It's even worse than that at the University at which I work. Now, you need a userID and password (All students, faculty and staff are issued one) just to access the electronic card catalog! This is really a side effect of a security policy in which all publicly available campus computers can now be accessed only through their university ID. I don't think it was targetted at the library card catalog computers per se, but the result is that members of the public can't look up books in the library. (Although they still can at home, via the web.)
Another side effect is that you can't look up books anonymously to read in the library without checking out the book. This could have a chilling effect on people's reading habits even if the lookups aren't logged, as people can't be sure of this.
and not even having a computer practically guarantees that you won't get spyware and malware.
Would that were true, but unfortunately cell phones, pagers, and even cars are susceptible to malicious code, as I'm sure will the newer generation of high definition DVD players which need to fetch keys from the net every time a movie is played. I can envision the day when any appliance or device that is powered by electricity will capable of becoming infected.
and balk at the thought of a three page paper in 8 point font.
I, too, would balk at the thought of a three page paper in 8 point font, as no one over 40 is going to be able to read it! Why not assign something sane, like a six page paper in an 11 point font that people of all ages could read and enjoy.
The conflation of authentication and encryption is the bane of SSL and all SSL-based applications. The two really should be separate.
The problem is that encryption without authentication is really not secure as you'd be vulnerable to a man in the middle attack. Even in the examples you described, a man in the middle could present you with a self-signed certificate, and if you just click "yes" to accept a self-signed cert all the time, you possibly wouldn't notice, unless you routinely check the key fingerprints, which most people don't do.
Keeping a blog on the internet is to school as swearing at home is to your resteraunt.
Not really. The difference is that the blogs may be accessible from school computers. If, for instance, you run your own school newspaper out of your home, using your own or family's ISP as a host, and if students at your school regularly visit that site, which they may do if your paper is especially funny or insightful, then you are effectively engaging in school speech, even though technically you are not speaking or writing on school grounds.
A better analogy would be you run a website out of your home in which you talk about how terrible the food is at a local restaurant. Although they probably can't sue you successfully as it is a subjective opinion, they can certainly refuse to serve you.
Actually, I'm not, and that's basically my point. When I am working, I feel damn lucky to have a job, and I've never complained about salary. I was just expressing some surprise that people making over $50k/yr are complaining that their salaries are too low. I honestly didn't know programmers' salaries were so high. Reading Slashdot regularly, I had figured that programmers were living below the poverty line.
Rather than say, "Hey, you're trying to pay less for programmers!" we should be saying "Hey, are we getting paid too much? Are we pricing ourselves out of positions?"
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I know this won't be a popular position on Slashdot, but am I the only one who was shocked by the average salaries of the American and H1B workers listed in the article? As someone whose never made more than $20,000 a year in my life, I really find it hard to have a great deal of sympathy here.
Something with such wide-sweeping effects really should be getting an appropriate amount of attention.
But that's just it. I doesn't have any wide-sweeping effects. If the DNS root servers were relocated to a different country, I seriously doubt anyone would even notice. Besides, no one in the US government or congress has indicated any desire to change anything. A few countries in the EU are complaining, but this is basically a non-story as far as I can tell. It's getting about as much coverage in the mainstream press as it deserves.
How is my neice having a domain in her name frivolous?
It's frivolous because you don't need a domain name to share baby photos; a website will do fine. The purpose of domain names was never so every person could have a domain like yourname.com. What's wrong with reaching your website with a name like yourisp.com/~yourname/? I don't have any domain with my personal name, but I manage several websites.
I don't think that's unique to your area. I think it is true just about everywhere that construction workers will make substantially more than all but the highest levels of IT workers.
I don't think that's entirely unfair, either. Construction workers do hard, often dangerous, manual labor in the hot sun. IT workers tend to sit in air conditioned offices, and the most physical exertion required is occasionally lifting a 19" monitor.
I'm not trying to downplay the importance of good IT workers, but I don't understand the attitude that they should be entitled to higher wages than skilled manual laborers.
Now, if the article were about a Linux study which showed that Linux saves money compared to MS products, and a Microsoft employee was quoted as saying the study is flawed, and a Slashdot user posted "wow a Microsoft architect disagrees... imagine that", he/she would be modded +5 Insightful. Fascinating how the moderation system works on slashdot.
The only way to avoid this problem is to put the master clock in the DAC (as you say) and slave the player's clock to it,
Isn't it possible to design a DAC that does buffering? For example, the DAC could buffer a few seconds of digital audio data it captures from the S/PDIF input into a FIFO and then clock it out using a high quality quartz-based oscillator that's electrically isolated and all that, and then feed that to the actual DAC circuitry? I suppose if the clock rates are too different there may be buffer overrun, underrun issues, but those could be alleviated by making the buffer large enough. Of course, this would work for audio only. Watching a movie would cause lip-synch problems.
Special relativity only applies in inertial frames
Wrong. Special relativity states that the laws of physics appear the same in all inertial frames. Clearly the laws of physics appear different in accelerating frames (i.e. you feel pseudoforces and light doesn't travel in straight lines, etc.), but that isn't the same as saying that special relativity can't be used to describe accelerating bodies.
Don't get confused by the twin paradox and spaceships that have to accelerate. The twin paradox cheats on these issues as usually presented.
True, discussions of the twin paradox does cheat on this issue as usually presented, but not as always presented. Some texts do indeed describe the journey using a period of constant non-infinite acceleration, and do so without general relativity.
To quote from A. P. French's excellent text: "...Nevertheless, for any clock that is not damaged by the acceleration, the effects of the trip can be calculated without bringing in the notions of equivalent gravitational fields. Special relativity is quite adequate to the job of predicting the time lost. It had better be, for (as Bondi has facetiously put it) 'it is obvious that no theory denying the observability of acceleration could survive a car trip on a bumpy road.' And special relativity has amply proved itself to be a more durable theory than this."
Students should be forced to use slide rules and pen and paper. There is no educational advantage to allowing them to use calculators.
What exactly is the educational benefit of using a slide rule as opposed to a calculator? You're just replacing one tool with an older, slightly more obsolete tool. In fact, given that cheap calculators are much easier to come by than slide rules today, you're much more likely to be stuck somewhere without a slide rule than stuck without a calculator. How are you then better educated by knowing how to do multiplication on a slide rule rather than a calculator?
One can imagine, hudreds of years ago, the complaints of elders about the use of pen and paper in schools. "It's just shocking that young people don't know how to carve Cuniform on clay tablets anymore!"
Throughout history, as tools changed, the skills needed by people changed as well. It seems that it is better that schools teach students using current rather than outdated tools. There are many things students were taught in the past that aren't taught anymore. Many don't learn how to hunt, fish, build shelter, make clothes. These are valuable skills, but there just isn't time to teach them at the same time as teaching all that is required to function in today's technological society.
As far as I know (IANAL) EULA violations are civil matters, whereas copyright violation is a criminal matter. Either can get you into trouble, but I'm not sure it's fair to say "it's just as illegal".
Isn't Harry Potter a kids' movie? As in for young children? If so, what is it doing on here?
I wasn't aware that Slashdot had become an "adults only site". It must be all the links to goatse. In any event, as others have pointed out, the books and movies can be enjoyed by people of all ages. I enjoy them, and I'm old enough to remember playing Dungeon on a DECWriter terminal attached to a Vax 11/780.
If the cops bust you, and you have an encrypted hard drive and you don't hand over the password, you will be charged with obstruction of justice.
Interesting. I'm curious, by the way. Which country do you live in? The situation you describe is quite different from that in the United States, and I'm curious as to how other cultures and legal systems work.
The tax system now is (mostly) fair. Everyone pays a % of their earnings.
Please explain how the first sentence follows from the second. Taxes are to pay for government function and services. Are the services and benefits we receive from the government proportional to our income?
The problem with a national sales tax is that middle to low income earners spend a larger percentage of their earnings.
But that's true of just about anything. If you decrease the denominator of a fraction by a factor x the fraction will increase by a factor of x. If you earn twice as much as I do and we both buy the same car, the car will cost me twice as much (as a fraction of my income) as it will cost you. Is the car dealer being unfair?
To make matters worse, income tax isn't even a fixed percentage of income. The percentage rate goes up as income goes up. How is that fair? And I won't even get started on the alternative minimum tax...
I think the bigger concern here is the enormous cost that the ISPs and telcos would have to bear in order to retain all this Internet traffic. These costs would ultimately be passed along to the consumer, and could possible price high-speed Internet access out of the reach of many people.
SSH and SSL would solve the privacy problems (but only somewhat, as people at both ends would need to be using encryption), but would do nothing to solve the logistical problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Another side effect is that you can't look up books anonymously to read in the library without checking out the book. This could have a chilling effect on people's reading habits even if the lookups aren't logged, as people can't be sure of this.
Would that were true, but unfortunately cell phones, pagers, and even cars are susceptible to malicious code, as I'm sure will the newer generation of high definition DVD players which need to fetch keys from the net every time a movie is played. I can envision the day when any appliance or device that is powered by electricity will capable of becoming infected.
I, too, would balk at the thought of a three page paper in 8 point font, as no one over 40 is going to be able to read it! Why not assign something sane, like a six page paper in an 11 point font that people of all ages could read and enjoy.
The problem is that encryption without authentication is really not secure as you'd be vulnerable to a man in the middle attack. Even in the examples you described, a man in the middle could present you with a self-signed certificate, and if you just click "yes" to accept a self-signed cert all the time, you possibly wouldn't notice, unless you routinely check the key fingerprints, which most people don't do.
Not really. The difference is that the blogs may be accessible from school computers. If, for instance, you run your own school newspaper out of your home, using your own or family's ISP as a host, and if students at your school regularly visit that site, which they may do if your paper is especially funny or insightful, then you are effectively engaging in school speech, even though technically you are not speaking or writing on school grounds.
A better analogy would be you run a website out of your home in which you talk about how terrible the food is at a local restaurant. Although they probably can't sue you successfully as it is a subjective opinion, they can certainly refuse to serve you.
Actually, I'm not, and that's basically my point. When I am working, I feel damn lucky to have a job, and I've never complained about salary. I was just expressing some surprise that people making over $50k/yr are complaining that their salaries are too low. I honestly didn't know programmers' salaries were so high. Reading Slashdot regularly, I had figured that programmers were living below the poverty line.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I know this won't be a popular position on Slashdot, but am I the only one who was shocked by the average salaries of the American and H1B workers listed in the article? As someone whose never made more than $20,000 a year in my life, I really find it hard to have a great deal of sympathy here.
But that's just it. I doesn't have any wide-sweeping effects. If the DNS root servers were relocated to a different country, I seriously doubt anyone would even notice. Besides, no one in the US government or congress has indicated any desire to change anything. A few countries in the EU are complaining, but this is basically a non-story as far as I can tell. It's getting about as much coverage in the mainstream press as it deserves.
It's frivolous because you don't need a domain name to share baby photos; a website will do fine. The purpose of domain names was never so every person could have a domain like yourname.com. What's wrong with reaching your website with a name like yourisp.com/~yourname/? I don't have any domain with my personal name, but I manage several websites.
I don't think that's entirely unfair, either. Construction workers do hard, often dangerous, manual labor in the hot sun. IT workers tend to sit in air conditioned offices, and the most physical exertion required is occasionally lifting a 19" monitor.
I'm not trying to downplay the importance of good IT workers, but I don't understand the attitude that they should be entitled to higher wages than skilled manual laborers.
Yes! I quite agree. I therefore think his character should therefore spend some time in a virtual jail.
Isn't it possible to design a DAC that does buffering? For example, the DAC could buffer a few seconds of digital audio data it captures from the S/PDIF input into a FIFO and then clock it out using a high quality quartz-based oscillator that's electrically isolated and all that, and then feed that to the actual DAC circuitry? I suppose if the clock rates are too different there may be buffer overrun, underrun issues, but those could be alleviated by making the buffer large enough. Of course, this would work for audio only. Watching a movie would cause lip-synch problems.
Wrong. Special relativity states that the laws of physics appear the same in all inertial frames. Clearly the laws of physics appear different in accelerating frames (i.e. you feel pseudoforces and light doesn't travel in straight lines, etc.), but that isn't the same as saying that special relativity can't be used to describe accelerating bodies.
Don't get confused by the twin paradox and spaceships that have to accelerate. The twin paradox cheats on these issues as usually presented.
True, discussions of the twin paradox does cheat on this issue as usually presented, but not as always presented. Some texts do indeed describe the journey using a period of constant non-infinite acceleration, and do so without general relativity.
To quote from A. P. French's excellent text: "...Nevertheless, for any clock that is not damaged by the acceleration, the effects of the trip can be calculated without bringing in the notions of equivalent gravitational fields. Special relativity is quite adequate to the job of predicting the time lost. It had better be, for (as Bondi has facetiously put it) 'it is obvious that no theory denying the observability of acceleration could survive a car trip on a bumpy road.' And special relativity has amply proved itself to be a more durable theory than this."
What exactly is the educational benefit of using a slide rule as opposed to a calculator? You're just replacing one tool with an older, slightly more obsolete tool. In fact, given that cheap calculators are much easier to come by than slide rules today, you're much more likely to be stuck somewhere without a slide rule than stuck without a calculator. How are you then better educated by knowing how to do multiplication on a slide rule rather than a calculator?
One can imagine, hudreds of years ago, the complaints of elders about the use of pen and paper in schools. "It's just shocking that young people don't know how to carve Cuniform on clay tablets anymore!"
Throughout history, as tools changed, the skills needed by people changed as well. It seems that it is better that schools teach students using current rather than outdated tools. There are many things students were taught in the past that aren't taught anymore. Many don't learn how to hunt, fish, build shelter, make clothes. These are valuable skills, but there just isn't time to teach them at the same time as teaching all that is required to function in today's technological society.
So, if they suspect you of murder, but haven't been able to find the body, can they order you to produce it and hold you in contempt for not doing so?
I wasn't aware that Slashdot had become an "adults only site". It must be all the links to goatse. In any event, as others have pointed out, the books and movies can be enjoyed by people of all ages. I enjoy them, and I'm old enough to remember playing Dungeon on a DECWriter terminal attached to a Vax 11/780.
Interesting. I'm curious, by the way. Which country do you live in? The situation you describe is quite different from that in the United States, and I'm curious as to how other cultures and legal systems work.
I thought the Field's medal was supposed to be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics.
Please explain how the first sentence follows from the second. Taxes are to pay for government function and services. Are the services and benefits we receive from the government proportional to our income?
The problem with a national sales tax is that middle to low income earners spend a larger percentage of their earnings.
But that's true of just about anything. If you decrease the denominator of a fraction by a factor x the fraction will increase by a factor of x. If you earn twice as much as I do and we both buy the same car, the car will cost me twice as much (as a fraction of my income) as it will cost you. Is the car dealer being unfair?
To make matters worse, income tax isn't even a fixed percentage of income. The percentage rate goes up as income goes up. How is that fair? And I won't even get started on the alternative minimum tax...
Well, that shows how much the average European knows. If you ask any discerning American, they will say Princeton is first, and Harvard second.
I think the bigger concern here is the enormous cost that the ISPs and telcos would have to bear in order to retain all this Internet traffic. These costs would ultimately be passed along to the consumer, and could possible price high-speed Internet access out of the reach of many people.
SSH and SSL would solve the privacy problems (but only somewhat, as people at both ends would need to be using encryption), but would do nothing to solve the logistical problems.