Hey, don't knock homeschooling. Homeschooling by mothers with phDs works GREAT. It's homeschooling by dumb people we have to watch out for. In this case, I think "homeschool" is used as a codeword for stupid people who also happen to be fundamentalist loonies. If you're saying that stupid people who also happen to be fundamentalist loonies are a bad idea, then I'm in complete agreement. Let's make them illegal.
Anybody got any details on the Leann Etchison arrest? Charging someone with resisting arrest, rather than a real crime for which he or she was arrested sounds a lot like charging a person with assaulting a police officer -- ie hitting his billyclub with your head.
Good idea. Let's have a test to prove you can read and write. And also a poll-tax, so we can know that you're not some destitute moron. Also let's put some questions on that literacy test to make sure you're a protestant and not one of those loony religions, and a quick inspection to make sure you're genetically OK -- ie. white.
The slope is slipperier than a six foot long 2x6 smeared with okra propped up with a couple of bricks on one end.
"It's either that, or force comcast, the bells, and any other company that's ever been given tax breaks and subsidized land from the city for their equipment and for their lines to force them to provide wholesale access to their wires to other isps. That way, consumers really do have a choice on who they can get internet from and whether they are going to put up with this kind of crap or not."
A. The ILECs (monopoly phone companies) generally do have to sell wholesale and ISPs use this. They just price their low-end DSL so low it forces all the competition out of business. You need a DSLAM in every POP to serve the whole city, and that means the cost of the hardware and rent to the ILEC. It also means rent for wires to cross-connect -- the ILECs milk you for whatever they can. It's expensive, and the ILEC has a huge advantage on it. So it's not just the leasing of wires that's the problem here. If you want real DSL competition, you need to allow a lot more cheap stuff to competitors, and see that it's not just the wires the ILEC has a monopoly on.
B. Little ISPs buy transit from bigger ISPs. DSL providers buy transit from backbone companies. If you don't have neutrality laws, the shit you're describing will still happen on a larger scale at the backbone level. I remember a case in Canada where precisely this happened, so the little ISP had to give up on promising no throttling.
C. "Pennies on data transit costs"? What are you smoking? They saved NOTHING on transit costs. They were trying to delay modernizing their network to handle the real traffic load. They were trying to make money on having extra cash to play with today, rather than invest for the future. This is done by giving dividends on the stocks (which your top executives own a lot of, isn't that interesting), profiting from investments, and not getting loans. Comcast was just behaving naturally: they were being colossal dicks.
"Don't teach good password policy; they won't remember their passwords. Teach them how to use a password manager instead."
WRONG WRONG WRONG! Not on the password manager, but on not teaching password policy. Children need to understand that passwords should never be shared so as adults they'll see that as an axiom. If you went to college in the digital age (and worked in any support situation) you have seen the effects of couples sharing passwords and then breaking up. We all (as Slashdotters) know how that the best way to get someone's important banking password is to get their throwaway healthclub password -- they're usually the same. We know (from the movie wargames, and from real life, though in real life they're often far less hidden) that passwords are usually written down and close (very close) to the computer in question. The best place to find a password for the laptop you've just stolen is on a post-it note in the laptop bag.
Kids don't need to be taught to make up good passwords (though that's not a bad thing), kids need to be taught what passwords are, why they're important, how people steal things using them, never to share them, assume people want them, etc.
You're saying basically "Because this sounds like an intelligent reaction by politicians, it has to be fake. It simply must be a maneuver, rather than a real response. An actual response would be stupid. Intelligence is always a lie. Progress is always a lie."
No, that's not paranoia, any more than thinking the sun will come up tomorrow is paranoia.
Substitute "Solar Power" in this argument, and you heard a rough approximation of this pieces just a few years ago.
The argument here is "It'll never work. The status quo is better. It's too expensive to change."
You can go point by point on his article and and see short term thinking. The "injustice! the middle class is getting screwed!" is just a short term-thinking/emotional attempt to stop the progress of technology. In two years, things will be as he describes. In 15 years, only people in the burbs will use gas, and those in hybrids.
And if we don't subsidize this, in 15 years all our cars will be Chinese, Japanese, etc. This is a familiar situation: The auto industry in the 1970s was resistant to any change, and it destroyed American dominance in automobiles.
Agreed. However, I'd modify this. If the person really is looking at these systems and is interested, but hasn't started on his own, he should just give up and walk away.
Good programmers don't learn in school or from books: they learn things in school and things from books, articles, etc. but they learn to really grasp the thing by working, and they work because they cannot stop themselves.
OK, let's give the poster one more chance: Stop asking for help before starting work, grab an SDK, write a Hello World, expand it, break it, make a LOT of mistakes, read some stuff, solve some problems, THEN ask some questions, and do some more. They you'll either know you can do this stuff, or you'll know just how much you hate it and exactly why. Either is a fine conclusion.
Real programmers program. Bad programmers see holes in their resumes and try to plug them. Don't be a bad programmer.
If you just need some shaking data to unblur very nicely, why can't one just (offline, with a hour or two to crank on it) just figure out what the motion was by unblurring as hypothesis testing, perhaps on a small section of the picture. Then you unblur the whole thing on the most likely candidates?
"the motivations aren't always financial" is a phrase I've heard before -- mostly from HR departments. It means someone who doesn't care about the product, but rather about making his/her departmental bottom like is running things.
Money never hurts, and moves mountains. Yes, some people do it for free. More people will do it if there's cash. This means Microsoft either wants to:
1. save money (unlikely, but possible at a departmental level)
2. not find bugs (likely -- they take work to fix and cause embarrassment)
3. not have a simple quantifiable number associated with bugs, like "how much did you pay out this year on bug bounties?" so that consumers notice that they have more bugs than anyone else (very, VERY likely)
While you're right, you should know that the whole frog boiling things is a myth, at least when it comes to frogs. Try it sometime. Even when you start with cold water, they jump out when it gets reasonably hot.
Umm... If you recall, I asked some questions about the tech. "That means you point it at 1000 people and one of them will be injured. In what way? Skin burns or toasted cerebral cortex?" for example. I'm not disregarding anything. I'm just asking people I hope know more than me, because this sounds a lot like something dangerous being couched as completely benign. This is why we ask questions, rather than saying "This is BULLSHIT. Screw this!" Hopefully someone who actually knows something will answer. No one did, unfortunately.
No, no, you miss the point. The test companies aren't bullying them, necessarily. TI just needs to realize that things can be done to make their devices not a standard, and they'll do this in fear that the test companies will simply change the rules.
No need to bully. The fear would be there without the test companies saying ANYTHING.
What I don't understand is why TI doesn't embrace this, and come out with a specifically unhackable without a soldering iron (software in ROM, no ports) device. Students everywhere would have to abandon their current model and buy this crippled thing for tests. TI should make out like a bandit, and wind up the ONLY allowed device.
Give someone in a position of power a weapon which is supposed to be safe, and it'll get used way more often than you'd expected. Tasers are a great example of this. Remember the "don't tase me, man!" video, or any of the other instances we've seen of police horribly abusing them?
The thing about a gun is that the mopes (or even the clever folks) holding them understand their consequences and know that there will be ramifications.
Hence my question about the amount of time you use them and what the slope of the curve on damage for the victims is. If these are designed to be used for 30 second bursts and can affect a crowd of hundreds, we can expect them to be used over and over on such crowds, with little or no restraint.
Yes, Kent States happen, but soldiers know that they're supposed to avoid such things. They know what happens when they pull the trigger. This microwave weapon, conversely, is a pleasant weapon to wield -- no visible/known consequences.
"Hey man, don't nuke us, man!" or "Could you please now, stop nuking us. We're trying to leave. Please stop. My friend's eyeballs are steaming."
A hardware company actually put a self-destruct mechanism in the phone when you change the software.
A. This will get tripped accidentally, even for naive users, and will cost owners money to fix. B. This violates the idea of ownership of the device. Motorola figures that they're licensing you parts, not selling. For an "open" OS, this is insane. C. Once you get around it, unless you can destroy the code, you still have that thing hanging around. A mistake or bad combination later on could trip it -- there's no reason to have to put up with walking through a minefield.
All this translates to "Spread the news, blacklist the phone, send a message to Motorola." Because if this goes on as a "who cares" thing, all Motorola Android phones will have it in future and other companies will follow suit.
This needs to be a black eye for Motorola, they need to notice that, and they need to quickly backpedal.
Bingo. That's the comic book version of this phenomenon. But then, Schank argued that people did this a a normal behavior, whereas the sort of debate you're describing is contrived to work exactly the way you describe.
When you give an interview, if you're good with the media you have points you want to make. You don't care what the questions are. You just repeat the same points/stories over and over, and the interviewer walks away with only the material you want him/her to print/show.
Debates work much the same. Unless you've been waiting for a particular line you expect, and for which you've prepared a zinger or a trap of some kind, who cares what the other guy says? Every time you get to talk is just that: A time YOU get to talk, so you give the stories and lines that will play well for you.
It's hardly a debate, therefore, and completely useless to the electorate. There's a great moment in a debate between Richie Daley, Jane Byrne and Harold Washington for the office of mayor. The moderator (I think) ask a question. Richie talks, Jane talks both repeating the same soundbites they keep repeating all campaign long, and then Harold, in exasperation, says [I paraphrase] "Now, [NAME], I'm going to talk now, and I'm going to answer your question. And once I've done that, I will be the ONLY person here who answered your question!" Then he did.
I don't need the gateway to the legacy telco world. I just want a cross platform system which works on Windows, Linux and Android (and maybe the iPhone) which allows free calls and video and can be used by a grandma.
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Hey, don't knock homeschooling. Homeschooling by mothers with phDs works GREAT. It's homeschooling by dumb people we have to watch out for. In this case, I think "homeschool" is used as a codeword for stupid people who also happen to be fundamentalist loonies. If you're saying that stupid people who also happen to be fundamentalist loonies are a bad idea, then I'm in complete agreement. Let's make them illegal.
Anybody got any details on the Leann Etchison arrest? Charging someone with resisting arrest, rather than a real crime for which he or she was arrested sounds a lot like charging a person with assaulting a police officer -- ie hitting his billyclub with your head.
Good idea. Let's have a test to prove you can read and write. And also a poll-tax, so we can know that you're not some destitute moron. Also let's put some questions on that literacy test to make sure you're a protestant and not one of those loony religions, and a quick inspection to make sure you're genetically OK -- ie. white.
The slope is slipperier than a six foot long 2x6 smeared with okra propped up with a couple of bricks on one end.
"It's either that, or force comcast, the bells, and any other company that's ever been given tax breaks and subsidized land from the city for their equipment and for their lines to force them to provide wholesale access to their wires to other isps. That way, consumers really do have a choice on who they can get internet from and whether they are going to put up with this kind of crap or not."
A. The ILECs (monopoly phone companies) generally do have to sell wholesale and ISPs use this. They just price their low-end DSL so low it forces all the competition out of business. You need a DSLAM in every POP to serve the whole city, and that means the cost of the hardware and rent to the ILEC. It also means rent for wires to cross-connect -- the ILECs milk you for whatever they can. It's expensive, and the ILEC has a huge advantage on it. So it's not just the leasing of wires that's the problem here. If you want real DSL competition, you need to allow a lot more cheap stuff to competitors, and see that it's not just the wires the ILEC has a monopoly on.
B. Little ISPs buy transit from bigger ISPs. DSL providers buy transit from backbone companies. If you don't have neutrality laws, the shit you're describing will still happen on a larger scale at the backbone level. I remember a case in Canada where precisely this happened, so the little ISP had to give up on promising no throttling.
C. "Pennies on data transit costs"? What are you smoking? They saved NOTHING on transit costs. They were trying to delay modernizing their network to handle the real traffic load. They were trying to make money on having extra cash to play with today, rather than invest for the future. This is done by giving dividends on the stocks (which your top executives own a lot of, isn't that interesting), profiting from investments, and not getting loans. Comcast was just behaving naturally: they were being colossal dicks.
"Don't teach good password policy; they won't remember their passwords. Teach them how to use a password manager instead."
WRONG WRONG WRONG! Not on the password manager, but on not teaching password policy. Children need to understand that passwords should never be shared so as adults they'll see that as an axiom. If you went to college in the digital age (and worked in any support situation) you have seen the effects of couples sharing passwords and then breaking up. We all (as Slashdotters) know how that the best way to get someone's important banking password is to get their throwaway healthclub password -- they're usually the same. We know (from the movie wargames, and from real life, though in real life they're often far less hidden) that passwords are usually written down and close (very close) to the computer in question. The best place to find a password for the laptop you've just stolen is on a post-it note in the laptop bag.
Kids don't need to be taught to make up good passwords (though that's not a bad thing), kids need to be taught what passwords are, why they're important, how people steal things using them, never to share them, assume people want them, etc.
You're saying basically "Because this sounds like an intelligent reaction by politicians, it has to be fake. It simply must be a maneuver, rather than a real response. An actual response would be stupid. Intelligence is always a lie. Progress is always a lie."
No, that's not paranoia, any more than thinking the sun will come up tomorrow is paranoia.
I'm done. Mark said it best in Doonesbury. He said it too early, I think. Now it's a done deal, though.
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2009/12/25/
In this case, the door you were locking lead directly into the locksmith's workshop.
Substitute "Solar Power" in this argument, and you heard a rough approximation of this pieces just a few years ago.
The argument here is "It'll never work. The status quo is better. It's too expensive to change."
You can go point by point on his article and and see short term thinking. The "injustice! the middle class is getting screwed!" is just a short term-thinking/emotional attempt to stop the progress of technology. In two years, things will be as he describes. In 15 years, only people in the burbs will use gas, and those in hybrids.
And if we don't subsidize this, in 15 years all our cars will be Chinese, Japanese, etc. This is a familiar situation: The auto industry in the 1970s was resistant to any change, and it destroyed American dominance in automobiles.
Agreed. However, I'd modify this. If the person really is looking at these systems and is interested, but hasn't started on his own, he should just give up and walk away.
Good programmers don't learn in school or from books: they learn things in school and things from books, articles, etc. but they learn to really grasp the thing by working, and they work because they cannot stop themselves.
OK, let's give the poster one more chance: Stop asking for help before starting work, grab an SDK, write a Hello World, expand it, break it, make a LOT of mistakes, read some stuff, solve some problems, THEN ask some questions, and do some more. They you'll either know you can do this stuff, or you'll know just how much you hate it and exactly why. Either is a fine conclusion.
Real programmers program. Bad programmers see holes in their resumes and try to plug them. Don't be a bad programmer.
Here's a dumb question...
If you just need some shaking data to unblur very nicely, why can't one just (offline, with a hour or two to crank on it) just figure out what the motion was by unblurring as hypothesis testing, perhaps on a small section of the picture. Then you unblur the whole thing on the most likely candidates?
"the motivations aren't always financial" is a phrase I've heard before -- mostly from HR departments. It means someone who doesn't care about the product, but rather about making his/her departmental bottom like is running things.
Money never hurts, and moves mountains. Yes, some people do it for free. More people will do it if there's cash. This means Microsoft either wants to:
1. save money (unlikely, but possible at a departmental level)
2. not find bugs (likely -- they take work to fix and cause embarrassment)
3. not have a simple quantifiable number associated with bugs, like "how much did you pay out this year on bug bounties?" so that consumers notice that they have more bugs than anyone else (very, VERY likely)
Why does a PDF viewer need to give the document the ability to write at all?
Would ripping some of the crazy features out of the PDF spec solve this more completely and reasonably?
What do we use PDFs for which involves writes?
While you're right, you should know that the whole frog boiling things is a myth, at least when it comes to frogs. Try it sometime. Even when you start with cold water, they jump out when it gets reasonably hot.
Which is what we ought to be doing.
"In the meantime?" They were born unwieldy beasts.
No, used correctly, not death. So what happens when we abuse it?
Umm... If you recall, I asked some questions about the tech. "That means you point it at 1000 people and one of them will be injured. In what way? Skin burns or toasted cerebral cortex?" for example. I'm not disregarding anything. I'm just asking people I hope know more than me, because this sounds a lot like something dangerous being couched as completely benign. This is why we ask questions, rather than saying "This is BULLSHIT. Screw this!" Hopefully someone who actually knows something will answer. No one did, unfortunately.
No, no, you miss the point. The test companies aren't bullying them, necessarily. TI just needs to realize that things can be done to make their devices not a standard, and they'll do this in fear that the test companies will simply change the rules.
No need to bully. The fear would be there without the test companies saying ANYTHING.
What I don't understand is why TI doesn't embrace this, and come out with a specifically unhackable without a soldering iron (software in ROM, no ports) device. Students everywhere would have to abandon their current model and buy this crippled thing for tests. TI should make out like a bandit, and wind up the ONLY allowed device.
Actuarial exams already require the calculator you bring to be one of a very specific models.
Give someone in a position of power a weapon which is supposed to be safe, and it'll get used way more often than you'd expected. Tasers are a great example of this. Remember the "don't tase me, man!" video, or any of the other instances we've seen of police horribly abusing them?
The thing about a gun is that the mopes (or even the clever folks) holding them understand their consequences and know that there will be ramifications.
Hence my question about the amount of time you use them and what the slope of the curve on damage for the victims is. If these are designed to be used for 30 second bursts and can affect a crowd of hundreds, we can expect them to be used over and over on such crowds, with little or no restraint.
Yes, Kent States happen, but soldiers know that they're supposed to avoid such things. They know what happens when they pull the trigger. This microwave weapon, conversely, is a pleasant weapon to wield -- no visible/known consequences.
"Hey man, don't nuke us, man!" or "Could you please now, stop nuking us. We're trying to leave. Please stop. My friend's eyeballs are steaming."
That means you point it at 1000 people and one of them will be injured. In what way? Skin burns or toasted cerebral cortex?
If some over-aggressive soldier leaves it on too long, does that make the number .2% or 10%?
How long do we have to point it at people to change that to 100%? 1000 times too long or just a few seconds too much?
A hardware company actually put a self-destruct mechanism in the phone when you change the software.
A. This will get tripped accidentally, even for naive users, and will cost owners money to fix.
B. This violates the idea of ownership of the device. Motorola figures that they're licensing you parts, not selling. For an "open" OS, this is insane.
C. Once you get around it, unless you can destroy the code, you still have that thing hanging around. A mistake or bad combination later on could trip it -- there's no reason to have to put up with walking through a minefield.
All this translates to "Spread the news, blacklist the phone, send a message to Motorola." Because if this goes on as a "who cares" thing, all Motorola Android phones will have it in future and other companies will follow suit.
This needs to be a black eye for Motorola, they need to notice that, and they need to quickly backpedal.
Bingo. That's the comic book version of this phenomenon. But then, Schank argued that people did this a a normal behavior, whereas the sort of debate you're describing is contrived to work exactly the way you describe.
When you give an interview, if you're good with the media you have points you want to make. You don't care what the questions are. You just repeat the same points/stories over and over, and the interviewer walks away with only the material you want him/her to print/show.
Debates work much the same. Unless you've been waiting for a particular line you expect, and for which you've prepared a zinger or a trap of some kind, who cares what the other guy says? Every time you get to talk is just that: A time YOU get to talk, so you give the stories and lines that will play well for you.
It's hardly a debate, therefore, and completely useless to the electorate. There's a great moment in a debate between Richie Daley, Jane Byrne and Harold Washington for the office of mayor. The moderator (I think) ask a question. Richie talks, Jane talks both repeating the same soundbites they keep repeating all campaign long, and then Harold, in exasperation, says [I paraphrase] "Now, [NAME], I'm going to talk now, and I'm going to answer your question. And once I've done that, I will be the ONLY person here who answered your question!" Then he did.
Harold won.
"A little"?
I think he (or one of his grad students) found a fundamental behavior, and he excluded himself from it, because he didn't like the implication.
Yikes, I got his first name wrong -- it's Roger! My apologies, but in my defense, the talk he gave was something like 20 years ago.
Perhaps you're thinking about someone else -- I cannot find a TED talk online done by Roger Schank.
I don't need the gateway to the legacy telco world. I just want a cross platform system which works on Windows, Linux and Android (and maybe the iPhone) which allows free calls and video and can be used by a grandma.
What should I be using?