're screwed, and everyone's security disappears. At this point, getting the security back means getting a whole new algorithm together, writing new code, and more or less redoing everything from scratch.
If you have a security system whereby the security only depends on the password or the key, you don't have to worry about social engineering so much. If someone gets their hands on the password, it's not such a big deal to come up with a new one. In fact, you can distribute your security system far and wide, and everyone can use different passwords or keys with almost 0 extra effort. If anyone's security is breached, they can come up with a new password or key with almost zero extra effort.
That's the big advantage of ditching security through obscurity. 1) If you do have a security breach, it's easy to fix, and 2) Lots and lots of people can use the same algorithm (which was pro'lly hard to come up with) by doing a minimal amount of work (coming up with a password or key), and they won't all be able to breach each other's security.
But you can loose something when people take your source code and fork off a project with similar functionality. You don't loose your copy of it, sure, and you aren't loosing income if you weren't ever planning on selling it. There are 2 big things that you can loose, though.
First, you can loose a feeling of being part of something cool and significant, of producing something worthwhile and getting some credit for that. If I produce some neat-o keen open source gizmo and lots of people use it, giving me feedback about new features they like, offering to help develop it further, I feel really happy as a result. If someone forks my code and runs off with their own version, I'll be somewhat annoyed. This is likely for purely selfish reasons relating to feeling important, and has nothing to do with the lofty altruistic ideals most people bring up, but is still a legitimate concern. If I go to the trouble to produce, polish, and improve some piece of software, expecting some intangible rewards, it's perfectly legitimate to choose a liscencing scheme that makes it harder for people to prevent me from getting those intangible benefits.
The second thing you can loose is an actual user base. Many physical objects gain value because of their scarcity, like diamonds and Jaguar convertibles. If they become commonplace, they loose some (or all) of their value. Most communication devices, and a many other objects as well, gain value from being common. If you have the only fax machine in the world it is useless because you can talk to no one. If you can disseminate similar fax machines to yours across the world at no cost to yourself, you will increase the value of yours greatly, thereby doing well for yourself. Similarly, there is significant value to having, say, an automobile that is has very common parts, because repair and maintainance will be easy and cheap.
If someone forks your code, they stand to take some of your market share, and possibly thereby devalue your own copy of the software. This, again, is a significant loss you may occur when people fork your code.
People _can_ be parasites when it comes to software. It's not the people who download the code, compile it, and run it happily, or the people who make a few changes and then run it for themselves. It's the people who fork your code and run off with their own development programs that hurt you. You can't keep people from forking the code entirely without loosing a significant part of what makes your software free, but you can put some limitations on it. And one really helpful one is requiring that any derivative works remain free. This is a legitimate way of discouraging parasites, and protecting yourself from their worst parasitisms.
First off, I think it's important to recognize that an introductory CS class really isn't introductory to very many students in it, unless you're talking about the University of Bumblefuck. At almost any University, a large fraction of the kids who decide to major in CS will already have some programming experience, be that in C/C++, Pascal, Perl, Java, or whatever. If you truly think that to develop good programming habits/abilities you _need_ to start with assembler, or Java, or C, or any other specific language (as a lot of people have suggested) then you might as well give up on the whole intro class deal.
That being said, here's how it's done at my school . The intro cs class is taught in Scheme, which is a variant of Lisp. The textbook that we use is The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Gerry Sussman and Hal Abelson, and is available for free online (not a really important point, but a nice one).
Now, this is not _the_ way to teach people CS, but I think it's damned good. Here are some of the reasons why.
_Very_ few students come into the class knowing scheme. This puts everyone on a much more even footing, and allows professors to more clearly evaluate how well students understand the basic concepts, without questions of familiarity with the language clouding the issue.
We are taught scheme without any traditional control structures, so everyone understands recursion well. In my experience, recursion is one of the hardest things for inexperienced programmers to understand. After you've gotten through an entire term with nary a while or repeat loop, you'll be recursing with the best of them. It's easy as all get out for students to learn those standard control structures later, once they move on to another language.
We are able to construct and use a scheme meta-compiler before the end of the intro class. This would be very difficult in most languages, but is not that hard in scheme. Being able to write a compiler for a language, even if it is written in the same language, is a powerful way of making sure students understand that all decent languages have the same expressive power.
Functions can be passed around just as easily as data. This is something most other languages don't do well (except OO languages, where it's moot). While someone who starts on Pascal or C is going to get really confused when they run into this practice down the line, someone who learns with scheme will find it comes very naturally.
Object Oriented stuff is taught from the ground up. Students construct their own objects, classes, etc, _from scratch_, and then do fairly complex stuff with it.
It's easy to talk about the formal properties of systems in scheme. We get into some rudimentary proofs that our systems will behave the way we want in the intro class.
So, I think there are a lot of really good points to using scheme as an introductory programming language, if you do it right. It lets you address a lot of important concepts, up front, and does it well. Now, it's certainly not the most practical language for most things, but it's not a language that people misapply very often, so I don't think there's a big danger there. If your intoduction to CS is done right, you can start using any new language in about half an hour, although you'll want to keep a lot of reference materials on hand for the first week or two.
Overall, I think our intro CS class is done really well, although it's not the One True Path. I think we'd see better Computer Scientists and Computer Programmers if more schools used well thought out systems like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you had real anti-gravity, I don't see why you couldn't use it to get off of the Earth. One of the easiest ways to use anti-gravity to help get off the Earth is also one of the biggest problems with anyone the claims to have an anti-gravity device.
Here's a thought experiment: Say a couple of guys are floating around in a space station in Low Earth Orbit. Gravity is going to be a little weaker there that on the surface, but not by a whole lot. They will feel "weightless" or claim they are in "zero-g" because the station is falling towards the Earth just as fast as they are. Say one of them turns on his personal anti-gravity device now. What happens?
He goes from feeling "zero-gravity" to feeling something pretty close to Earth normal gravity, only he'll feel like he is being pulled away from the Earth. While the station continues to fall towards the Earth, he won't. His friends on the shuttle will see him get mysteriously whipped over to the side of the space station. It's as though you were using the device on an elevator that started to go down. You'd smack your head on the roof, after having effectively fallen into it.
However, the Earth's gravity is not the only gravity acting on our hypothetical space station. The Earth, its contents, and all the junk in orbit around it are constantly falling towards the sun. When our subject turns on his anti-gravity device, the station will continue to fall towards the sun, but he won't. Again, it'll seem like he is being pushed by mysterious forces when he turns it on. But there's more than the sun. Everything in our solar system is constantly falling towards the center of the galaxy. All of the galaxies near us are being sucked towards the Great Attractor at high rates. Turning on his anti-gravity device would suddenly cancel out all of these forces on him, while the space station would continue to feel them. Our poor anti-gravity guy will quickly get dashed against the inside of the space station.
This is why I'm skeptical of claims of anti-gravity devices. If this guy really did have a device the cancelled 2% of gravity, it would do a _lot_ more than make the object seem 2% lighter. It would suddently experience 2% of the each of the forces of the sun, the center of the galaxy, the Great Attractor, etc (as measured from the lab frame of reference, anyway). It would get pushed and pulled in a half a dozen different directions that depend on the lattitude, time of day and season. That none of the anti-gravity "researchers" notice this effect only makes their claims all the more doubtful.
Nonetheless, if it were somehow possible to construct an anti-gravity device (which I think is unlikely), you could possibly use this effect to help get off of the Earth.
The deal with NetHack is that is has been in development for ~15 years, and almost all of that work has gone into the gameplay. The interface hasn't changed at all in forever, there aren't really any graphics, so all of the work that is put into the game goes into how it plays, not how it looks.
Once I get really into a game, the graphics don't much matter (excepting maybe a few select games, such as Myst). Once I've been playing for very long, I stop really seeing the details of the graphics, and see more of the abstract concepts involved. If new graphical effects are slowly leaked out over time, I may continue to pay them some attention (in Black and White, for example, I continued to pay some attention to how my creature was growing, getting fatter or thinner, and looking nicer or meaner), but it's mostly at the level of mild amusement. As long as I'm just going to see the abstracted version of what's really going on, why waste a lot of time on the interface? Put the time into game play, because that's what I really care about.
The problem, though, is that people are initially attracted to a game by the graphics, even if the graphics don't ultimately have a big impact on how much they enjoy it. I've been playing NetHack since, uhhh, shit, I dunno when. Given modern standards for graphics, most people look at it and snort in derision. I know this happens all the time when I'm playing and someone wanders by and asks what I'm up to. I can try to explain that the gameplay is _way_ more important than the graphics, but it's hard to get people to sit down and put in the effort to learn it.
I'm still happy playing, but this makes me a little nervous. How many new people are finding NetHack these days? I'm guessing it's not many. If NetHack can't keep attracting new blood, it'll eventuall stagnate and die. _Man_, that would suck.
Business such as bars and restaurants are _not_ allowed to set any requirements they please on people to enter. For example, it is illegal (and, I believe, rightly so) to require that someone be white to enter a bar or restaurant.
Now, there is obviously a big difference between a bar denying access to patrons who do not provide the prefered proof of age, and a bar denying access to blacks, asians, indians, etc. Is the former legal, though? _That_s the question you should be asking. I suspect that if you made the prefered proof of age sufficiently restrictive you might be setting yourself up for legal trouble. On the other hand if you have a relatively broad set of accepted proofs of age, or at least can provide a reasonable argument for why you've chosen what you have, I suspect you'll be fine, legally.
As far as this particular issue, the swiping of ID cards at bars, I suspect the following would be a way of preserving your "privacy": demagnetize your strip. When the bouncer swipes your card, mumble something about the magnet in your physics lab having demagnetized your wallet. Chances are he'll visually check that the card shows the right age, and let you in.
We now know that P=NP. It said so right in the Tree House of Horror VI http://snpp.com/episodes/3F04.html. Now _that_s news. I mean, e^i*pi = -1, everyone knows that, but showing that P=NP revolutionizes the whole of computing!
I dunno about the content of the article, but the floating laptop adds sure are annoying.
This doesn't sound quite right to me. If that was the case, you would trigger the keys when your fingers will still in the air, possibly even a few inches off the table. I mean, you'll start obstructing the beam to the space bar while your finger is still in the air above, say, the "y" key.
Perhaps it uses a LADAR type system to get a specific location on your finger. That sounds more feasible to me, anyway.
The money is only useful insofar as it lets them fund their campaigns better, and therefor get more of their constituents to vote for them. Donations won't matter so much if you can either:
1) Get lots of people in your district to care about an issue enough to let it outweigh stupid ads they see on TV and such, or
2) Convince your representative that you may have done 1.
Having fat sacks of cash doesn't do you much good if no one will vote for you anyway (think Perot, here). If you can convince your elected representatives that they will piss off more constituents by supporting bad legislation than they can attract with the money they can get by doing so, they'll do the right thing.
I'm not saying this is easy, just that it is possible (in theory, if nothing else) to have an effect without any money at all, even when you are competing against lobbyists with lots of it.
I'm pretty sure that any given state can, at the very least, fine a corporation that has been misbehaving within its borders. If the corporation in question does business in many states, the other states may well feel some impact, but that hardly raises constitutional questions. Otherwise any corporation could completely ignore state laws by making sure they do business in several states.
Don't you mean 1962? I mean, if there's no violence before 40 years ago (1962), then it also holds that there's none before 50 years ago, but I still think you goofed there.
If you are going to pull out the evolutionary card, and start arguing about genetic programming, at least get things right. One of the purposes of sex is procreation. As long as an individual does successfully procreate, from an evolutionary point of view, there are no problems with having additional sex with whomever you want.
Bonobos are a close relative of the chimp. They have _massive_ amounts of sex, between males and males, females and females, males and females, children and adults. They have threesomes and orgies. They use every orifice, and all manner of positions. They are doing fine, evolutionarily.
For the bonobo, sex has many uses. One is to procreate, and that is an important one. However, sex is also used to cement relationships, make up after a fight, demonstrate dominance or submission, or just (apparently) for fun. In stark contrast to normal chimps, bonobos are peaceful and friendly, and almost never get into physically violent conflicts.
Many other species also have common homosexual encounters. Dolphins, for one, commonly have homosexual sex. I could go on listing species for which homosexual acts are common, but I won't.
The important thing for these species is that, while they do have homosexual sex, they also manage to procreate. For all of the non-human species, this means they must, at least every once in a while, have straight intercourse. Plenty of humans who are strictly homosexual manage to have children, either by planning a one-shot heterosexual encounter, by using the good old turkey baster, going to a fertility clinic, or whatever.
Not every sex act has to be intended to cause procreation. In fact, most people try to deliberately avoid conception most of the time they have sex. So as long as a gay person does manage to have a child somehow, somewhere, sometime, I don't think it really matters who they are attracted to, or who they screw the rest of the time. And it is becoming increasingly easy, technologically and culturally, for gay people to have children, so the issues you cite will continue to become less and less relevant.
In short, you don't have a leg to stand on.
Here's an example of the kind of ridiculousness that results from some institutions having lots of IP addresses. I'm a student at MIT, which has all of net 18. I've been the network administrator for my fraternity for a couple years, which uses all of 18.216.xxx.xxx. That's right, we've got some 64k IP addresses, of which maybe 60 are assigned, and 40 actually point to a running computer. That means %99.9 are being wasted.
I think there's a world of difference between the "premium" and non-premium versions of the product, in this case. As an MIT student, I'd have to say that the quality of instruction we get here is not, in general, exceptional. Those few exceptionally good professors that I've had were professors who had already written text books in the subjects they taught, so the world at large has already been able to make use of them.
The two things that make MIT a good place to get an education are 1) the student culture and 2) the opportunity to do cutting edge research in an MIT research lab as and undergrad.
Being surrounded by smart, motivated students who are passionate about their work is infectious. MIT students get a lot out of their education because they put a lot it, because that's the normal thing to do here, and because they all help each other out. While many schools have an atmosphere of cutthroat competition, MIT has an atmosphere of "we're all in this together" and "if we're going to make it through this, it'll be by helping each other out". The result of this is a whole lot of mentoring and working together amongst the undergrad population.
So, while it's all well and good to be able to look at the course materials online, I think people who do this will be missing out on the two greatest factors in MIT being a good school. You'd pro'lly be better of going to a decent state school, hanging out with some smart, motivated people, and getting involved with some sort of research group, instead of trying to use this stuff on the web to learn your shit.
Maybe by 'none', people mean the following:
God may or may not exist, but I'm not going to worship him. This could be because I don't think God is worthy of worship, or don't think he wants me to worship him, or because I don't think there will be repercussions for me not worshipping him, or because I am proud and will not worship anyone or anything.
Heck, maybe some of the 'none' people do conclusively believe that some God(s) exists, but choose not to worship.
It seems fallacious to assume that all those people who believe in God will worship him, and all those who worship God believe in him.
The important difference is this - gun manufacturers typically make a product that works as advertised, and if anyone gets hurt it's because the owner (or someone else who got their hands on the gun) used the gun in its intended manner. At this point, the gun behaved exactly as advertised, but was maliciously used to harm someone.
Microsoft's current position is closer to that of a car manufacturer that sells cars that explode when you expose them to a shock wave (as might be caused, say, by a car exploding in the next lane). You can use the car exactly the way you are supposed to, following all of the instructions in the users manual, but if you didn't notice the little publicized document from the manufacturer mentioning the problem and describing how to fix it, you still get exploded.
When car manufacturers do this, they are expected to 1) agressively try to contact any and all customers who might have their faulty product, 2) very likely perform a recall of said faulty product, and 3) still get their asses sued off anyway.
I think that's more the pertinent liability model.
I was on the net in 1991, at the ripe old age of 12.
In fact, I don't remember when I first started using the net. It's too long ago, and I was too young at the time. Granted, for the first couple of years I was just playing a couple games on an old unix box at the university my father worked at, and only knew a few commands. By 1991, though, I was playing more advanced, multi-user games like Empire and a bunch of MUDs, and starting to get comfortable using unix.
In the future, everone will be like this. People won't get their first internet access when they get to college, as was generally the case 10 years ago. Neither will they first use the internet when their family gets AOL or whatever, as is typically the case now. In 10 to 20 years, children almost all be born into houses with computers and internet access, and will start using them when (or before) they learn to read.
It's interesting to think about how this'll change things. For one, hopefully there won't be some many folks who are completely clueless about their computers. Beyond that, I won't venture to guess at the moment.
This depends on the kind of security you are talking about. People that decry security through obscurity are usually talking about trusting an obscure algorithm or method. They recommend that you instead act as though everyone knows what algorithms and methods you use, and that the only thing you trust to be obscure is your password (or your public key, or whatever).
The whole point of this is that most real world systems need to be distributed to a bunch of people, not all of whom can be trusted. Especially if you are developing a security system that's intended to be released to the public at large (a commerical software product, or open source system), you should expect that eventually the script kiddies will get their hands on the algorithm that has been distributed. And then once people figure out the algorithm, through social engineering or whatever, you're screwed, and everyone's security disappears. At this point, getting the security back means getting a whole new algorithm together, writing new code, and more or less redoing everything from scratch.
If you have a security system whereby the security only depends on the password or the key, you don't have to worry about social engineering so much. If someone gets their hands on the password, it's not such a big deal to come up with a new one. In fact, you can distribute your security system far and wide, and everyone can use different passwords or keys with almost 0 extra effort. If anyone's security is breached, they can come up with a new password or key with almost zero extra effort.
That's the big advantage of ditching security through obscurity. 1) If you do have a security breach, it's easy to fix, and 2) Lots and lots of people can use the same algorithm (which was pro'lly hard to come up with) by doing a minimal amount of work (coming up with a password or key), and they won't all be able to breach each other's security.
But you can loose something when people take your source code and fork off a project with similar functionality. You don't loose your copy of it, sure, and you aren't loosing income if you weren't ever planning on selling it. There are 2 big things that you can loose, though.
First, you can loose a feeling of being part of something cool and significant, of producing something worthwhile and getting some credit for that. If I produce some neat-o keen open source gizmo and lots of people use it, giving me feedback about new features they like, offering to help develop it further, I feel really happy as a result. If someone forks my code and runs off with their own version, I'll be somewhat annoyed. This is likely for purely selfish reasons relating to feeling important, and has nothing to do with the lofty altruistic ideals most people bring up, but is still a legitimate concern. If I go to the trouble to produce, polish, and improve some piece of software, expecting some intangible rewards, it's perfectly legitimate to choose a liscencing scheme that makes it harder for people to prevent me from getting those intangible benefits.
The second thing you can loose is an actual user base. Many physical objects gain value because of their scarcity, like diamonds and Jaguar convertibles. If they become commonplace, they loose some (or all) of their value. Most communication devices, and a many other objects as well, gain value from being common. If you have the only fax machine in the world it is useless because you can talk to no one. If you can disseminate similar fax machines to yours across the world at no cost to yourself, you will increase the value of yours greatly, thereby doing well for yourself. Similarly, there is significant value to having, say, an automobile that is has very common parts, because repair and maintainance will be easy and cheap.
If someone forks your code, they stand to take some of your market share, and possibly thereby devalue your own copy of the software. This, again, is a significant loss you may occur when people fork your code.
People _can_ be parasites when it comes to software. It's not the people who download the code, compile it, and run it happily, or the people who make a few changes and then run it for themselves. It's the people who fork your code and run off with their own development programs that hurt you. You can't keep people from forking the code entirely without loosing a significant part of what makes your software free, but you can put some limitations on it. And one really helpful one is requiring that any derivative works remain free. This is a legitimate way of discouraging parasites, and protecting yourself from their worst parasitisms.
NoBeardPete
First off, I think it's important to recognize that an introductory CS class really isn't introductory to very many students in it, unless you're talking about the University of Bumblefuck. At almost any University, a large fraction of the kids who decide to major in CS will already have some programming experience, be that in C/C++, Pascal, Perl, Java, or whatever. If you truly think that to develop good programming habits/abilities you _need_ to start with assembler, or Java, or C, or any other specific language (as a lot of people have suggested) then you might as well give up on the whole intro class deal.
That being said, here's how it's done at my school . The intro cs class is taught in Scheme, which is a variant of Lisp. The textbook that we use is The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Gerry Sussman and Hal Abelson, and is available for free online (not a really important point, but a nice one).
Now, this is not _the_ way to teach people CS, but I think it's damned good. Here are some of the reasons why.
So, I think there are a lot of really good points to using scheme as an introductory programming language, if you do it right. It lets you address a lot of important concepts, up front, and does it well. Now, it's certainly not the most practical language for most things, but it's not a language that people misapply very often, so I don't think there's a big danger there. If your intoduction to CS is done right, you can start using any new language in about half an hour, although you'll want to keep a lot of reference materials on hand for the first week or two.
Overall, I think our intro CS class is done really well, although it's not the One True Path. I think we'd see better Computer Scientists and Computer Programmers if more schools used well thought out systems like this.
NoBeardPete