Even if he had downloaded the images to look at - what harm would it have caused? He didn't ruin some girls life by looking at pictures that already exist.
He didn't ruin the life of the specific girl in the photos. But he incremented the download counter, giving that much more encouragement to the suppliers, letting them know the market was at least one person greater than otherwise.
Maybe after downloading, he was in a conversation where the subject came up and he didn't feel justified in saying, "It's wrong". And so there was one less conversation where it was discouraged. If he justifies it to his own self, the same justification he feels will leak out, just as all the other aspects of his person come through to other people.
All of this adds up to the ruining of the life of a girl - not in the past - but in the future. The next girl.
My comment is hypothetical, because this gent was railroaded, but there exists another fellow for who this does apply. On a macro level, the dynamic holds true. The harm done is that evil propagates itself, and it is worse when it does so in subtle, unquantifiable, yet undeniably real fashion.
What is the justification for (knowingly) having it, and not destroying it? In this case he did destroy it (pay the man respect), and that is why everyone is upset.
It's not a compile time feature. attr_accessor is a method just like any other method, and as such, performs its action at runtime. Slapping attr_accessor in your code is just a method invocation.
Additionally, because in Ruby you can redefine methods at any point in time, what attr_accessor actually does could be different at different points in (run)time, depending if the interpreter has hit code redefining it or not. It's only its default implementation which generates accessors;-). If you run the code after loading the wrong library, you could see strange effects. Google "monkey patching".
Conceivably you *could* write a C implementation which would either alter your compiled binaries or dynamically compile new ones at runtime to achieve the same effect. When you were done, it would look a lot like an... interpreter.
Being interpreted is very much a property of the language. There's at least two different ways to make this case.
First, I might point out that (although this is changing w/ Jruby & Rubinius) the Ruby language is basically specified by a reference implementation interpreter (MRI). MRI's behaviour *is* ruby.
More importantly, knowing that the interpreter is going to run through your code line by line changes your entire programming paradigm. Most ruby metaprogramming features are *all* about being interpreted.
Eg attr_accessor. It is a method which, when evaluated by the interpreter generates accessor methods for the names passed in. Leaving expressions with side effects in your classes just so that the interpreter can trip over them and do things for you is not a standard programming paradigm in C.
Opening classes and adding methods at runtime? A core feature of Ruby and entirely dependent on being interpreted.
If I wanted to get all fancy and mushy, I would say that writing Ruby is like a dance with the Ruby interpreter.
Ruby is *way* closer to a LISP (MATZLisp, anyone?) than C. Apples and toaster ovens.
Even if you did write a ruby compiler, and said, "Aha! I have a ruby implementation which is not interpreted!" I would say, "What a nice interpreter factory you have written. But why do you feel the need to compile and spit out a new one every time you want to run a ruby program?"
You obviously didn't read the article very closely...
Josh *didn't* post any photos. Someone else did.
The problem here is that character assassination has become very, very easy. How much effort is it for someone to post misleading photos with out of context or just plain false tags and comments?
The problem is that you can no longer protect your own privacy effectively because it's no longer in your own hands. Actually, it never was; the difference is that now your friends and enemies have access to a global publishing medium where data is archived for many years to come.
I must say, it seems like Josh was an idiot who deserved his punishment. However, saying, "Bad people don't deserve privacy" only suffices until someone else considers you a bad person.
Of course you want control of your code. Knowing where things are and what they do is a good thing... to a point.
Yes, configuring an IDE is painful. Yes, using lightweight tools makes it easier to understand everything that is happening. Yes, rolling with your own development stack gives you the power, because you can choose familiar tools. But none of this scales to large projects or project teams.
IDE tools and features are there for a reason - they're not arbitrary. They exist because previous developers learned the hard way that when the complexity of a system rises, the tool support has to step up and match it. Yes, it means that the tools are more complex and will require time and effort to learn in order to use them efficiently.
Features that make me feel "far away from the code" bring me closer to the program. The code (yes, the code), the compiler, the build tools and the production environment are all practical and necessary details that I, as a developer, wish to ignore as much as possible.
The holy grail is to make the development environment completely transparent. On small projects, lightweight tools get closer to this because of their simplicity. On large projects, their simplicity becomes a liability as the developer compensates for it with extra manual work, and the lightweight approach backfires.
I couldn't care less about the code - I care about the problem and it's solution. The code is a (regrettably) necessary step in this.
It's really nice to work on small systems which don't require a heavyweight IDE. Eclipse is a pig and I much prefer vim. However, using vim and javac is a luxury which I don't take for granted.
For the first four years after graduation, you can call yourself an Engineer In Training. After that, you can get your seal and stamp as a Professional Software Engineer. I'm sure you're just trying to save text, but this a serious oversimplification. In Alberta, at least, there are quite well defined criteria for exactly what kind of experience will be credited to you when you apply for status as a Professional Engineer (P. Engg. in Canada). Not having the official guidelines directly in front of me, I will only say that one requirement is that you must work under the direct supervision of a P. Engg. Certain kinds of work aren't accepted as engineering experience.
Seriously, when it becomes acceptable for the phone company to break into my conversation with "Did you know that Geico can save you ton of money on car insurance?" then my ISP can screw around with my Web pages. Shut up, shut up SHUT UP! They'll do it, you know.
You've missed his point entirely. It applies directly to Apple, too;)
His point is that Linux is a tool that many different entities can pick up, customize, and apply according to their own vision. This is a core idea of open source.
You're right that his point is old. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" is a very old open source argument. But it's still in use because it reflects the truth. What Linus is emphasizing is that when you buy a welded-hood mobile, not only are you unable to fix it, but you're locked in to the vendor's concept of what a car is.
An example...
OSX is both UNIX based, and with close-to-mainstream user friendliness. Next to that, people have no incentive to use Linux at all. This statement is true for a very limited subset of people - people who have bought into what Apple's concept of a computer is (aka consumer device that you buy from Apple;). It only applies to the desktop. If you're interested in mobile platforms or supercomputers, it's really irrelevant whether or not OSX is UNIX based or user-friendly.
"Sir, this is the best apple in the world" is a pretty awful pitch to someone shopping for oranges. The only way to sell them the apple is to try and con them into thinking that they really want an apple instead of an orange (Concept lock-in). This works relatively well with the unsure, but it really cheeses the rest of us of.
Boy, I hope this is sarcasm. Because if it is, it's really elegant.
But I quiver in terror at the possibility that the parent is serious, so I'll bite. Simply because the parent is SO wrong that I can't risk it.
For a big project this could be a major problem. Sorry to be abrupt, but... No. For a big project, coding in the parent-specified manner is a major problem. Lax coding style may make personal/small projects simpler and easier to implement, but it doesn't scale. Code that "does the job best" is code that is robust, extensible, and maintainable. In a large project, it's a guarantee that someone other than you will, at some point, have to read/maintain your code. Global variables? Using oversized arrays to avoid pointers? These say many things to me, but "doing the job best" is not one of them. Not striving for form (at least to the level of commonly recognized 'barely adequate practises') will hinder your efficiency.
...the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether). I don't think that testing a programmer's understanding of basic algorithms is out of place.
Memorizing stuff verbatim is what _bad_ schools are about. Good schools teach ideas, not technology. There's nothing wrong with teaching students how to look at an algorithm, break it down, understand it and implement it. That's an incredibly useful skill to learn and practice. There's no better way to teach a student how to do this than to make them do it with a few simple algorithms (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?).
There's also nothing wrong with trying to find out which "snotty nosed kids" are better than the others at understanding algorithms (you could call them the 'smart ones'). A reasonable way (not perfect, but reasonable) way of doing this is to present them with a few _basic_ algorithms that most students run across in school (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?).
See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything. Assume an accomplished architect is faced with a task (let's say preparing for an interview with Google). Being 'accomplished' we can assume that they have a strong ability to "locate information and use it effectively". How does that ability translate to this context? It seems that they would research likely interview questions, gather resource material, and 'use it effectively', aka study in this context. When studying is combined with a modicum of passion and diligence (also important to being accomplished), the end result might be quite similar to 'cramming'.
You don't become an accomplished architect without the ability to learn (or forget, and relearn) something. You also don't become accomplished without recognizing when this is necessary. Whether you're fresh out of school or whether you've been around for years, it doesn't matter - if you're not willing to find out that something is a test and study for it(or cram, if you have to), don't expect Google to hire you. I certainly wouldn't.
But even if you want to take the most religious and personal notions of God, well, in that case God is a bit more like the female orgasm than he is like Captain Picard--many people claim to have experienced it, many people think the others are either lying or crazy, and it's largely an open question as to who to believe. As a fundamentalist, I think that you're slightly mistaken in this. Personal notions of God don't mean that God is an 'it' to experience, but rather a *person*. There are many people whom (although they have physical bodies and are visible to the human eye) you have never met. Yet, they still exist. However, it is entirely reasonable for someone to talk about their experiences of interacting with someone else. People do it all the time - people who are in love cannot stop doing so.
As for scientific experimentation... If God *didn't* make the universe, than how you perceive the universe is pretty much a function of what you ate for breakfast. (Certain mushrooms come to mind) And given that your understanding of eggs and toast (and physics) is entirely dependent on the brain chemistry they initiate, science goes out the window. Your system is trying to comprehend itself. Since you yourself are part of the system, you can't understand it. All your knowledge is dependent on the thing you're trying to understand.
If you want to pretend that breakfast provides a reliable experience of the universe that renders your experiments later in the day viable, well, that's a step of faith. But faith in what, and on what basis?
A computer record of your silliness is not much different than a person remembering some stupid thing you said many years before... but at least it's more accurate. A computer record of your silliness is vastly different than a person remembering some stupid thing.
- Unless your silliness was of exemplary humour or of an extremely scarring nature, a person will forget it. You can pull up USENET posts from over 25 years ago on google archives. If the good doctor is right (and this is his point) 25 years from now you will still be able to.
- The number of people who have access to a person's record of your silliness is limited to whomever they tell. In the context of the internet, it is limited by the number of people who want to search for it. I suspect that this number is a lot higher than you might think.
In addition, search, data-mining, profiling, market research tools, and spam techniques are all getting better. It's difficult to say what joe-fraudster, joe-spammer, or joe-homelandsecurity will be able to achieve five, ten, or twenty-five years from now.
Perhaps twenty-five years from now posting on slashdot will be considered a terrorist activity. Perhaps previous posters will be hauled off to jail in the middle of the night. Or just treated as second class citizens. The point is, who can say? I've tried to identify *current* parties who are interested in a composite of your data - but I have no idea of who the *future* interested parties may be. They may be still more sinister.
Saying "think a little more" is not the answer because people are not used to thinking in the way that this requires. It requires thinking about possible future abuses rather than just present ones. To a certain extent, people cannot think in the way that this requires. Regardless of whether or not people *should*, people *won't*, people *can't*, and this is why there is a problem.
With open source, things are different... You could create something great, and there's no guarantee at all that you'll get anything back for it. In practice, people don't seem to get screwed that badly, but it's not as tight a feedback loop.
As you previously pointed out, there's no guarantee that you'll get anything back from a closed source piece of software (even if it's great). You could just go out of business;)
The reason open source *appears* to be different is that by and large, it lacks managers and businesspeople.
Developers in closed source software don't make any money off the product they develop either. They generally just get a salary, Ask any MS coder what slice of the profits they see;) A salary is nice for feeding your children but unless the developer actually owns a stake in the business they're not making money off the product - they're making money off their boss.
The best any developer (either OSS or closed source) can expect is a developer's salary. The open source developer generally gets by on ego, the warm fuzzies, and general hacker curiosity. If that isn't enough, than he's probably an ex-developer.
Consider a entrepreneurial sort who starts up a business supporting an open source product (which he didn't write). Maybe he doesn't even know how to code. (Perhaps he already had a software business and is simply extending it) He's just someone who realizes that this free code has a certain amount of value, and with some clever marketing and value added (in terms of support) can make him money. If he's shrewd enough, he makes enough money that he can finesse a couple of the project contributors from their day jobs and pay them to work on the project full-time.
Now they are fully paid developers working on a project. They have a manager who determines what is priority and what is not. The manager is making money from a product that he didn't write himself. The sole difference between this situation and a closed source one is that the closed source company makes extra dollars from the actual licensing.
Any open source developer is free to exploit their own project - or anyone else's OSS project. Whether they are successful will depend on their business skills, which may or may not exist.
Regardless, the Real Money to be made from open source will be made by people who are willing to take risks in making a business out of it. As soon as people start doing this, developers will start to see some cash, up to the level of a developer's salary. But they'll never see any more of it than that, because although they are authors who have experienced no small amount of creative joy, they're still just developers.
Not quite. B and C aren't the same *person* - cryptographic parties don't have to be people. C is the hapless Consumer. B is their Black Box closed hardware player.
The only real difference between your analogy and mine however, is a screwdriver.
Not at all. This is a just a case of good, smart and ambitious advertising. What better way to tell people, "We are here to help you buy a house."? (Even in your video games!)
More land only means more opportunity for them to grow their presence in the SL world. CB is a large company with a lot of resources that they can spend on escapades like this, if they so desire. If land expansion happens, they are in a pole position to take advantage of it. Nor are they stupid - they know exactly what they're willing to spend on this, and exactly what they wish/expect to get out of it.
RTA - FTA
Coldwell, which employs over 120,000 real-world sales agents in the United States and operates in a total of 45 countries, isn't in Second Life to make money, says Charlie Young, the company's senior vice president for marketing. "In the end this is about buying and selling homes in the real world," he says. "We're trying to figure out how to reach what we call the 'new consumer'." Executives insist that any profits will be reinvested in Second Life real estate. Real world homes make large amounts of money. SL homes don't. However, in terms of advertising expenses, CB is probably spending peanuts to make this happen. I don't know the dollar figures as I don't play SL, and IANARealtor, but I'd be very surprised if this didn't equate to cheap advertising.
Best of all, a virtual world allows CB to present exactly the image they wish. Everything is scripted, all the realtors are friendly and competent, and everyone has an overwhelmingly positive experience. People feel *real gratitude* for a virtual experience and CB generates *real* goodwill.
Of course, I personally think this is insidious and that it runs counter to the entire idea of a virtual world. But I realize that it's a calculated business decision that has likely undergone cost/benefit and risk analyis, and that CB will walk away the moment they feel that they're not getting their money's worth from the investment. And I personally think it's quite a clever idea.
You've never lived in a third world country, have you?
$100 is peanuts in the 1st world. When it's half a year's salary, that makes all the difference. Would you give a ten year old child a $25,000 piece of equipment to play with for 'educational' purposes? If you can barely afford to feed them and pay their school fees in the first place, it becomes quite simple. You take it away, treat their sick grandmother, and (maybe) you pay their school fees. Oh, and you buy them a textbook. Which is then 'borrowed' by the teacher, who couldn't afford one.
Unless there are strong measures in place to ensure that the laptop stays in the hands of the child it was given to, it won't. How do you identify the child it was given to? A password is useless - any parent (or in some cultures, any adult) will be able to convince a ten year old to surrender their password. Would you let a ten year old be exclusively responsible for remembering the password that activates a $25,000 piece of equipment?
I haven't even mentioned (external)theft because the potential for it should be so incredibly obvious. From a security perspective, protecting the laptop from the parents is a far more difficult problem.
Your comment about the RIAA is ridiculous. I have to chalk it up to your own personal vendetta. I can think of a few governments, however, which might possibly abuse this program.
What's needed is for someone like NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to charge Microsoft with reckless endangerment for knowingly, willfully, and negligently distributing and continuing to distribute systems vulnerable to such attacks.
No - that's the last thing that's needed. I, for one, do not welcome our new software liability litigation overlords. It might start with Microsoft, but that's just the start of a very long thread that really should not be pulled.
There may be an answer to crummy software, but I'm pretty sure litigation isn't it.
This reminds me of previous story about the difficulties of employers reading personal blogs and making employment decisions based on what they find on the Net.
We're looking at a medium where what is put up will last for many many years (verging on forever, possibly) and while you can control what you post yourself, you can't control what others share. (You can go retroactively to the courts and get mocked mercilessly for it though.) People (even many here on slashdot) don't realize what a powerful medium it is.
I don't think that many people realize the tremendous potential for abuse that the internet holds. Sure the kid got 15 minutes of fame out of the deal, and he arguably didn't make the best use out of it, but this will dog him his entire life. He's one extreme example of how someone can leverage the internet to abuse someone else and cause irrepairable damage.
My guess is that whoever modded the parent funny didn't *really* understand how serious the problem is.
There's nothing especially wrong or insidious about googling a prospective employee. I'd do it.
The larger problem is that not everyone realizes that the internet is *public*, not private, and that what you post online has the potential to stay around for a very long time.
If you don't want it googled, don't put it up. If your friend puts it up, tell them to take it down.
On the other hand, any employer who would refuse to hire someone based off of humorous content in a blog or on a personal webpage (or even due to radical political/religious views) is probably ignoring a large pool of good employees. A smart employer will realize that even clever, hardworking people look stoned sometimes.
A great many Biblical prophecies referred to events that took place in past history... But they also refer to future events as well. They do both.
Take for example prophecy in the Old Testament - most of the OT prophets were quite clearly speaking to the people of their day, warning them of events that were about to happen (and, well, actually did happen - that's because they were prophets;) ). But they also held significance of a greater scope. The key word here is *also*.
Even if all the events of the Book of Revelation were realized in the 1st century, it doesn't mean they don't have another meaning to us today. Especially if you believe that the Bible is divinely inspired.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if he had downloaded the images to look at - what harm would it have caused? He didn't ruin some girls life by looking at pictures that already exist.
He didn't ruin the life of the specific girl in the photos. But he incremented the download counter, giving that much more encouragement to the suppliers, letting them know the market was at least one person greater than otherwise.
Maybe after downloading, he was in a conversation where the subject came up and he didn't feel justified in saying, "It's wrong". And so there was one less conversation where it was discouraged. If he justifies it to his own self, the same justification he feels will leak out, just as all the other aspects of his person come through to other people.
All of this adds up to the ruining of the life of a girl - not in the past - but in the future. The next girl.
My comment is hypothetical, because this gent was railroaded, but there exists another fellow for who this does apply. On a macro level, the dynamic holds true. The harm done is that evil propagates itself, and it is worse when it does so in subtle, unquantifiable, yet undeniably real fashion.
What is the justification for (knowingly) having it, and not destroying it? In this case he did destroy it (pay the man respect), and that is why everyone is upset.
It's not a compile time feature. attr_accessor is a method just like any other method, and as such, performs its action at runtime. Slapping attr_accessor in your code is just a method invocation.
Additionally, because in Ruby you can redefine methods at any point in time, what attr_accessor actually does could be different at different points in (run)time, depending if the interpreter has hit code redefining it or not. It's only its default implementation which generates accessors ;-). If you run the code after loading the wrong library, you could see strange effects. Google "monkey patching".
Conceivably you *could* write a C implementation which would either alter your compiled binaries or dynamically compile new ones at runtime to achieve the same effect. When you were done, it would look a lot like an... interpreter.
Being interpreted is very much a property of the language. There's at least two different ways to make this case.
First, I might point out that (although this is changing w/ Jruby & Rubinius) the Ruby language is basically specified by a reference implementation interpreter (MRI). MRI's behaviour *is* ruby.
More importantly, knowing that the interpreter is going to run through your code line by line changes your entire programming paradigm. Most ruby metaprogramming features are *all* about being interpreted.
Eg attr_accessor. It is a method which, when evaluated by the interpreter generates accessor methods for the names passed in. Leaving expressions with side effects in your classes just so that the interpreter can trip over them and do things for you is not a standard programming paradigm in C.
Opening classes and adding methods at runtime? A core feature of Ruby and entirely dependent on being interpreted.
If I wanted to get all fancy and mushy, I would say that writing Ruby is like a dance with the Ruby interpreter.
Ruby is *way* closer to a LISP (MATZLisp, anyone?) than C. Apples and toaster ovens.
Even if you did write a ruby compiler, and said, "Aha! I have a ruby implementation which is not interpreted!" I would say, "What a nice interpreter factory you have written. But why do you feel the need to compile and spit out a new one every time you want to run a ruby program?"
I own two Motorola GSM telephones & judging by their performance I was under the impression Motorola had no engineers left.
The emphasis is mine but the joke is all his.
You obviously didn't read the article very closely...
Josh *didn't* post any photos. Someone else did.
The problem here is that character assassination has become very, very easy. How much effort is it for someone to post misleading photos with out of context or just plain false tags and comments?
The problem is that you can no longer protect your own privacy effectively because it's no longer in your own hands. Actually, it never was; the difference is that now your friends and enemies have access to a global publishing medium where data is archived for many years to come.
I must say, it seems like Josh was an idiot who deserved his punishment. However, saying, "Bad people don't deserve privacy" only suffices until someone else considers you a bad person.
Of course you want control of your code. Knowing where things are and what they do is a good thing... to a point.
Yes, configuring an IDE is painful. Yes, using lightweight tools makes it easier to understand everything that is happening. Yes, rolling with your own development stack gives you the power, because you can choose familiar tools. But none of this scales to large projects or project teams.
IDE tools and features are there for a reason - they're not arbitrary. They exist because previous developers learned the hard way that when the complexity of a system rises, the tool support has to step up and match it. Yes, it means that the tools are more complex and will require time and effort to learn in order to use them efficiently.
Features that make me feel "far away from the code" bring me closer to the program. The code (yes, the code), the compiler, the build tools and the production environment are all practical and necessary details that I, as a developer, wish to ignore as much as possible.
The holy grail is to make the development environment completely transparent. On small projects, lightweight tools get closer to this because of their simplicity. On large projects, their simplicity becomes a liability as the developer compensates for it with extra manual work, and the lightweight approach backfires.
I couldn't care less about the code - I care about the problem and it's solution. The code is a (regrettably) necessary step in this.
It's really nice to work on small systems which don't require a heavyweight IDE. Eclipse is a pig and I much prefer vim. However, using vim and javac is a luxury which I don't take for granted.
Programming is one of them.
His point is that Linux is a tool that many different entities can pick up, customize, and apply according to their own vision. This is a core idea of open source.
You're right that his point is old. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" is a very old open source argument. But it's still in use because it reflects the truth. What Linus is emphasizing is that when you buy a welded-hood mobile, not only are you unable to fix it, but you're locked in to the vendor's concept of what a car is.
An example... OSX is both UNIX based, and with close-to-mainstream user friendliness. Next to that, people have no incentive to use Linux at all. This statement is true for a very limited subset of people - people who have bought into what Apple's concept of a computer is (aka consumer device that you buy from Apple
"Sir, this is the best apple in the world" is a pretty awful pitch to someone shopping for oranges. The only way to sell them the apple is to try and con them into thinking that they really want an apple instead of an orange (Concept lock-in). This works relatively well with the unsure, but it really cheeses the rest of us of.
But I quiver in terror at the possibility that the parent is serious, so I'll bite. Simply because the parent is SO wrong that I can't risk it. For a big project this could be a major problem. Sorry to be abrupt, but... No. For a big project, coding in the parent-specified manner is a major problem. Lax coding style may make personal/small projects simpler and easier to implement, but it doesn't scale.
Code that "does the job best" is code that is robust, extensible, and maintainable. In a large project, it's a guarantee that someone other than you will, at some point, have to read/maintain your code.
Global variables? Using oversized arrays to avoid pointers?
These say many things to me, but "doing the job best" is not one of them. Not striving for form (at least to the level of commonly recognized 'barely adequate practises') will hinder your efficiency.
Not Americans ;)
Kindest regards,
Johnny Canuck
...the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether). I don't think that testing a programmer's understanding of basic algorithms is out of place.Memorizing stuff verbatim is what _bad_ schools are about. Good schools teach ideas, not technology. There's nothing wrong with teaching students how to look at an algorithm, break it down, understand it and implement it. That's an incredibly useful skill to learn and practice. There's no better way to teach a student how to do this than to make them do it with a few simple algorithms (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?).
There's also nothing wrong with trying to find out which "snotty nosed kids" are better than the others at understanding algorithms (you could call them the 'smart ones'). A reasonable way (not perfect, but reasonable) way of doing this is to present them with a few _basic_ algorithms that most students run across in school (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?). See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything. Assume an accomplished architect is faced with a task (let's say preparing for an interview with Google). Being 'accomplished' we can assume that they have a strong ability to "locate information and use it effectively". How does that ability translate to this context? It seems that they would research likely interview questions, gather resource material, and 'use it effectively', aka study in this context. When studying is combined with a modicum of passion and diligence (also important to being accomplished), the end result might be quite similar to 'cramming'.
You don't become an accomplished architect without the ability to learn (or forget, and relearn) something. You also don't become accomplished without recognizing when this is necessary. Whether you're fresh out of school or whether you've been around for years, it doesn't matter - if you're not willing to find out that something is a test and study for it(or cram, if you have to), don't expect Google to hire you. I certainly wouldn't.
However, it is entirely reasonable for someone to talk about their experiences of interacting with someone else. People do it all the time - people who are in love cannot stop doing so.
As for scientific experimentation...
If God *didn't* make the universe, than how you perceive the universe is pretty much a function of what you ate for breakfast. (Certain mushrooms come to mind) And given that your understanding of eggs and toast (and physics) is entirely dependent on the brain chemistry they initiate, science goes out the window. Your system is trying to comprehend itself. Since you yourself are part of the system, you can't understand it. All your knowledge is dependent on the thing you're trying to understand.
If you want to pretend that breakfast provides a reliable experience of the universe that renders your experiments later in the day viable, well, that's a step of faith. But faith in what, and on what basis?
- Unless your silliness was of exemplary humour or of an extremely scarring nature, a person will forget it. You can pull up USENET posts from over 25 years ago on google archives. If the good doctor is right (and this is his point) 25 years from now you will still be able to.
- The number of people who have access to a person's record of your silliness is limited to whomever they tell. In the context of the internet, it is limited by the number of people who want to search for it. I suspect that this number is a lot higher than you might think.
In addition, search, data-mining, profiling, market research tools, and spam techniques are all getting better. It's difficult to say what joe-fraudster, joe-spammer, or joe-homelandsecurity will be able to achieve five, ten, or twenty-five years from now.
Perhaps twenty-five years from now posting on slashdot will be considered a terrorist activity. Perhaps previous posters will be hauled off to jail in the middle of the night. Or just treated as second class citizens. The point is, who can say? I've tried to identify *current* parties who are interested in a composite of your data - but I have no idea of who the *future* interested parties may be. They may be still more sinister.
Saying "think a little more" is not the answer because people are not used to thinking in the way that this requires. It requires thinking about possible future abuses rather than just present ones. To a certain extent, people cannot think in the way that this requires. Regardless of whether or not people *should*, people *won't*, people *can't*, and this is why there is a problem.
As you previously pointed out, there's no guarantee that you'll get anything back from a closed source piece of software (even if it's great). You could just go out of business ;)
The reason open source *appears* to be different is that by and large, it lacks managers and businesspeople. ;) A salary is nice for feeding your children but unless the developer actually owns a stake in the business they're not making money off the product - they're making money off their boss.
Developers in closed source software don't make any money off the product they develop either. They generally just get a salary, Ask any MS coder what slice of the profits they see
The best any developer (either OSS or closed source) can expect is a developer's salary. The open source developer generally gets by on ego, the warm fuzzies, and general hacker curiosity. If that isn't enough, than he's probably an ex-developer.
Consider a entrepreneurial sort who starts up a business supporting an open source product (which he didn't write). Maybe he doesn't even know how to code. (Perhaps he already had a software business and is simply extending it) He's just someone who realizes that this free code has a certain amount of value, and with some clever marketing and value added (in terms of support) can make him money. If he's shrewd enough, he makes enough money that he can finesse a couple of the project contributors from their day jobs and pay them to work on the project full-time.
Now they are fully paid developers working on a project. They have a manager who determines what is priority and what is not. The manager is making money from a product that he didn't write himself. The sole difference between this situation and a closed source one is that the closed source company makes extra dollars from the actual licensing.
Any open source developer is free to exploit their own project - or anyone else's OSS project. Whether they are successful will depend on their business skills, which may or may not exist.
Regardless, the Real Money to be made from open source will be made by people who are willing to take risks in making a business out of it. As soon as people start doing this, developers will start to see some cash, up to the level of a developer's salary. But they'll never see any more of it than that, because although they are authors who have experienced no small amount of creative joy, they're still just developers.
Not quite. B and C aren't the same *person* - cryptographic parties don't have to be people. C is the hapless Consumer. B is their Black Box closed hardware player.
The only real difference between your analogy and mine however, is a screwdriver.
More land only means more opportunity for them to grow their presence in the SL world. CB is a large company with a lot of resources that they can spend on escapades like this, if they so desire. If land expansion happens, they are in a pole position to take advantage of it. Nor are they stupid - they know exactly what they're willing to spend on this, and exactly what they wish/expect to get out of it.
RTA - FTA Coldwell, which employs over 120,000 real-world sales agents in the United States and operates in a total of 45 countries, isn't in Second Life to make money, says Charlie Young, the company's senior vice president for marketing. "In the end this is about buying and selling homes in the real world," he says. "We're trying to figure out how to reach what we call the 'new consumer'." Executives insist that any profits will be reinvested in Second Life real estate. Real world homes make large amounts of money. SL homes don't. However, in terms of advertising expenses, CB is probably spending peanuts to make this happen. I don't know the dollar figures as I don't play SL, and IANARealtor, but I'd be very surprised if this didn't equate to cheap advertising.
Best of all, a virtual world allows CB to present exactly the image they wish. Everything is scripted, all the realtors are friendly and competent, and everyone has an overwhelmingly positive experience. People feel *real gratitude* for a virtual experience and CB generates *real* goodwill.
Of course, I personally think this is insidious and that it runs counter to the entire idea of a virtual world.
But I realize that it's a calculated business decision that has likely undergone cost/benefit and risk analyis, and that CB will walk away the moment they feel that they're not getting their money's worth from the investment.
And I personally think it's quite a clever idea.
You've never lived in a third world country, have you?
$100 is peanuts in the 1st world. When it's half a year's salary, that makes all the difference. Would you give a ten year old child a $25,000 piece of equipment to play with for 'educational' purposes? If you can barely afford to feed them and pay their school fees in the first place, it becomes quite simple. You take it away, treat their sick grandmother, and (maybe) you pay their school fees. Oh, and you buy them a textbook. Which is then 'borrowed' by the teacher, who couldn't afford one.
Unless there are strong measures in place to ensure that the laptop stays in the hands of the child it was given to, it won't. How do you identify the child it was given to? A password is useless - any parent (or in some cultures, any adult) will be able to convince a ten year old to surrender their password. Would you let a ten year old be exclusively responsible for remembering the password that activates a $25,000 piece of equipment?
I haven't even mentioned (external)theft because the potential for it should be so incredibly obvious. From a security perspective, protecting the laptop from the parents is a far more difficult problem.
Your comment about the RIAA is ridiculous. I have to chalk it up to your own personal vendetta. I can think of a few governments, however, which might possibly abuse this program.
- Scott
What's needed is for someone like NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to charge Microsoft with reckless endangerment for knowingly, willfully, and negligently distributing and continuing to distribute systems vulnerable to such attacks.
No - that's the last thing that's needed. I, for one, do not welcome our new software liability litigation overlords. It might start with Microsoft, but that's just the start of a very long thread that really should not be pulled.
There may be an answer to crummy software, but I'm pretty sure litigation isn't it.
Are you crazy? The US Gov't is interested in *every* Libyan child's schoolwork. If I was a Libyan child, I'd *demand* a secure laptop.
You have a typo in your option a)
:)
Just replace "not part of the Commonwealth" with "hopelessly disconnected from the rest of the world"
This reminds me of previous story about the difficulties of employers reading personal blogs and making employment decisions based on what they find on the Net.
We're looking at a medium where what is put up will last for many many years (verging on forever, possibly) and while you can control what you post yourself, you can't control what others share. (You can go retroactively to the courts and get mocked mercilessly for it though.) People (even many here on slashdot) don't realize what a powerful medium it is.
I don't think that many people realize the tremendous potential for abuse that the internet holds. Sure the kid got 15 minutes of fame out of the deal, and he arguably didn't make the best use out of it, but this will dog him his entire life. He's one extreme example of how someone can leverage the internet to abuse someone else and cause irrepairable damage.
My guess is that whoever modded the parent funny didn't *really* understand how serious the problem is.
There's nothing especially wrong or insidious about googling a prospective employee. I'd do it.
The larger problem is that not everyone realizes that the internet is *public*, not private, and that what you post online has the potential to stay around for a very long time.
If you don't want it googled, don't put it up. If your friend puts it up, tell them to take it down.
On the other hand, any employer who would refuse to hire someone based off of humorous content in a blog or on a personal webpage (or even due to radical political/religious views) is probably ignoring a large pool of good employees. A smart employer will realize that even clever, hardworking people look stoned sometimes.
A great many Biblical prophecies referred to events that took place in past history... But they also refer to future events as well. They do both.
;) ). But they also held significance of a greater scope. The key word here is *also*.
Take for example prophecy in the Old Testament - most of the OT prophets were quite clearly speaking to the people of their day, warning them of events that were about to happen (and, well, actually did happen - that's because they were prophets
Even if all the events of the Book of Revelation were realized in the 1st century, it doesn't mean they don't have another meaning to us today. Especially if you believe that the Bible is divinely inspired.
Not in our shiny new digital world. Technology moves fast.
;)
Chances are you just get a blank LCD, or garbled digits