While I have no issues w/ Firefox, I find thunderbird lacking in a core functionality I enjoy (the ability to sort email - which is not filter incoming email but sort already read email. I don't get enough email for it to be worth it to sort email out of my inbox before it's read but I like having my old email sorted so it's easy to find stuff. I cannot find anyway to do this w/ thunderbird - any help would be appreciated).
What I'd like to see is more plugins from the Mozilla developers, it's my understanding that most plugins are not officially supported and are run-at-your-own-risk. Would be nice to have a base browser and some simple plugins that are officially supported and bug tested by mozilla. I for one, cannot live w/out the tabbrowser extensions which just add more functionality to how tabs are used (including the ability to unclose a window which is a memory hog but wonderful when i accidently hit x)
Nothing to do w/ the computer, has to do w/ possible point values assigned. I always fought w/ teachers who'd claim i only took 1 point of for your little careless mistake since you clearly know the material but it's be 1 point out of 10 or something like that, which would be a 90 which would lower my gpa if factored in.
That's a naive teacher problem. My band teacher never understood that because I took almost entirely honors/AP classes that an A+ in band lowered my gpa (since I, like 7% of the class had over a 4.5 which was an A+ in a normal class). Same w/ the 9-pt essay grading in history (althoug h they curved that nicely w/ a "fair" mapping of score to letter grade).
My biggest gripe w/ baseball (aside from often finding it boring due to the immense amounts of downtime) is how inaccurate their "stats" are (esp. pitcher related one). perfect games are attributed to the pitcher yet unless it's 27 or near-27 strikeouts, rely a good deal on the other fielders. same w/ no-hitters. also ERA, while somewhat decent, has the issue that a pitcher can give up a hit w/ one set of a fielders, and it'd not be a hit w/ another set and therefore i find the stat stupid. I don't have better solutions but I know they exist, my dad read a book about a scout who's picked some amazing pro teams and how he did it (hint: he didn't use any conventional statistics for determining worth).
Also in batting, batting avg/hrs is crap since your position in the batting order has a huge affect on how you're pitched to.
Sorry to nitpick, but it takes "more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe" assuming no better algorithm for breaking the encryption is developed. If someone creates a polynomial time algorithm for factoring large numbers (such as Shor's algorithm for quantum computers), this is no longer the case for RSA or any other factoring vs. multiplying/generating primes system. Similarly for other systems. It's not that the system cannot be broken, it's that we don't know of a way in which it can be done using current algorithms. The only informationally secure encryption system (afaik) is a never re-used one-time pad because it makes all decryptions equally likely and thus you gain NO information about the cleartext from the encrypted text except possibly length. The problem is, this requires a truly random key at least as long as the length of the message and the key cannot be reused.
It's quite simple. If my business sells closed-source software and that's my main way of profitting, I don't want you finding alternatives, or using OSS which interoperates flawlessly. As m$ has shown w/ word processors, ability to interoperate w/ the current status quo is a huge selling point. As a company that sells software my goal is to sell as much as possible. Format lock-in becomes a good thing, I don't want you looking at any alternatives or anything that interoperates that isn't mine.
For a dominant company, there is no advantage I can see to anyone but the consumer to interoperating w/ competing software (competing in the non-monetary sense in this case) and some possible disadvantages if there software is better than mine.
My university has RFID id cards that are needed to get into the dorms (you hold them close to a "reader" and it releases the electronic lock). However, these IDs are lost (I lost one once, found it in my room a week later - no idea how it fell out of my wallet, assumingg the best here) or forgotten so frequently that any student will let any other student-looking person in if asked (just make sure you say something general like can you let me in, or use the correct terminology "prox me in" - since we call the card a prox - short for proximity card). Also sometimes people will offer to let you in w/out you even asking. The point is, if you're determined at all, it's real easy to get into buildings you need a key/card to get into because everyone i know has either lost/forgot/not had (i can't count the number of times i've been holding a female friend's id at night since my female friends often don't have pockets and aren't always so keen to keep it in their bra and she's forgotten to take it back from me and thus couldn't get into her dorm building w/out someone letting her in) their card at some point in time and feels sympathy for others.
I feel like things might be different if there was visible crime in the dorms but on the whole, if you're going to require people to remember a physical object to get in somewhere, people are going to forget/lose it and consequently other nice people will let them in w/out it. Unless there's no way for this to happen (e.g., security guard checking ID - but people always get pissed when they can't get in somewhere - such as one of the clubs at night because they don't have their prox on them and can often talk the bouncers into letting them in)
In response to your comment about US leadership w/out vision, go read Peter Singer's The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Real interesting, while Singer is extremely controversial, he basically attempts to show how Bush could not have any logical moral or ethical backing behind his actions/policies/plans. He has no ideology that he's following except possibly that it's up to the US to save the world from Satan's evil minions.
My dad is an attorney (corporate kind, not litigation kind) and upon moving to this new firm they raised his rate to about $350 an hour. That's what the competitive rate is. So lots of lawyers charge more than $200/hr. It's not a question of are they worth it but a question of how much will the best legal defense cost you in M$'s case. I'm sure someone else could've done just as well for less but I'm also fairly certain there's probably not someone who could do just as well who's charging less. Defending a huge-ass corp like M$ requires a lot. And I can almost guarantee that some of that money goes to paying associates/paralegals who aren't lawyers who are also working on the case.
IMHO, if your job doesn't require some sort of talent or hard-to-learn skill, you shouldn't expect any security. If all your job requires is knowledge/education, why should we expect that job not to be automated/replaced by someone who will work for less? I'm not trying to argue that it's fair that all these educated people are now screwed but IMHO, it should be expected. A lot of IT work simply requires mediocre intelligence and familiarity w/ the system (standard disclaimer holds, this is a broad generalization and by no means always true) ESPECIALLY when corporations don't care about having the best designed/maintained setup, just about having one that works adequately.
I'm not saying that some things don't require one to be innovative/creative but corporate culture discourages any system that requires creativity/innovation because that's hard to replace, it's much better to have 1 creative person write a set of rules/steps for everyone to follow. I am still amazed at the comments I see on/. about outsourcing because while unfair to the individuals who are being fired, you're in a field that requires knowledge more than skill. In response to another post, no lawyers don't need to use creativity/intelligence when drawing up a standard contract but they do when negotiating provisions with someone else and when finding "loopholes" or trying to best use the system to their advantage (such as when doing tax work/estate planning). While there are formulas for it, it's not a cut-and-dry algorithm.
The problem people here see is that people spent money on an education before entering this field and thus should have jobs available. To me education does not imply available jobs, valuable skills do and anyone who expects a job simply because they are knowledgable and attended college is deluding themself.
Summary: outsourcing is not fair but it should be expected. IT jobs are "white" collar in that they require education but in my limited experience are usually rather formulaic and thus open to intense competition cutting out those w/ higher costs of living from being able to engage in them.
This has to do w/ the fact that measuring something in quantum physics changes it. For instance, suppose light has two components for polarization (x and y). If you put a normal lens upright and only let in pure y light, you end up collapsing all the light into it's y portion. The middle lens, collapses this light into it's 45 degree portion and the last takes only the x portion. Without the middle lens you're left taking the x portion of stuff w/ only a y portion (nothing gets through).
Slightly more technical explanation, polarization (and other quantumish properties - I forget if polarization is technically a quantum property) is measured in terms of two basis vectors. When measuring (or filtering in this case), you collapse the wave form (or vector) into the component that's allowed through. By switching basis vectors multiple times, you essentially transform the wave several times. (1x +1y gets filtered into 1y which gets re-written as (1 + 1 ) which when filtered is transformed into 1 which is equivalent to (1x + 1y). assuming the original light was equally polarized between x and y it would get through all three just fine. different polarization combinations yield different results but approx 1/8th of natural light (randomly polarized) will get through the three filters. without the middle filter, you have light in only the y component being collapsed into it's x component (0) and thus no light is seen
It does show that. But when light is slowed down so only one photon shoots out at a time, this photon cannot interfere with itself, the same pattern occurs. Something else must cause it, hence "multiple universes" theory.
This is not in regards to college professors or private school teachers. One of my best friend's mom's is a teacher in the town where we grew up. She has an insane amount of job security. Basically, because of the teacher's union, unless she does something illegal, she wont be fired. That's what I view as problem #1. The worst teacher I ever had didn't get fired (despite one year failing over a third of his students in a district that generally has rather intelligent students) until he finally hit a kid. EVERYONE hated him and he couldn't teach at all, but the district couldn't fire him despite a myriad of complaints from parents about his mental abuse on kids (calling them stupid and such) because that wasn't considered cause by the teacher's union. Extreme example, but my point still holds, I think unions have gone too far. The building my sister works in (government building) still has an elevator operator because whatever union he's a part of it is too powerful for them to fire him despite the fact that all he does now is push buttons.
Next point: my friend's mom in all honesty doesn't deserve more money. She doesn't work very many hours, she gets a LOT of vacation, and doesn't have to worry about being fired as long as she follows the law and does a quasi-adequate job. Teaching students WELL is very difficult and deserves to be adequately compensated but in my experience (I'm a sophomore in college now) in terms of what I learned from them, most of my teachers did not deserve to be paid anything (I ended up teaching myself much more than they taught me - in 6th grade, I taught myself math from an 8th grade book because my teacher couldn't teach it to me, I had to go to the enrichment teacher whenever I had a problem) while a select few deserved a lot of money because they did an amazing job. Obviously no teacher can be perfect for every student, but in my experience, most teachers don't deserve that much money for what they do (esp when they use the same lesson plans/tests despite the fact that students have all the exams from older friends, every year and basically do a few hours of work a day, nowhere near 40 hours a week).
Have higher standards for teachers, pay them what they're worth - no more standardized pay among the entire district based only on years taught in the district, abolish the tenure system (or severely re-vamp it) and then you might be able to attract smarter people to come teach. My mom taught special ed students for a bit and said a good portion of the teachers where she worked did it as a second income because it was a safe job (little/no chance of being fired) w/ good hours and good vacation times.
IMHO, the RIAA is not trying to make money selling music online, they're just trying to curtail illegal downloading. As was mentioned in an earlier post, if online music becomes REALLY popular, the RIAA becomes much less valuable because you no longer need someone to handle distribution for you (you only need to deal w/ recording/marketing). The RIAA wants to control ALL distribution so they can profit immensely. To the RIAA, this newfangled interweb = end of life as they know it, which is scary as all hell and possibly life-threatening for them.
Because why should you get to do something for free if they can charge you for it. If the average person doesn't understand that having 1 computer on the internet isn't necessarily less draining on your ISP than connecting 2 computers then they will try and charge you. It's about what marketing/business has turned into these days, instead of making valuable products/services so people buy them, it's convincing people to buy whatever you sell even if it's useless.
Bandwidth quotas are about minimizing cost for the company and making sure one person doesn't make everyone else's connections slow as crap because you're downloading/uploading gigs of pr0n/ISO files, limiting number of connections are about finding more things to charge you for. Oh you want, 3 computers on the internet, you have to buy 3 connections, instead of 1 connection and settings up a router/NAT to deal w/ the other computers. It's the same reason, people here have had their internet shut off from sharing their connection w/ other computers (even if they own them). it's not allowed, you have to pay for any additional computers you want registered on the network, even if you're not using anymore resources than if you only had 1 comp registered.
I was never aware of this and no one I've ever given that same "rant" to has been aware of it. You're right, the average hom user doesn't know about tty sessions. But they do know, they don't want to have to stop everything and re-login to run/install something. Perhaps if right-clicking revealed run as, instead of shift+right-click (which I never knew was a feature that did anything) it would be more publicized.
What about for home users? I for one will not put up w/ having to stop everything i'm doing to log off and log onto another username whenever i want to install something (and I know a lot of less tech-savvy people wont want to deal w/ that either/wont deal w/ not being allowed to install their own stuff on their own computer). I'm not arguing that permissions is a bad thing, it's just that without the *nix ability to just login as root in another tty and not close every other program your running/stop what you're doing, i'm going to be that jackass who's main account has admin privledges, and i see that as the better option despite the security risk.
Or if they do want you to program, let you do it in one of several languages. In a software engineering course I just took, our prof would often make us do each assignment in a new language (one in C, one in Java, one in AWK). Consequently, I feel like I can pick up new languages rather easily which I feel is much more valuable than 5+ yrs coding in x-language which might dissapear in 5 years. I feel like CS exams should be about CS concepts, not specific programming languages. If you want to make students program, let them pick their fav lang for it (and if they pick C for something that'd be much easier in an OO-language, let them try).
Make them describe concepts as opposed to just programming. Or in an algorithms/data structures class I took (very hard question), throw them an N^3 algorithm and a bunch of functoins they can us e (and the complexity for each) and make them improve the algorithm to be subquadratic and use at most quadratic space. Make them assess tradeoffs, explain concepts and demonstrate knowledge of WHY what they're doing is the best way/a good way instead of just knowing that it works.
For those unaware, the Prisoner's Dilemma goes something like this (taken from wikipedia.org):
"Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and having separated them, visit each of them and offer the same deal: If you confess and your accomplice remains silent, he gets the full 10-year sentence and you go free. If he confesses and you remain silent, you get the full 10-year sentence and he goes free. If you both stay silent, all we can do is give you both 6 months for a minor charge. If you both confess, you each get 5 years."
Conclusion, best option for both participants is not confess (both go free). However, the best option for you individually is to confess (5 yrs, 0 yrs versus 6 months or 10 yrs), hence the dilemna.
Could parent please explain the tit for Tat strategy mentioned that is usally applied to the Prisoner's Dilemma and elaborate on his/her post?
IMHO, the problem is that anti-trust laws are designed to protect the consumer by making sure monopolies can't knock out competition from other BUSINESSES. What happens when you have a Free/Open Source OS. In many industries requiring a company to license their specs to allow compatibility is perfectly reasonable. In the software/OS industry, this would destroy Free operating systems. The laws aren't designed so that someone who's making no profit can compete. And that's the problem, the laws don't match the current status quo.
I don't think the problem is just that anti-trust punishments don't do much, it's that M$'s biggest competition is most likely from Free software (let's agree that Apple's OS X is a niche market for now) which can't license ANYTHING because there's no money it. And the gov't doesn't understand that. In their head, making sure other companies can create inter-operable software makes sense because why would anyone do something for free and give it away?
Martha Stewart went to jail for OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE (lying about using inside information). Bill Gates is being fined for not reporting a purchase as he's required to. COMPLETELY different crimes, it's not a woman thing (not that I think she should be in jail but what he did is a lot less illegal)
It's his personal investment account. Maybe he's diversifying his portfolio (if one has uncorrelated assets, one can reduce risk w/out reducing expected return).
Thank you for saying this. Unless you have an innate talent for math/science, there's no logical reason in going into those fields beyond curiousity. Most people (even here at Princeton) view college as a necessary step to getting a good job. They take the easiest courses they enjoy because the real world doesn't reward you for taking hard classes you got lower grades in. They also pick practical majors because w/ a tough job market, it's the best way to get a job.
There's no reason to take HARD courses (such as my engineering courses - I'm an engineering major) unless you love them and even then it's discouraging when I can get a B in a classics course I pass-failed to fulfill a distribution requirement without doing any of the reading for the course yet I know I'd fail my Optimization course if I never did any reading for it. Furthermore, pure sciences/math don't pay very well. So it's a lot of work, to get worse grades and not make as much money when you graduate. Where's the logic in that unless a) it's not a lot of work for you because you have an innate talent for it and b) you love doing it, so that enjoyment balances out the poor salaries you'll get.
Our culture is becomming exceedingly more materialistic and money-driven in my not-so-expert opinion. Consequently, people are shifting towards jobs that pay higher and better. Among the most popular majors here at Princeton are (last I knew) Economics and Operations Research & Financial Engineering.
To me, the problem is, people view a job as something you do to make money, and there isn't that much one can do in the pure sciences beyond research (unless you're exceedingly lucky/brilliant and come up with some essential new product) which for the most part, in my limited knowledge, doesn't pay that well compared to other things one can do w/ a similar education (science/engineering people are VERY desired in the financial industry which often pays VERY well).
Solutions I have come up with: a) make culture less materialistic - not happening anytime soon; b) give a lot more funding to pure research so that it'll pay better and also be easier to do - bigger budget means getting more of the toys you need for your experiments
A lot of stuff isn't so cut and dry though. Especially w/ the speed at which technology moves now, something can become commonplace very quickly and maybe not seem patentable when 6 months ago no one had ever even conceived of it and it was a great new idea worthy of a patent.
We also have the unintended consequences. Your proposal, which I agree with in many cases, discourages companies from trying to defend their IP. What if a small firm tries to attack M$ or a huge corporation. Suppose they lose. Suppose M$ also had 10 lawyers working on the case, w/ a combined total of 500 man-hours billing out at $300 an hour. Now your small firm trying to defend a patent is now out $150k in legal expenses because that's what this big corporation spent. If our system was perfect this might be ok. But even if your patent should be upheld w/ 99% probability, is it worth it to challenge if in that 1% chance of failure you would owe a very substantial sum/portion of your small firm's income?
The issue as I see it is that a patent should require some sort of innovation, if it's something that anyone can easily dream up (such as one-click ) it doesn't deserve a patent just because you filed your application first and we're having too many of those sorts of patents. A patent is supposed to grand a temporary monopoly in exchange for sharing your idea/design w/ the world. If the idea/design could EASILY be thought up by any group of computer scientists sitting in a room, it shouldn't get a patent. Problem: requires patent examiners to spend more time examining patents when they're already backlogged.
Good to see some mainstream press address the issue of frivolous patents that exist.
I totally agree. I personally think jail should be primarily for violent criminals and maybe some huge non-violent ones (Enron/TYCO cases come to mind - NOT martha stewart). I think we need to get out of this it's illegal send them to jail mindset that seems to prevail. Why is downloading starwars, watching it once and deleting it, any more illegal than sneaking into a movie theater to watch it. In the second case I technically "stole" the cost of admission from the theater. In the first, I didn't even do that, all I did was gather enjoyment from someone else's work without compensating them. Illegal? Yes. Morally wrong? Depends, I've seen many strong cogent arguments that copyright/patents do NOT encourage creativity/innovation and many good arguments that say they do. Should I go to jail for cheaping out on $10? NO!!
In my head software/movie pirates are people who illegally PROFIT from other's works not those who illegally watch/use someone else's work for individual enjoyment. It's still illegal but in my head, not something that should be prosecuted. If it's so widespread that the *AA views it as a threat to business, then it's time to rethink the current business model if people don't feel like it's worth paying for your product.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have no issues w/ Firefox, I find thunderbird lacking in a core functionality I enjoy (the ability to sort email - which is not filter incoming email but sort already read email. I don't get enough email for it to be worth it to sort email out of my inbox before it's read but I like having my old email sorted so it's easy to find stuff. I cannot find anyway to do this w/ thunderbird - any help would be appreciated).
What I'd like to see is more plugins from the Mozilla developers, it's my understanding that most plugins are not officially supported and are run-at-your-own-risk. Would be nice to have a base browser and some simple plugins that are officially supported and bug tested by mozilla. I for one, cannot live w/out the tabbrowser extensions which just add more functionality to how tabs are used (including the ability to unclose a window which is a memory hog but wonderful when i accidently hit x)
Nothing to do w/ the computer, has to do w/ possible point values assigned. I always fought w/ teachers who'd claim i only took 1 point of for your little careless mistake since you clearly know the material but it's be 1 point out of 10 or something like that, which would be a 90 which would lower my gpa if factored in.
That's a naive teacher problem. My band teacher never understood that because I took almost entirely honors/AP classes that an A+ in band lowered my gpa (since I, like 7% of the class had over a 4.5 which was an A+ in a normal class). Same w/ the 9-pt essay grading in history (althoug h they curved that nicely w/ a "fair" mapping of score to letter grade).
My biggest gripe w/ baseball (aside from often finding it boring due to the immense amounts of downtime) is how inaccurate their "stats" are (esp. pitcher related one). perfect games are attributed to the pitcher yet unless it's 27 or near-27 strikeouts, rely a good deal on the other fielders. same w/ no-hitters. also ERA, while somewhat decent, has the issue that a pitcher can give up a hit w/ one set of a fielders, and it'd not be a hit w/ another set and therefore i find the stat stupid. I don't have better solutions but I know they exist, my dad read a book about a scout who's picked some amazing pro teams and how he did it (hint: he didn't use any conventional statistics for determining worth).
Also in batting, batting avg/hrs is crap since your position in the batting order has a huge affect on how you're pitched to.
Sorry to nitpick, but it takes "more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe" assuming no better algorithm for breaking the encryption is developed. If someone creates a polynomial time algorithm for factoring large numbers (such as Shor's algorithm for quantum computers), this is no longer the case for RSA or any other factoring vs. multiplying/generating primes system. Similarly for other systems. It's not that the system cannot be broken, it's that we don't know of a way in which it can be done using current algorithms. The only informationally secure encryption system (afaik) is a never re-used one-time pad because it makes all decryptions equally likely and thus you gain NO information about the cleartext from the encrypted text except possibly length. The problem is, this requires a truly random key at least as long as the length of the message and the key cannot be reused.
It's quite simple. If my business sells closed-source software and that's my main way of profitting, I don't want you finding alternatives, or using OSS which interoperates flawlessly. As m$ has shown w/ word processors, ability to interoperate w/ the current status quo is a huge selling point. As a company that sells software my goal is to sell as much as possible. Format lock-in becomes a good thing, I don't want you looking at any alternatives or anything that interoperates that isn't mine.
For a dominant company, there is no advantage I can see to anyone but the consumer to interoperating w/ competing software (competing in the non-monetary sense in this case) and some possible disadvantages if there software is better than mine.
My university has RFID id cards that are needed to get into the dorms (you hold them close to a "reader" and it releases the electronic lock). However, these IDs are lost (I lost one once, found it in my room a week later - no idea how it fell out of my wallet, assumingg the best here) or forgotten so frequently that any student will let any other student-looking person in if asked (just make sure you say something general like can you let me in, or use the correct terminology "prox me in" - since we call the card a prox - short for proximity card). Also sometimes people will offer to let you in w/out you even asking. The point is, if you're determined at all, it's real easy to get into buildings you need a key/card to get into because everyone i know has either lost/forgot/not had (i can't count the number of times i've been holding a female friend's id at night since my female friends often don't have pockets and aren't always so keen to keep it in their bra and she's forgotten to take it back from me and thus couldn't get into her dorm building w/out someone letting her in) their card at some point in time and feels sympathy for others.
I feel like things might be different if there was visible crime in the dorms but on the whole, if you're going to require people to remember a physical object to get in somewhere, people are going to forget/lose it and consequently other nice people will let them in w/out it. Unless there's no way for this to happen (e.g., security guard checking ID - but people always get pissed when they can't get in somewhere - such as one of the clubs at night because they don't have their prox on them and can often talk the bouncers into letting them in)
In response to your comment about US leadership w/out vision, go read Peter Singer's The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Real interesting, while Singer is extremely controversial, he basically attempts to show how Bush could not have any logical moral or ethical backing behind his actions/policies/plans. He has no ideology that he's following except possibly that it's up to the US to save the world from Satan's evil minions.
My dad is an attorney (corporate kind, not litigation kind) and upon moving to this new firm they raised his rate to about $350 an hour. That's what the competitive rate is. So lots of lawyers charge more than $200/hr. It's not a question of are they worth it but a question of how much will the best legal defense cost you in M$'s case. I'm sure someone else could've done just as well for less but I'm also fairly certain there's probably not someone who could do just as well who's charging less. Defending a huge-ass corp like M$ requires a lot. And I can almost guarantee that some of that money goes to paying associates/paralegals who aren't lawyers who are also working on the case.
IMHO, if your job doesn't require some sort of talent or hard-to-learn skill, you shouldn't expect any security. If all your job requires is knowledge/education, why should we expect that job not to be automated/replaced by someone who will work for less? I'm not trying to argue that it's fair that all these educated people are now screwed but IMHO, it should be expected. A lot of IT work simply requires mediocre intelligence and familiarity w/ the system (standard disclaimer holds, this is a broad generalization and by no means always true) ESPECIALLY when corporations don't care about having the best designed/maintained setup, just about having one that works adequately.
/. about outsourcing because while unfair to the individuals who are being fired, you're in a field that requires knowledge more than skill. In response to another post, no lawyers don't need to use creativity/intelligence when drawing up a standard contract but they do when negotiating provisions with someone else and when finding "loopholes" or trying to best use the system to their advantage (such as when doing tax work/estate planning). While there are formulas for it, it's not a cut-and-dry algorithm.
I'm not saying that some things don't require one to be innovative/creative but corporate culture discourages any system that requires creativity/innovation because that's hard to replace, it's much better to have 1 creative person write a set of rules/steps for everyone to follow. I am still amazed at the comments I see on
The problem people here see is that people spent money on an education before entering this field and thus should have jobs available. To me education does not imply available jobs, valuable skills do and anyone who expects a job simply because they are knowledgable and attended college is deluding themself.
Summary: outsourcing is not fair but it should be expected. IT jobs are "white" collar in that they require education but in my limited experience are usually rather formulaic and thus open to intense competition cutting out those w/ higher costs of living from being able to engage in them.
This has to do w/ the fact that measuring something in quantum physics changes it. For instance, suppose light has two components for polarization (x and y). If you put a normal lens upright and only let in pure y light, you end up collapsing all the light into it's y portion. The middle lens, collapses this light into it's 45 degree portion and the last takes only the x portion. Without the middle lens you're left taking the x portion of stuff w/ only a y portion (nothing gets through).
Slightly more technical explanation, polarization (and other quantumish properties - I forget if polarization is technically a quantum property) is measured in terms of two basis vectors. When measuring (or filtering in this case), you collapse the wave form (or vector) into the component that's allowed through. By switching basis vectors multiple times, you essentially transform the wave several times. (1x +1y gets filtered into 1y which gets re-written as (1 + 1 ) which when filtered is transformed into 1 which is equivalent to (1x + 1y). assuming the original light was equally polarized between x and y it would get through all three just fine. different polarization combinations yield different results but approx 1/8th of natural light (randomly polarized) will get through the three filters. without the middle filter, you have light in only the y component being collapsed into it's x component (0) and thus no light is seen
It does show that. But when light is slowed down so only one photon shoots out at a time, this photon cannot interfere with itself, the same pattern occurs. Something else must cause it, hence "multiple universes" theory.
This is not in regards to college professors or private school teachers. One of my best friend's mom's is a teacher in the town where we grew up. She has an insane amount of job security. Basically, because of the teacher's union, unless she does something illegal, she wont be fired. That's what I view as problem #1. The worst teacher I ever had didn't get fired (despite one year failing over a third of his students in a district that generally has rather intelligent students) until he finally hit a kid. EVERYONE hated him and he couldn't teach at all, but the district couldn't fire him despite a myriad of complaints from parents about his mental abuse on kids (calling them stupid and such) because that wasn't considered cause by the teacher's union. Extreme example, but my point still holds, I think unions have gone too far. The building my sister works in (government building) still has an elevator operator because whatever union he's a part of it is too powerful for them to fire him despite the fact that all he does now is push buttons.
Next point: my friend's mom in all honesty doesn't deserve more money. She doesn't work very many hours, she gets a LOT of vacation, and doesn't have to worry about being fired as long as she follows the law and does a quasi-adequate job. Teaching students WELL is very difficult and deserves to be adequately compensated but in my experience (I'm a sophomore in college now) in terms of what I learned from them, most of my teachers did not deserve to be paid anything (I ended up teaching myself much more than they taught me - in 6th grade, I taught myself math from an 8th grade book because my teacher couldn't teach it to me, I had to go to the enrichment teacher whenever I had a problem) while a select few deserved a lot of money because they did an amazing job. Obviously no teacher can be perfect for every student, but in my experience, most teachers don't deserve that much money for what they do (esp when they use the same lesson plans/tests despite the fact that students have all the exams from older friends, every year and basically do a few hours of work a day, nowhere near 40 hours a week).
Have higher standards for teachers, pay them what they're worth - no more standardized pay among the entire district based only on years taught in the district, abolish the tenure system (or severely re-vamp it) and then you might be able to attract smarter people to come teach. My mom taught special ed students for a bit and said a good portion of the teachers where she worked did it as a second income because it was a safe job (little/no chance of being fired) w/ good hours and good vacation times.
IMHO, the RIAA is not trying to make money selling music online, they're just trying to curtail illegal downloading. As was mentioned in an earlier post, if online music becomes REALLY popular, the RIAA becomes much less valuable because you no longer need someone to handle distribution for you (you only need to deal w/ recording/marketing). The RIAA wants to control ALL distribution so they can profit immensely. To the RIAA, this newfangled interweb = end of life as they know it, which is scary as all hell and possibly life-threatening for them.
Because why should you get to do something for free if they can charge you for it. If the average person doesn't understand that having 1 computer on the internet isn't necessarily less draining on your ISP than connecting 2 computers then they will try and charge you. It's about what marketing/business has turned into these days, instead of making valuable products/services so people buy them, it's convincing people to buy whatever you sell even if it's useless.
Bandwidth quotas are about minimizing cost for the company and making sure one person doesn't make everyone else's connections slow as crap because you're downloading/uploading gigs of pr0n/ISO files, limiting number of connections are about finding more things to charge you for. Oh you want, 3 computers on the internet, you have to buy 3 connections, instead of 1 connection and settings up a router/NAT to deal w/ the other computers. It's the same reason, people here have had their internet shut off from sharing their connection w/ other computers (even if they own them). it's not allowed, you have to pay for any additional computers you want registered on the network, even if you're not using anymore resources than if you only had 1 comp registered.
I was never aware of this and no one I've ever given that same "rant" to has been aware of it. You're right, the average hom user doesn't know about tty sessions. But they do know, they don't want to have to stop everything and re-login to run/install something. Perhaps if right-clicking revealed run as, instead of shift+right-click (which I never knew was a feature that did anything) it would be more publicized.
What about for home users? I for one will not put up w/ having to stop everything i'm doing to log off and log onto another username whenever i want to install something (and I know a lot of less tech-savvy people wont want to deal w/ that either/wont deal w/ not being allowed to install their own stuff on their own computer). I'm not arguing that permissions is a bad thing, it's just that without the *nix ability to just login as root in another tty and not close every other program your running/stop what you're doing, i'm going to be that jackass who's main account has admin privledges, and i see that as the better option despite the security risk.
Or if they do want you to program, let you do it in one of several languages. In a software engineering course I just took, our prof would often make us do each assignment in a new language (one in C, one in Java, one in AWK). Consequently, I feel like I can pick up new languages rather easily which I feel is much more valuable than 5+ yrs coding in x-language which might dissapear in 5 years. I feel like CS exams should be about CS concepts, not specific programming languages. If you want to make students program, let them pick their fav lang for it (and if they pick C for something that'd be much easier in an OO-language, let them try).
Make them describe concepts as opposed to just programming. Or in an algorithms/data structures class I took (very hard question), throw them an N^3 algorithm and a bunch of functoins they can us e (and the complexity for each) and make them improve the algorithm to be subquadratic and use at most quadratic space. Make them assess tradeoffs, explain concepts and demonstrate knowledge of WHY what they're doing is the best way/a good way instead of just knowing that it works.
For those unaware, the Prisoner's Dilemma goes something like this (taken from wikipedia.org):
"Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and having separated them, visit each of them and offer the same deal: If you confess and your accomplice remains silent, he gets the full 10-year sentence and you go free. If he confesses and you remain silent, you get the full 10-year sentence and he goes free. If you both stay silent, all we can do is give you both 6 months for a minor charge. If you both confess, you each get 5 years."
Conclusion, best option for both participants is not confess (both go free). However, the best option for you individually is to confess (5 yrs, 0 yrs versus 6 months or 10 yrs), hence the dilemna.
Could parent please explain the tit for Tat strategy mentioned that is usally applied to the Prisoner's Dilemma and elaborate on his/her post?
IMHO, the problem is that anti-trust laws are designed to protect the consumer by making sure monopolies can't knock out competition from other BUSINESSES. What happens when you have a Free/Open Source OS. In many industries requiring a company to license their specs to allow compatibility is perfectly reasonable. In the software/OS industry, this would destroy Free operating systems. The laws aren't designed so that someone who's making no profit can compete. And that's the problem, the laws don't match the current status quo.
I don't think the problem is just that anti-trust punishments don't do much, it's that M$'s biggest competition is most likely from Free software (let's agree that Apple's OS X is a niche market for now) which can't license ANYTHING because there's no money it. And the gov't doesn't understand that. In their head, making sure other companies can create inter-operable software makes sense because why would anyone do something for free and give it away?
Martha Stewart went to jail for OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE (lying about using inside information). Bill Gates is being fined for not reporting a purchase as he's required to. COMPLETELY different crimes, it's not a woman thing (not that I think she should be in jail but what he did is a lot less illegal)
It's his personal investment account. Maybe he's diversifying his portfolio (if one has uncorrelated assets, one can reduce risk w/out reducing expected return).
Thank you for saying this. Unless you have an innate talent for math/science, there's no logical reason in going into those fields beyond curiousity. Most people (even here at Princeton) view college as a necessary step to getting a good job. They take the easiest courses they enjoy because the real world doesn't reward you for taking hard classes you got lower grades in. They also pick practical majors because w/ a tough job market, it's the best way to get a job.
There's no reason to take HARD courses (such as my engineering courses - I'm an engineering major) unless you love them and even then it's discouraging when I can get a B in a classics course I pass-failed to fulfill a distribution requirement without doing any of the reading for the course yet I know I'd fail my Optimization course if I never did any reading for it. Furthermore, pure sciences/math don't pay very well. So it's a lot of work, to get worse grades and not make as much money when you graduate. Where's the logic in that unless a) it's not a lot of work for you because you have an innate talent for it and b) you love doing it, so that enjoyment balances out the poor salaries you'll get.
Our culture is becomming exceedingly more materialistic and money-driven in my not-so-expert opinion. Consequently, people are shifting towards jobs that pay higher and better. Among the most popular majors here at Princeton are (last I knew) Economics and Operations Research & Financial Engineering.
To me, the problem is, people view a job as something you do to make money, and there isn't that much one can do in the pure sciences beyond research (unless you're exceedingly lucky/brilliant and come up with some essential new product) which for the most part, in my limited knowledge, doesn't pay that well compared to other things one can do w/ a similar education (science/engineering people are VERY desired in the financial industry which often pays VERY well).
Solutions I have come up with: a) make culture less materialistic - not happening anytime soon; b) give a lot more funding to pure research so that it'll pay better and also be easier to do - bigger budget means getting more of the toys you need for your experiments
A lot of stuff isn't so cut and dry though. Especially w/ the speed at which technology moves now, something can become commonplace very quickly and maybe not seem patentable when 6 months ago no one had ever even conceived of it and it was a great new idea worthy of a patent.
We also have the unintended consequences. Your proposal, which I agree with in many cases, discourages companies from trying to defend their IP. What if a small firm tries to attack M$ or a huge corporation. Suppose they lose. Suppose M$ also had 10 lawyers working on the case, w/ a combined total of 500 man-hours billing out at $300 an hour. Now your small firm trying to defend a patent is now out $150k in legal expenses because that's what this big corporation spent. If our system was perfect this might be ok. But even if your patent should be upheld w/ 99% probability, is it worth it to challenge if in that 1% chance of failure you would owe a very substantial sum/portion of your small firm's income?
The issue as I see it is that a patent should require some sort of innovation, if it's something that anyone can easily dream up (such as one-click ) it doesn't deserve a patent just because you filed your application first and we're having too many of those sorts of patents. A patent is supposed to grand a temporary monopoly in exchange for sharing your idea/design w/ the world. If the idea/design could EASILY be thought up by any group of computer scientists sitting in a room, it shouldn't get a patent. Problem: requires patent examiners to spend more time examining patents when they're already backlogged.
Good to see some mainstream press address the issue of frivolous patents that exist.
I totally agree. I personally think jail should be primarily for violent criminals and maybe some huge non-violent ones (Enron/TYCO cases come to mind - NOT martha stewart). I think we need to get out of this it's illegal send them to jail mindset that seems to prevail. Why is downloading starwars, watching it once and deleting it, any more illegal than sneaking into a movie theater to watch it. In the second case I technically "stole" the cost of admission from the theater. In the first, I didn't even do that, all I did was gather enjoyment from someone else's work without compensating them. Illegal? Yes. Morally wrong? Depends, I've seen many strong cogent arguments that copyright/patents do NOT encourage creativity/innovation and many good arguments that say they do. Should I go to jail for cheaping out on $10? NO!!
In my head software/movie pirates are people who illegally PROFIT from other's works not those who illegally watch/use someone else's work for individual enjoyment. It's still illegal but in my head, not something that should be prosecuted. If it's so widespread that the *AA views it as a threat to business, then it's time to rethink the current business model if people don't feel like it's worth paying for your product.