We don't always have to screw one group of people over to remedy injustice to another group. Society can tolerate some inefficiency in order to protect everyone's right to separate self expression.
Certainly it should be illegal for a restaurant to refuse service to a same sex couple who walk in holding hands. But here was are forcing someone to actively participate in a ceremony that goes against their sincere beliefs. I think we can carve out a small exception for specific circumstances (ceremony that is widely considered to be religious in nature, family business, non-urgent need, wide availability of alternatives).
There are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are happy to use Yahoo services and there is no reason why the company can not keep them running well and earning salary for employees. The problem is logically impossible expectation of infinite growth placed on public companies. Sooner or later this drives every successful company into collapse after losing their pyramid scheme and investors flock to the latest overhyped startup to try to recoup their losses with more gambling.
Prosecuting outsiders to bond members of your own tribe seems to be an inescapable human need. Liberal activists who boo comics and ensure that anyone who dares to have a different personal opinion of, say, homosexuality loses their job are just bible thumpers and Saudi Arabia morality police going by another name. They have to continuously crank up the extremes of zero tolerance for anyone who deviates from their ideas about women, minorities, native americans and so on to bond with each other and maintain self image of superior human beings who have full right to bully and discriminate against savages.
For the record, I fully believe that LGBT and all other minorities including polygamists have a right to equal, productive lives, and so should a baker who doesn't want to make a cake for their wedding. It's just that activist groups who claim to support either side are actually just on a power trip to prop up their own self esteem and find a legitimate excuse to bully others.
Please, could someone PLEASE explain the logic behind participating in multiplayer games?
The rules of these games are made up anyway and winning is not an indication of any admirable real world trait or skill. So some people get a kick out of making yet another game out of beating the game without getting caught, seeing people hide behind walls they can see through and then fragging them and taunting them in chat.
Majority of devices fail with perfectly functioning hardware, because software is no longer updated, with the last available release usually being horribly slow and bloated. Installing a custom ROM often does wonders for usability. We should first demand that that bootloaders are unlockable and at least the interface expected and provided by driver binaries is well documented. Fully open and user serviceable hardware would be great, but even modest steps will keep lots of stuff out of landfill.
Why would I want to plug in a whatever box and watch a middle of whatever program it's showing at the time, interrupted by ads every 15 minutes? When technology is there to select exactly what I want to see and when. Even for live news/sports I may want to pause or rewind to see what I missed. Just give me well working apps and ability to subscribe to the ones that appeal to me.
My car has plenty of smarts, including a drive by wire system and *gasp* an electronic key that ensures that only I can operate it. This does introduce some new failure mode, but *overall* I am safer and more likely to get where I am going because of all this technology.
If done right, a smart gun can be actually more reliable and accurate while simultaneously reducing accidents. For example, it can have a screen that shows me where a bullet will hit and how many remain in the magazine. It can have redundant ways of unlocking, including a physical key if the battery runs out.
As for government disabling guns, they can already send a SWAT team in bulletproof vests and shred you to pieces. The only difference is that you and innocent bystanders around you are more likely to survive. Plus, we are talking smart, not internet connected.
8 year olds can learn Scratch precisely because it's limited. In beginning classes, there is are only so many way to connect blocks. One can stumble on a solution with random twiddling and over time start to notice patterns. This is not going to happen with any free form language where you can type whatever you want, but most of the thing you type will not compile.
Past this stage, there is actually nothing wrong with BASIC. Try PLAY "abcd", tweak till results sounds like a tune, then add gosub for a refrain.
If you don't like Linux Foundation policies, communication style of Linus himself or design of systemd, you are always free to fork the project and get full benefits of work so far as well as ability to merge any future patches that you like into your own source tree. Either your fork gathers enough following to maintain it, or the original project makes changes to address the problems that triggered it - either way you win.
The fact that this has not happened with Linux tells me that current situation is acceptable to a large majority of developers and users compared to inconvenience of manually merging patches. The rest should keep trying and perhaps one day they will create a project that exceeds original Linux, just like Linux eclipsed Minix. Personally, I would love to see an OS with versioned source/binary driver interface, where backward compatibility for existing binary drivers is maintained for many years. BUT, I am too lazy to actually contribute much development time, so I have to make do with what is out there.
Pair programming requires one to continuously socialize with someone nonstop for entire working day, something that most people, let alone most software engineers, can not do while maintaining concentration, creativity or sanity.
Code reviews encourage filibusters when someone keeps adding to the comment thread just because they personally want something done differently and others find it rude to approve the change and curtail discussion.
What works well is running lint and writing good tests. Then if someone is motivated enough to address their grievances with your code, they can clean it up on their own time.
I have been worried that using encryption will attract attention of law enforcement who will know I something to hide. What a tremendous relief that I will now look just like another law abiding citizen using escrow crypto. While at the same time, I will use this escrow crypto for 99% of my communications, including my embarrassing but legal porn collection. And then, just when I hatch my evil plots, I will encrypt a small amount of data with my own crypto, before stamping escrowed one on top.
Now the government has no reason to suspect me unless they get a warrant, sift through ALL my stuff and manage to realize that a second of noise in a 2 hour movie file contains my real secrets.
I for one welcome our new technologically illiterate overlords!
I have been worried that using encryption will attract attention of law enforcement who will know I something to hide. What a tremendous relief that I will now look just like another law abiding citizen using escrow crypto. While at the same time, I will use this escrow crypto for 99% of my communications, including my embarrassing but legal porn collection. And then, just when I hatch my evil plots, I will encrypt a small amount of data with my own crypto, before stamping escrowed one on top.
Now the government has no reason to suspect me unless they get a warrant, sift through ALL my stuff and manage to realize that a second of noise in a 2 hour movie file contains my real secrets.
I for one welcome our new technologically illiterate overlords!
I am sure Iran has great scientists and visiting space station is not going to help them develop nukes (or at least experiment payload can be screened to rule that out). What objections can we possibly have to advancement of human knowledge, no matter which country the astronaut is from?
You missed the big communist scare a few decades ago. Or Japanese-American hysteria during WWII. Whenever there is a conflict, there is a tendency to demonize everyone that shares any attributes with an enemy. Once the conflict is over, it always turns out that these are just regular folks who just happen to look/talk/pray like the evildoers.
I don't think it's possible or even desirable for every piece of software to be open source. That would result in a lot of useful software not being written, as many smaller developers will not figure out how differentiate themselves from legal copycats.
Nevertheless, FSF made a huge positive contribution by making compelling critical mass of free software available and forcing commercial companies to share improvements that they make to Linux kernel, compilers and other key infrastructure. We can't even imagine how sucky and insecure commercial products would be today if they were not built on shared community foundation. GPL essentially helped overcome tragedy of the commons where it's better for everyone if there is, say, a good OS kernel available for everyone to build their own UI on top, but it's in immediate interest of any one company to withhold improvements from competitors.
I can see a similar need in hardware - a set of copyleft hardware, firmware and 3D printer designs that anyone can use as a base for an innovative product while sharing improvements to reusable components.
It's an important secondary benefit that people will be able to run 100% open systems to learn, because of concern about government backdoors or just because of philosophical objections to not having source, like RMS. I just don't see it as a primary motivating factor for most people in the position to actually contribute code.
When I buy a car, I don't expect that I wake up one day and the steering wheel moved to the back sit. Yet that's what Microsoft expects me to do to simply keep using my computer and running same apps and games as I always have.
And if you say "it's for security", wrong again. My car went through multiple recalls which are more complex than just fixing a buffer overflow, yet none of them caused it to turn into a motocycle (Windows 8) or lose a cigarette lighter (media center). What's more, Microsoft is the only one that is THAT bad. OSX, iOS and Android stay at least recognizable though updates. And with Linux I can run twm for windows manager if I want and still not get p0wned.
Giving into our more base desires to afford our female offspring a little extra safety is probably harmless
Except those desires are not harmless. They keep girls from fully participating in society and learning valuable skills. They keep men from being productive or taking care of their physical and emotional health by constantly requiring them to attend to needs of their girlfriends, wives and daughters, when the later could easily take care of those needs themselves giving proper upbringing.
Is reproductive failure really a likely enough existential threat today to justify losing a big part of our productivity to avoid it? My guess is that top threats are environmental destruction, nuclear war and superbugs. Why don't we prioritize protecting ourselves from our current threats, just like our ancestors prioritized theirs thousands of years ago?
When all children walk to school / play unsupervised, they are fairly safe as drivers know to look for them and, as a mixed age group, can hurt a would be predator or at least raise enough alarm for adults to show up. Now if you take your child by car everywhere, you are making him/her a little safer (at least short term - health/psychological effects are another topic). But if everyone does that, your child is in considerable danger every time they get accidentally separated from you or run on the road to fetch a ball.
I think we need more active measures to restore sanity, like parent volunteers on each corner around school start time to convince the rest of the parents to give independent walking a try.
They should allow their own devices to be programmed first. A lot of families today only have a phone and a tablet and no other devices. If those are locked down to only play candy crush, what hope is there for kids to learn?
Computers are everywhere, but they don't naturally expose programming tools anymore. It would be better if they did, but we have to work with reality of locked down iPads where you need to pay an annual fee to program.
I am currently trying to get an 8 year old to complete hour of code classes. The classes are pretty good, with animated characters and concepts of functions, conditions and so on. But she has just barely enough patience and formal thinking to finish exercises with my help. If I am not around, she just starts randomly twiddling with blocks and gets frustrated that nothing works.
Now, some 5 year olds may be unusually good at this. But to teach this in classroom environment, with kids of different abilities and one instructor per 20 or more children, you probably need to wait till 4th grade at the earliest. Might be able to have one or two introductory classes to whet the appetite earlier, but not expect to get very far with it. Better to focus on basics like math.
Since subject of Chrome has come up, please beware that either Slashdot or Chrome change has broke ability to comment using this combination. Any attempt to submit the comment says that I couldn't prove I am human, while similar action on, say, Safari works perfectly.
Happy holidays and please take a look at this at your earliest convenience. I am using current stable Chrome on MacOSX 10.11.2, and the browser works well on other sites.
I hate Putin, but the links in this story do not support its conclusion. What is the total budget for Russian space program? What other missions are planned? Has anyone quantified waste versus useful work?
It could be that moon is just not the most scientifically or commercially important target right now and they are focusing on more interesting missions. Obama reached the same conclusion a few years back while INCREASING total NASA budget to focus on Mars exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't always have to screw one group of people over to remedy injustice to another group. Society can tolerate some inefficiency in order to protect everyone's right to separate self expression.
Certainly it should be illegal for a restaurant to refuse service to a same sex couple who walk in holding hands. But here was are forcing someone to actively participate in a ceremony that goes against their sincere beliefs. I think we can carve out a small exception for specific circumstances (ceremony that is widely considered to be religious in nature, family business, non-urgent need, wide availability of alternatives).
Unlike Mozilla bashes, I am not suggesting that any activists be forced out of their jobs just for having opinions different from mine.
There are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are happy to use Yahoo services and there is no reason why the company can not keep them running well and earning salary for employees. The problem is logically impossible expectation of infinite growth placed on public companies. Sooner or later this drives every successful company into collapse after losing their pyramid scheme and investors flock to the latest overhyped startup to try to recoup their losses with more gambling.
Prosecuting outsiders to bond members of your own tribe seems to be an inescapable human need. Liberal activists who boo comics and ensure that anyone who dares to have a different personal opinion of, say, homosexuality loses their job are just bible thumpers and Saudi Arabia morality police going by another name. They have to continuously crank up the extremes of zero tolerance for anyone who deviates from their ideas about women, minorities, native americans and so on to bond with each other and maintain self image of superior human beings who have full right to bully and discriminate against savages.
For the record, I fully believe that LGBT and all other minorities including polygamists have a right to equal, productive lives, and so should a baker who doesn't want to make a cake for their wedding. It's just that activist groups who claim to support either side are actually just on a power trip to prop up their own self esteem and find a legitimate excuse to bully others.
Please, could someone PLEASE explain the logic behind participating in multiplayer games?
The rules of these games are made up anyway and winning is not an indication of any admirable real world trait or skill. So some people get a kick out of making yet another game out of beating the game without getting caught, seeing people hide behind walls they can see through and then fragging them and taunting them in chat.
Majority of devices fail with perfectly functioning hardware, because software is no longer updated, with the last available release usually being horribly slow and bloated. Installing a custom ROM often does wonders for usability. We should first demand that that bootloaders are unlockable and at least the interface expected and provided by driver binaries is well documented. Fully open and user serviceable hardware would be great, but even modest steps will keep lots of stuff out of landfill.
Why would I want to plug in a whatever box and watch a middle of whatever program it's showing at the time, interrupted by ads every 15 minutes? When technology is there to select exactly what I want to see and when. Even for live news/sports I may want to pause or rewind to see what I missed. Just give me well working apps and ability to subscribe to the ones that appeal to me.
My car has plenty of smarts, including a drive by wire system and *gasp* an electronic key that ensures that only I can operate it. This does introduce some new failure mode, but *overall* I am safer and more likely to get where I am going because of all this technology.
If done right, a smart gun can be actually more reliable and accurate while simultaneously reducing accidents. For example, it can have a screen that shows me where a bullet will hit and how many remain in the magazine. It can have redundant ways of unlocking, including a physical key if the battery runs out.
As for government disabling guns, they can already send a SWAT team in bulletproof vests and shred you to pieces. The only difference is that you and innocent bystanders around you are more likely to survive. Plus, we are talking smart, not internet connected.
8 year olds can learn Scratch precisely because it's limited. In beginning classes, there is are only so many way to connect blocks. One can stumble on a solution with random twiddling and over time start to notice patterns. This is not going to happen with any free form language where you can type whatever you want, but most of the thing you type will not compile.
Past this stage, there is actually nothing wrong with BASIC. Try PLAY "abcd", tweak till results sounds like a tune, then add gosub for a refrain.
If you don't like Linux Foundation policies, communication style of Linus himself or design of systemd, you are always free to fork the project and get full benefits of work so far as well as ability to merge any future patches that you like into your own source tree. Either your fork gathers enough following to maintain it, or the original project makes changes to address the problems that triggered it - either way you win.
The fact that this has not happened with Linux tells me that current situation is acceptable to a large majority of developers and users compared to inconvenience of manually merging patches. The rest should keep trying and perhaps one day they will create a project that exceeds original Linux, just like Linux eclipsed Minix. Personally, I would love to see an OS with versioned source/binary driver interface, where backward compatibility for existing binary drivers is maintained for many years. BUT, I am too lazy to actually contribute much development time, so I have to make do with what is out there.
Pair programming requires one to continuously socialize with someone nonstop for entire working day, something that most people, let alone most software engineers, can not do while maintaining concentration, creativity or sanity.
Code reviews encourage filibusters when someone keeps adding to the comment thread just because they personally want something done differently and others find it rude to approve the change and curtail discussion.
What works well is running lint and writing good tests. Then if someone is motivated enough to address their grievances with your code, they can clean it up on their own time.
I have been worried that using encryption will attract attention of law enforcement who will know I something to hide. What a tremendous relief that I will now look just like another law abiding citizen using escrow crypto. While at the same time, I will use this escrow crypto for 99% of my communications, including my embarrassing but legal porn collection. And then, just when I hatch my evil plots, I will encrypt a small amount of data with my own crypto, before stamping escrowed one on top.
Now the government has no reason to suspect me unless they get a warrant, sift through ALL my stuff and manage to realize that a second of noise in a 2 hour movie file contains my real secrets.
I for one welcome our new technologically illiterate overlords!
I have been worried that using encryption will attract attention of law enforcement who will know I something to hide. What a tremendous relief that I will now look just like another law abiding citizen using escrow crypto. While at the same time, I will use this escrow crypto for 99% of my communications, including my embarrassing but legal porn collection. And then, just when I hatch my evil plots, I will encrypt a small amount of data with my own crypto, before stamping escrowed one on top.
Now the government has no reason to suspect me unless they get a warrant, sift through ALL my stuff and manage to realize that a second of noise in a 2 hour movie file contains my real secrets.
I for one welcome our new technologically illiterate overlords!
I am sure Iran has great scientists and visiting space station is not going to help them develop nukes (or at least experiment payload can be screened to rule that out). What objections can we possibly have to advancement of human knowledge, no matter which country the astronaut is from?
You missed the big communist scare a few decades ago. Or Japanese-American hysteria during WWII. Whenever there is a conflict, there is a tendency to demonize everyone that shares any attributes with an enemy. Once the conflict is over, it always turns out that these are just regular folks who just happen to look/talk/pray like the evildoers.
Quite likely Windows kernel and base DLLs will be eventually open source. Being the only closed source kernel is a competitive disadvantage.
I don't think it's possible or even desirable for every piece of software to be open source. That would result in a lot of useful software not being written, as many smaller developers will not figure out how differentiate themselves from legal copycats.
Nevertheless, FSF made a huge positive contribution by making compelling critical mass of free software available and forcing commercial companies to share improvements that they make to Linux kernel, compilers and other key infrastructure. We can't even imagine how sucky and insecure commercial products would be today if they were not built on shared community foundation. GPL essentially helped overcome tragedy of the commons where it's better for everyone if there is, say, a good OS kernel available for everyone to build their own UI on top, but it's in immediate interest of any one company to withhold improvements from competitors.
I can see a similar need in hardware - a set of copyleft hardware, firmware and 3D printer designs that anyone can use as a base for an innovative product while sharing improvements to reusable components.
It's an important secondary benefit that people will be able to run 100% open systems to learn, because of concern about government backdoors or just because of philosophical objections to not having source, like RMS. I just don't see it as a primary motivating factor for most people in the position to actually contribute code.
When I buy a car, I don't expect that I wake up one day and the steering wheel moved to the back sit. Yet that's what Microsoft expects me to do to simply keep using my computer and running same apps and games as I always have.
And if you say "it's for security", wrong again. My car went through multiple recalls which are more complex than just fixing a buffer overflow, yet none of them caused it to turn into a motocycle (Windows 8) or lose a cigarette lighter (media center). What's more, Microsoft is the only one that is THAT bad. OSX, iOS and Android stay at least recognizable though updates. And with Linux I can run twm for windows manager if I want and still not get p0wned.
Giving into our more base desires to afford our female offspring a little extra safety is probably harmless
Except those desires are not harmless. They keep girls from fully participating in society and learning valuable skills. They keep men from being productive or taking care of their physical and emotional health by constantly requiring them to attend to needs of their girlfriends, wives and daughters, when the later could easily take care of those needs themselves giving proper upbringing.
Is reproductive failure really a likely enough existential threat today to justify losing a big part of our productivity to avoid it? My guess is that top threats are environmental destruction, nuclear war and superbugs. Why don't we prioritize protecting ourselves from our current threats, just like our ancestors prioritized theirs thousands of years ago?
When all children walk to school / play unsupervised, they are fairly safe as drivers know to look for them and, as a mixed age group, can hurt a would be predator or at least raise enough alarm for adults to show up. Now if you take your child by car everywhere, you are making him/her a little safer (at least short term - health/psychological effects are another topic). But if everyone does that, your child is in considerable danger every time they get accidentally separated from you or run on the road to fetch a ball.
I think we need more active measures to restore sanity, like parent volunteers on each corner around school start time to convince the rest of the parents to give independent walking a try.
They should allow their own devices to be programmed first. A lot of families today only have a phone and a tablet and no other devices. If those are locked down to only play candy crush, what hope is there for kids to learn?
Computers are everywhere, but they don't naturally expose programming tools anymore. It would be better if they did, but we have to work with reality of locked down iPads where you need to pay an annual fee to program.
I am currently trying to get an 8 year old to complete hour of code classes. The classes are pretty good, with animated characters and concepts of functions, conditions and so on. But she has just barely enough patience and formal thinking to finish exercises with my help. If I am not around, she just starts randomly twiddling with blocks and gets frustrated that nothing works.
Now, some 5 year olds may be unusually good at this. But to teach this in classroom environment, with kids of different abilities and one instructor per 20 or more children, you probably need to wait till 4th grade at the earliest. Might be able to have one or two introductory classes to whet the appetite earlier, but not expect to get very far with it. Better to focus on basics like math.
Dear Slashdot admins,
Since subject of Chrome has come up, please beware that either Slashdot or Chrome change has broke ability to comment using this combination. Any attempt to submit the comment says that I couldn't prove I am human, while similar action on, say, Safari works perfectly.
Happy holidays and please take a look at this at your earliest convenience. I am using current stable Chrome on MacOSX 10.11.2, and the browser works well on other sites.
I hate Putin, but the links in this story do not support its conclusion. What is the total budget for Russian space program? What other missions are planned? Has anyone quantified waste versus useful work?
It could be that moon is just not the most scientifically or commercially important target right now and they are focusing on more interesting missions. Obama reached the same conclusion a few years back while INCREASING total NASA budget to focus on Mars exploration.