> A more apt analogy would be somebody who develops extreme > sun sensitivity late in life, and then attempts to sue the sun.
That would be stupid on another level entirely, since no court has jurisdiction to issue any kind of injunction against the sun, and even if such an injunction were issued no law enforcement agency has the jurisdiction to enforce it, or the ability to do so even if jurisdiction issues are ignored.
This is more like saying you are allergic to iron (without any evidence to support this assertion, and without any statement from any doctor agreeing with your self-diagnosis) and suing the city for not filtering all of the iron out of the municipal water supply. Or the kooks who sue the city because important water additives, like chlorine and fluoride, are "poisonous", and nevermind about such esoteric concepts as safe doses.
It failed because it didn't do anything useful, worthwhile, interesting, or popular. It did was allow you to play hunt-the-pixel (like in a "graphical adventure" game or one of those edutainment children's games made from popular licensed characters), only instead of showing you something new or interesting when you clicked on the right little part of the picture, all it did was launch some piece of software that you could have launched much more easily without Bob, by using, say, Program Manager.
Sarah's a sufficiently common name that "Sarah Gaylord" wouldn't be a big deal. Nobody'd even know she was named after a modern famous person until they find out her middle name. Most kids are at least slightly embarrassed about their middle names, but they quickly discover that everyone else is too, so it's generally no big deal unless it's really extreme, and being named after a famous politician (well, apart from Hitler) isn't as extreme as all that.
Adolf as a first name, of course, would be a terrible thing to saddle the poor child with, quite irrespective of the middle name.
> The simplicity of the mouse was found to be better.
Yeah? Unplug your keyboard and use the computer with just a mouse for a week, then we'll talk.
Having *both* is better, but if you have to pick one, the keyboard is way more important than the mouse for almost all common computing tasks (image editing being a possible exception).
> My experience has made me believe PostgreSQL is better in every respect. > It's more stable, has more features and is easier to use.
However, it does take a little longer to initially learn to administer Postgres. It's little things like SHOW TABLES in MySQL versus learning which table the schemata are stored in under Postgres. It's not a very big deal, and IMO it's worth it, but there is a greater initial investment of time there.
> Please don't embarrass yourself and say the 1967 war. Israel started that war,
Israel was deliberately provoked into starting that war. I'm not saying Israel didn't want to fight the war. But the nations around them (Nasser's Egypt in particular) didn't want peace, either. It was very much a two-sided conflict.
Egypt and Israel seem to have found a way to live more or less at peace with one another now, but there are still other conflicts in the region. Two-sided conflicts. It's disingenuous to blame everything on Israel, when most of the nations in the region are unwilling to officially admit that Israel is even a country or has a right to *exist*.
I'm not saying Israel hasn't done anything unnecessarily provocative. They have. But the Arab-Israeli conflict is not all just about how unreasonable Israel is. There's plenty of blame to go around in the Middle East.
> Is there a good argument to cover even tortuous actions under this? > I'm for a free Internet, but defamation on the Internet is still defamation
Nobody's saying you can't be sued for defamation just because it happens on the internet.
I guess the argument goes something like this: in the real world, if you've said something inflammatory and somebody wants to sue you for it, figuring out who you are is entirely their problem. There's no magic way for them to track you down just by looking at what you said. For instance, if you hand out leaflets with something inflammatory on them, getting ahold of a copy of the leaflet does not in itself give them a way to identify you.
The other side of the argument, I suppose, would be that figuring out how to hand out the leaflets in a way that doesn't identify you as the defamer is entirely *your* problem.
I haven't yet entirely decided exactly how I feel about this. I can see some disadvantages to society either way it goes, so it's a matter of figuring out priorities.
> That is of course as long as the Jewish population does not > continue in their bid to delegitimize the claims of the Arabs > to a full and open democratic system
Do the Palestinians *want* a full and open democratic system? That's news to me.
Terms like "right wing" and "left wing" are inherently relative. France of course has politicians that are fairly described as "right wing" by French standards, but they're still left-of-center (i.e., liberal) by US standards. If you prefer to look at things from the other perspective, the "moderates" in the US are pretty right-wing by French standards.
France is not as far left of center as, say, Sweden.
And the US (or Israel for that matter) is not the most right-wing country there is, either.
> In other words, they will use 1kB for 1000 bytes and 1KiB for 1024 bytes.
Why on earth would we ever want to know how many units of 1000 bytes something is? That's useless, meaningless pseudo-information that has nothing to do with anything. There's no reason to ever want to know how many sets of 1000 bytes anything is. Ever.
If I want to know how much space a file takes up, I need to be told in units that have something to do with how much space the file takes up. Sectors would be ideal if I were only ever storing files on filesystems with one sector size, but if my hard drive has 4kb sectors and my flash-eeprom-based USB mass storage device has 512-byte sectors, then I guess I'd rather be told in kilobytes.
And no, a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes. That's nonsense, invented by marketing departments and perpetuated by people who don't understand the first thing about computers.
If you want an actual video *card*, you get Matrox. (That's assuming you want a quality product for a workstation. If all you want to do is play 3D games, you can go with ATA or Nvidia.)
Intel video chipsets are for onboard video (which adequate for kiosks, headless servers, family "web and email" computers, and a variety of other basic applications).
> Contrary to popular belief, lighting amatch does not > "burn away" all the bad odor chemicals. It just masks them.
However, the popular belief came about because of a use case wherein it does actually help (namely, burning a candle in the bathroom when people have been farting in there).
When you get out of computer-geek circles and spend some time among ordinary garden-variety end users, you quickly find out that just about the only people who don't print email are the ones who don't *check* their email. Sometimes they print it first, in order to keep it so they'll have it, and then they delete it from the computer so it won't take up space.
People also print web pages, a good deal more often than they print word processing documents. Frequently they print web pages that they don't even want. And they never EVER use print preview to decide which pages to print. You can wheedle, cajole, beg, threaten, and charge them a quarter a page, but they still won't use print preview. Even when they've been printing the same web page every day for years, and it *always* comes out three pages long, and pages 1 and 3 *always* consist of junk they don't want (headers, footers, ads,...), they still won't print just page 2, no matter how many times you show them how. (And yes, people really do print the same web page habitually. Usually it's a web pages that sometimes gets changed or updated, but not always.)
Wikipedia's idea of what's notable doesn't necessarily jive with a journalist's idea of what's notable.
Being an encyclopedia, and thus a tertiary source, Wikipedia is mostly looking for articles for which numerous secondary sources can be assembled. (An AP article is one example of a secondary source.) Note that an encyclopedia does not reproduce the content from the secondary sources, and it certainly doesn't compete with or "scoop" them. It summarizes them, and (apart from maybe a handful of footnotes) it generally treats them collectively. For Wikipedia, the single most important notability criterion is the availability of secondary source material on the topic. Online, by preference, although print sources can also be used.
Typically a journalist is not interested in whether there are notable secondary sources or not. He's looking for anything that readers will be interested in reading about, and bonus points if it's current. *Extra* bonus points if your story breaks first and all the other papers have to scramble to catch up. Journalists will use secondary sources when it's all they can get, but they prefer primary sources.
In some ways Wikinews would be a better fit for journalists than Wikipedia, but college students aren't necessarily in a position to report directly on the topics Wikinews wants to cover, because they need to stay near enough to campus that they can get to class on a regular basis. So unless some major news story is unfolding right next to the university... Also, Wikinews isn't nearly as well-known as Wikipedia, so the assignment wouldn't have the same appeal.
Note too that I'm not saying it can't be a useful assignment. Actually, the topics mentioned in the summary are definitely a good fit for Wikipedia's notability criteria, so maybe the professor is sensitive to the differences and making an effort to hand out the assignments in a reasonable way. Writing exercises are often designed to stress certain skills that the students need to develop, without regard for other skills that they will practice another time. Not being in the class, I don't know how well this assignment fits in to the curriculum or how useful it is for the students. It *could* be useful, if done well.
But it's not exactly the kind of writing most journalists will do after graduation.
I mean, sure, it's closer than if he had them writing zombie novellas or picture books...
> worry that the Chinese Internet will become a Chinese LAN
Wouldn't that be a WAN? I could be a little fuzzy on the exact details, but what I do remember of geography suggests China may be a little larger than the figure usually quoted for the length limits on LAN cabling.
IE isn't designed with the intent and for the purpose of altering websites and making them appear different from how they were intended. It (especially IE6) isn't very good at rendering things correctly, but that's due to incompetence, rather than a designed-in intention.
However, I'm hoping the FB legal team goes with a "he used our trademark in the name of his product" argument. That would set no dangerous new precedents.
> Any chance of convincing some gray/black hats to... hack Chavez's websites
There's a more straightforward approach.
If he shuts down opposition TV stations operated within the country, all you have to do is operate a TV station from across the border in Guyana or Brasil or Colombia. Heck, Puerto Rico is almost close enough if you broadcast at a really high power.
This doesn't work so well for geographically large countries like China. You can get your message to the people near the border, but the interior is hard to reach. But Venezuela isn't all that big. About the size of Texas. Put a station near the border in Colombia and one near the border in Guyana or Brasil, and you can reach most of Venezuela.
The elementary school math curriculum, at least in the US, is worse than useless. In the first place, it teaches precious little actual math. It does cover the concepts of defined order, addition, place value, and multiplication. Occasionally they throw in a short unit that covers some other stuff (like, say, the names of simple geometric shapes), but that's over in a couple of weeks and then you're back to the grindstone studying multi-column multiplication again.
The worse problem, though, is what the curriculum teaches inadvertently. Specifically, it teaches kids to *hate* anything that's called "math", for the rest of their lives.
Here, kids, here's a three-page worksheet that makes you repeat the same four or five steps over and over and over again. You'll be bored by the third problem on the first page, but please make sure you finish the whole thing. Tomorrow we'll give you another one just like it. We'll be practicing this *particular* set of four or five steps over and over again like this for four or five months, and then we'll move on to another very similar set of four or five steps. Next year you'll go through both of them again for several months each. Isn't that exciting?
Give me a stack of six gradeschool math books, one for each grade starting with kindergarten, and let me tear out the pages that serve no useful purpose. I'll give you back about nine months' worth of mediocre curriculum, maybe twelve months tops. The rest is pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a note about tabs and options and stuff, which are supposedly "above", but the area above that paragraph is just blank.
> A more apt analogy would be somebody who develops extreme
> sun sensitivity late in life, and then attempts to sue the sun.
That would be stupid on another level entirely, since no court has jurisdiction to issue any kind of injunction against the sun, and even if such an injunction were issued no law enforcement agency has the jurisdiction to enforce it, or the ability to do so even if jurisdiction issues are ignored.
This is more like saying you are allergic to iron (without any evidence to support this assertion, and without any statement from any doctor agreeing with your self-diagnosis) and suing the city for not filtering all of the iron out of the municipal water supply. Or the kooks who sue the city because important water additives, like chlorine and fluoride, are "poisonous", and nevermind about such esoteric concepts as safe doses.
Does that mean Emacs is now the best software for real graphics designers to get their work done?
It failed because it didn't do anything useful, worthwhile, interesting, or popular. It did was allow you to play hunt-the-pixel (like in a "graphical adventure" game or one of those edutainment children's games made from popular licensed characters), only instead of showing you something new or interesting when you clicked on the right little part of the picture, all it did was launch some piece of software that you could have launched much more easily without Bob, by using, say, Program Manager.
> tech that appears to be doing something useful but
> you end up wasting more time with it than you'd ever save.
Oh, like PowerPoint.
Sarah's a sufficiently common name that "Sarah Gaylord" wouldn't be a big deal. Nobody'd even know she was named after a modern famous person until they find out her middle name. Most kids are at least slightly embarrassed about their middle names, but they quickly discover that everyone else is too, so it's generally no big deal unless it's really extreme, and being named after a famous politician (well, apart from Hitler) isn't as extreme as all that.
Adolf as a first name, of course, would be a terrible thing to saddle the poor child with, quite irrespective of the middle name.
> The simplicity of the mouse was found to be better.
Yeah? Unplug your keyboard and use the computer with just a mouse for a week, then we'll talk.
Having *both* is better, but if you have to pick one, the keyboard is way more important than the mouse for almost all common computing tasks (image editing being a possible exception).
> My experience has made me believe PostgreSQL is better in every respect.
> It's more stable, has more features and is easier to use.
However, it does take a little longer to initially learn to administer Postgres. It's little things like SHOW TABLES in MySQL versus learning which table the schemata are stored in under Postgres. It's not a very big deal, and IMO it's worth it, but there is a greater initial investment of time there.
> Please don't embarrass yourself and say the 1967 war. Israel started that war,
Israel was deliberately provoked into starting that war. I'm not saying Israel didn't want to fight the war. But the nations around them (Nasser's Egypt in particular) didn't want peace, either. It was very much a two-sided conflict.
Egypt and Israel seem to have found a way to live more or less at peace with one another now, but there are still other conflicts in the region. Two-sided conflicts. It's disingenuous to blame everything on Israel, when most of the nations in the region are unwilling to officially admit that Israel is even a country or has a right to *exist*.
I'm not saying Israel hasn't done anything unnecessarily provocative. They have. But the Arab-Israeli conflict is not all just about how unreasonable Israel is. There's plenty of blame to go around in the Middle East.
> Is there a good argument to cover even tortuous actions under this?
> I'm for a free Internet, but defamation on the Internet is still defamation
Nobody's saying you can't be sued for defamation just because it happens on the internet.
I guess the argument goes something like this: in the real world, if you've said something inflammatory and somebody wants to sue you for it, figuring out who you are is entirely their problem. There's no magic way for them to track you down just by looking at what you said. For instance, if you hand out leaflets with something inflammatory on them, getting ahold of a copy of the leaflet does not in itself give them a way to identify you.
The other side of the argument, I suppose, would be that figuring out how to hand out the leaflets in a way that doesn't identify you as the defamer is entirely *your* problem.
I haven't yet entirely decided exactly how I feel about this. I can see some disadvantages to society either way it goes, so it's a matter of figuring out priorities.
> That is of course as long as the Jewish population does not
> continue in their bid to delegitimize the claims of the Arabs
> to a full and open democratic system
Do the Palestinians *want* a full and open democratic system? That's news to me.
> France? Left-wing?
Compared to a country like the US, yes.
Terms like "right wing" and "left wing" are inherently relative. France of course has politicians that are fairly described as "right wing" by French standards, but they're still left-of-center (i.e., liberal) by US standards. If you prefer to look at things from the other perspective, the "moderates" in the US are pretty right-wing by French standards.
France is not as far left of center as, say, Sweden.
And the US (or Israel for that matter) is not the most right-wing country there is, either.
> In other words, they will use 1kB for 1000 bytes and 1KiB for 1024 bytes.
Why on earth would we ever want to know how many units of 1000 bytes something is? That's useless, meaningless pseudo-information that has nothing to do with anything. There's no reason to ever want to know how many sets of 1000 bytes anything is. Ever.
If I want to know how much space a file takes up, I need to be told in units that have something to do with how much space the file takes up. Sectors would be ideal if I were only ever storing files on filesystems with one sector size, but if my hard drive has 4kb sectors and my flash-eeprom-based USB mass storage device has 512-byte sectors, then I guess I'd rather be told in kilobytes.
And no, a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes. That's nonsense, invented by marketing departments and perpetuated by people who don't understand the first thing about computers.
> Because that would mean your legal
> system is completely fucked up.
Like, for instance, every human legal system ever?
> Depends on what you want to put it into--if it's another living being
YMBNH.
> I want at least 120x optical zoom, ad-block on the HUD,
> and an automatic targeting program for the laser cannons.
I'd ask for a trillion billion dollars, my own space shuttle, and a private continent.
(Actually, I'm really the kind of guy who'd be more likely to wish for a sandwich like Hobbes. But I think Calvin's line is funnier.)
> "Would you like ultra-wide spectrum super-HD eyes with 60x optical
> zoom, Internet-connected HUD and complimentary laser cannons
Depends. What's all this going to cost me?
Oh, wait, let me guess: an arm and a leg, right? No thanks, then.
If you want an actual video *card*, you get Matrox. (That's assuming you want a quality product for a workstation. If all you want to do is play 3D games, you can go with ATA or Nvidia.)
Intel video chipsets are for onboard video (which adequate for kiosks, headless servers, family "web and email" computers, and a variety of other basic applications).
> Contrary to popular belief, lighting amatch does not
> "burn away" all the bad odor chemicals. It just masks them.
However, the popular belief came about because of a use case wherein it does actually help (namely, burning a candle in the bathroom when people have been farting in there).
> Only if people are printing emails...
...), they still won't print just page 2, no matter how many times you show them how. (And yes, people really do print the same web page habitually. Usually it's a web pages that sometimes gets changed or updated, but not always.)
When you get out of computer-geek circles and spend some time among ordinary garden-variety end users, you quickly find out that just about the only people who don't print email are the ones who don't *check* their email. Sometimes they print it first, in order to keep it so they'll have it, and then they delete it from the computer so it won't take up space.
People also print web pages, a good deal more often than they print word processing documents. Frequently they print web pages that they don't even want. And they never EVER use print preview to decide which pages to print. You can wheedle, cajole, beg, threaten, and charge them a quarter a page, but they still won't use print preview. Even when they've been printing the same web page every day for years, and it *always* comes out three pages long, and pages 1 and 3 *always* consist of junk they don't want (headers, footers, ads,
Wikipedia's idea of what's notable doesn't necessarily jive with a journalist's idea of what's notable.
Being an encyclopedia, and thus a tertiary source, Wikipedia is mostly looking for articles for which numerous secondary sources can be assembled. (An AP article is one example of a secondary source.) Note that an encyclopedia does not reproduce the content from the secondary sources, and it certainly doesn't compete with or "scoop" them. It summarizes them, and (apart from maybe a handful of footnotes) it generally treats them collectively. For Wikipedia, the single most important notability criterion is the availability of secondary source material on the topic. Online, by preference, although print sources can also be used.
Typically a journalist is not interested in whether there are notable secondary sources or not. He's looking for anything that readers will be interested in reading about, and bonus points if it's current. *Extra* bonus points if your story breaks first and all the other papers have to scramble to catch up. Journalists will use secondary sources when it's all they can get, but they prefer primary sources.
In some ways Wikinews would be a better fit for journalists than Wikipedia, but college students aren't necessarily in a position to report directly on the topics Wikinews wants to cover, because they need to stay near enough to campus that they can get to class on a regular basis. So unless some major news story is unfolding right next to the university... Also, Wikinews isn't nearly as well-known as Wikipedia, so the assignment wouldn't have the same appeal.
Note too that I'm not saying it can't be a useful assignment. Actually, the topics mentioned in the summary are definitely a good fit for Wikipedia's notability criteria, so maybe the professor is sensitive to the differences and making an effort to hand out the assignments in a reasonable way. Writing exercises are often designed to stress certain skills that the students need to develop, without regard for other skills that they will practice another time. Not being in the class, I don't know how well this assignment fits in to the curriculum or how useful it is for the students. It *could* be useful, if done well.
But it's not exactly the kind of writing most journalists will do after graduation.
I mean, sure, it's closer than if he had them writing zombie novellas or picture books...
> worry that the Chinese Internet will become a Chinese LAN
Wouldn't that be a WAN? I could be a little fuzzy on the exact details, but what I do remember of geography suggests China may be a little larger than the figure usually quoted for the length limits on LAN cabling.
> Hum, this would make IE illegal too!
IE isn't designed with the intent and for the purpose of altering websites and making them appear different from how they were intended. It (especially IE6) isn't very good at rendering things correctly, but that's due to incompetence, rather than a designed-in intention.
However, I'm hoping the FB legal team goes with a "he used our trademark in the name of his product" argument. That would set no dangerous new precedents.
> Any chance of convincing some gray/black hats to ... hack Chavez's websites
There's a more straightforward approach.
If he shuts down opposition TV stations operated within the country, all you have to do is operate a TV station from across the border in Guyana or Brasil or Colombia. Heck, Puerto Rico is almost close enough if you broadcast at a really high power.
This doesn't work so well for geographically large countries like China. You can get your message to the people near the border, but the interior is hard to reach. But Venezuela isn't all that big. About the size of Texas. Put a station near the border in Colombia and one near the border in Guyana or Brasil, and you can reach most of Venezuela.
The elementary school math curriculum, at least in the US, is worse than useless. In the first place, it teaches precious little actual math. It does cover the concepts of defined order, addition, place value, and multiplication. Occasionally they throw in a short unit that covers some other stuff (like, say, the names of simple geometric shapes), but that's over in a couple of weeks and then you're back to the grindstone studying multi-column multiplication again.
The worse problem, though, is what the curriculum teaches inadvertently. Specifically, it teaches kids to *hate* anything that's called "math", for the rest of their lives.
Here, kids, here's a three-page worksheet that makes you repeat the same four or five steps over and over and over again. You'll be bored by the third problem on the first page, but please make sure you finish the whole thing. Tomorrow we'll give you another one just like it. We'll be practicing this *particular* set of four or five steps over and over again like this for four or five months, and then we'll move on to another very similar set of four or five steps. Next year you'll go through both of them again for several months each. Isn't that exciting?
Give me a stack of six gradeschool math books, one for each grade starting with kindergarten, and let me tear out the pages that serve no useful purpose. I'll give you back about nine months' worth of mediocre curriculum, maybe twelve months tops. The rest is pointless.