desktops larger than the screen resolution are possible with windows, too.
That's not what he was saying, though: with pretty much any window manager for X, you can drag a window around (and thus partly off-screen) by holding down ALT whilst dragging with the left mouse button. But I'm sure there's some powertoy or similar under windows that does the same thing these days...
How is it snubbing the Pope? In the Dialogue there are three characters, Salviati (the heliocentric pusher), Sagredo (the neutral who is swayed by Salviati's arguments), and Simplicio (the steadfast dunce who can't get past Ptolemy and who is essentially a narrow-minded fool). Throughout the dialogue, we have Salviati arguing strongly for the heliocentric system, Sagredo jumping on the bandwagon, and Simplicio getting confused, reluctantly agreeing, or not wanting to argue further. So we go through four days of dialogue, with Simplicio never even scoring a point against the wit of Salviati, who dismantles Simplicio's arguments easily.
At the very end of the work, Simplicio pops up and says that even though he can't quite understand Salviati's arguments, they seem wondrous to him. But, he says, "neverthelesse I esteem it not true and concluding: but keeping alwayes before the eyes of my mind a solid Doctrine that I have learn't from a most learned and ingenuous person, and with which it is necessary to sit down". And then he spouts out a ghastly paraphrase of the Pope's argument to Galileo -- namely, that despite everything, God might have made it so, just because. In outrageous pantomime, Salviati and Sagredo fall on the ground defeated by this "truly Angelical Doctrine" -- despite spending four days in hot debate it's all too difficult for them to guess God's wisdom, and Hey! let's go and spend an hour in our gondola instead. It's impossible to read the work without ending up thinking the Pope a fool (and, well, a simpleton) and having a laugh along with Galileo at the narrow-mindedness of the church.
As a piece of polemical writing, the Dialogue is brilliant. But as a scholarly argument it's appalling, with Salviati setting up strawman after strawman to "prove" his points. So if I have a deep-seated animosity towards Galileo, it's because he chose to ignore the scientific method that he preached. As a scientist, I can only feel horror that he is idolised for behaviour that goes against every basic tenet of science. Was the church right to haul him before the inquisition? Obviously they weren't -- it was the reaction of a deeply conservative body which couldn't brook with any alternative argument, and utterly deplorable. But they gave Galileo every possible chance to avoid conflict, and his behaviour was similarly appalling in seeking the fight without the evidence to support himself.
Hmmm... I can't say I agree with you. For anyone with a modicum of common sense it would have been immediately obvious that the tides theory was incorrect. First off, there was the problem that the theory didn't actually predict the observed tides (it predicted exactly one tide per day, at exactly noon every day -- obviously something that anyone living by the sea could see was wrong). But more importantly than that, it was bad physics, and Galileo had just pioneered the modern study of moving bodies. If anyone else had proposed the theory of the tides, Galileo would have shot it down in a second (and would have been scathing about the intelligence of the proposer to boot). Of course, Galileo was desperately keen to prove the heliocentric model, and perhaps might have deluded himself in his desperation. But whether intentionally deliberate or unintentionally deluded, it was bad, bad science and certainly didn't prove his case.
Now, the funny thing about the theory of the tides is that Kepler had previously, and correctly, attributed them to the pull of the moon and the sun (he never quite worked out gravity, but he got very close). Galileo's response to this was to ridicule Kepler. And this brings me to your second point -- Kepler's elliptical orbits -- since Galileo completely ignored them when trying to argue for the heliocentric model. (And to say that Galileo was in correspondence with Kepler is a little laughable, since Galileo pretty much ignored Kepler his entire life. The only time he paid any attention to Kepler at all was when Kepler was the lone voice believing his newly published telescopic observations, and even then he quickly forgot Kepler.) If Galileo had argued that a heliocentric system with elliptical orbits was a conceptually simpler system than the wheels-upon-wheels of Ptolemy, then one might give him a bit of credit. But Galileo was arguing only the wheels-upon-wheels of Copernicus, which in any case had an analogous geocentric competitor in Tycho's model (where the planets orbit the sun, which in turn orbits the earth). Tycho's model was favoured by the Jesuits, but Galileo chose to ignore (once again, one has to wonder, unscrupulously) this model in his Dialogue. Bad science, once again.
The phases of Venus did not disprove the Tychonian model (Venus orbits the sun in this model, so has phases), and so we're back to the lack of a stellar parallax. And yes, this could mean (as Kepler himself had argued) that the stars were very, very far away. But the simplest explanation was simply that the earth didn't orbit the sun, and as a scientist Galileo should have been unbiased enough to admit it. Bad science once more... are you beginning to see a theme here?
As for the final point about Galileo not being deliberately inflammatory, I have to say I find it difficult to accept that a man so skilled at destroying his enemies in public debate and in print could not grasp the implications of shoving the Pope's conciliatory explanation into the mouth of Simplicio, the village idiot. It was an incredibly stupid thing for anyone to do; for Galileo, who had been admonished many times by the church not to push the issue, it could only have been seen as deliberately inflammatory.
And, of course, it was personal. The Pope had started off admiring Galileo, and in return Galileo snubbed him. Not a smart thing to do, when you're dealing with the ruler of one of the most powerful bodies of the day!
I wouldn't have said Galileo deserved what happened to him through the inquisition, but in a certain sense he did back them into a corner and go out of his way to push the issue in an inflammatory matter. If Galileo had been able to prove the heliocentric model, it might have been different. But, as you probably know, he couldn't prove it (and, worse, came up with a transparently desperate fake-proof in his theory of the tides.) In the end, it's hard to see where else the church could have gone without losing face (and, since they were the church, they weren't about to do that... something Galileo should have realised a long time before.)
I guess the thing that riles me about the entire episode is that Galileo shunned every scientific principle (the very ones he had done so much to promote) in arguing for a system he could not prove (and which, at the time, the scientific evidence (i.e. lack of an observable stellar paralax) opposed). It was not a conflict of science vs. faith, it was a conflict of faith vs. faith, and it saddens me that he's upheld as a hero for his behaviour. I can't help but agree with Koestler's thesis that Galileo had caused a schism between science and the church that was completely unnecessary.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it...
Galileo stuck his neck out for his views and incurred the wrath of the Church. Of course his achievement would be better known than that of someone who was keeping a low profile.
But Galileo's observations of the moon had nothing to do with his (much later) encounter with the inquisition. In fact, after Galileo published his telescopic observations of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and various stars in 1610, he was feted by the Pope and the Jesuit College as a scientific hero. (The first friction between Galileo and the church occurred six years later, in 1616; but the real trouble -- when he was hauled before the inquisition -- didn't start until 1631.) The issue here is the old scientific game of "who did what first".
That said, this really isn't news; Harriot's 1609 unpublished maps have been known about for years.
Shift in population ratios = change in allele frequencies = evolution.
Not sure about the Peppered Moth (I have a book on the subject to read over Christmas, and I'm not going to spoil the story now by checking it)... but perhaps the GP meant a shift in the population ratios of two different species? In other words, two species of moth, one dark, one white, but no interbreeding between the two. Change in environment leads to the flourishing of one species and the reduction of the other. This isn't evolution.
(Not trying to support the GP or the OP here, btw. The idea of suggesting that convergent evolution (in which organisms adapts to their environment over time) somehow contradicts or negates divergent evolution (in which organisms adapts to their environment over time) is a little nonsensical! Honeyeaters and waxwings seems a rather tame example, though -- if you really want to blow your mind about the power of convergent evolution, try the development of the eye in cephalopods and vertebrates...)
Why couldn't you have one monitor flat to place your hands on, and another in the "regular" position to look at.
Better yet, why not convert that flat monitor to a series of raised buttons, so that you can intuitively use the touch area without having to look away from the raised monitor?
You could achieve the same by Two-Finger-clicking on the touchpad (that's like a Right-Click) and choose "Open link in new window/tab" from the context-menue, but [cmd]-click obviously is much faster.
Funnily enough, using a middle mouse button is even faster...:)
Nah, just think of the delts and traps you'd get after using these things every day. I can see myself at the bar after a hard day of computing, nonchalantly doing my warm down flexes, when a hot babe comes up and checks out my body:
Where she went wrong was to then write an ignorant, stupid and threatening email to an adult she did not know before properly investigating the matter. Ignorance is correctable and one could argue that there was no particular reason for this individual to know about OS software, however the correct action would therefore have been to contact the adult and request an explanation - certainly not go off on some idiotic rant about harming children's education and illegal copying.
I agree with you there! Her email was a pretty dumb thing to write (something which she seems to have since admitted); but then, the blog writer's response was also over the top (which he has also admitted). Thankfully, though, it's worked out ok with no permanent harm done to anyone.
I'm no child psychologist either, though...so I'm only saying that I wish my argument to be judged on the points I'm asserted, and not simply ignored because some guy said something he heard from some teachers he knows that are as ill-equipped in the classroom as the average teacher on average. I hate it when I make a point and someone else's response essentially boils down to: that's not what someone else I know says! So what? What about the point itself? What do you think?
I don't think you can say that any teacher who fails to control a class is "ill-equipped". I remember when I was a student (in a school where kids had rich parents, and would certainly have had laptops if they'd been invented by then) being in a horrid class of Year 8 kids. For some reason, the school had thrown all the bad eggs into the one basket (together with some unfortunate bystanders like myself) and decided that this would be a good thing. It didn't matter how charismatic or skilled the teachers were with this class (and we had some great teachers at this school) -- these kids caused them to lose their temper, every day, without even trying. They were a pack mentality: they'd constantly probe for a weakness, and as soon as they found one they'd work it until it broke. (Luckily, I got myself transferred out of that pack of thugs, and thus know first hand that in other classes these teachers controlled their classes with charm and grace, never raising their voices or having to make a threat.)
And this is the point the GP was trying to make, I think: you can't make assumptions about the teacher until you know what the class was like. And you certainly can't assume that possessing a linux live CD means that the kid wasn't a troublemaker. (Based on the conversation with the teacher listed in the follow up article, it seems clear the student was being disruptive.)
Admittedly, I'm biased -- one of my long-term girlfriends was a teacher, and through her I met a lot of teachers. Not surprisingly, then, I have a lot of sympathy for teachers who want to enforce some discipline in class. But I would humbly suggest that you try teaching an unruly class for a day, before assuming that any attempt to enforce discipline is a Bad Thing.
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly.
That's not exactly what he/she said: to quote the GP, "I don't think overreacting can really come into the picture until we actually know what the class is like." Their point was merely that some school classes are pretty awful in terms of behaviour, and for many teachers the only way to prevent things getting completely out of hand is to rule through uncompromising strictness. Sadly, rational argument is not often something that works very well with a class of rebellious children!
Going back to the original mail the teacher sent (quoted here), all she did was confiscate the linux live CD (fair enough, since it was apparently causing a disruption at the time), and then talk to the student about the issue after class. Whilst her preconceptions about free software were deplorable, and her email to the HeliOS maintainer obviously an overreaction, her actual handling of the matter in class seems perfectly calm and reasonable.
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
From the wikipedia article you just referenced:
"The second form, citing a person who is actually an authority in the relevant field, carries more subjective, cognitive weight. A person who is recognized as an expert authority often has greater experience and knowledge of their field than the average person, so their opinion is more likely than average to be correct. In practical subjects such as car repair, an experienced mechanic who knows how to fix a certain car will be trusted to a greater degree than someone who is not an expert in car repair. There are many cases where one must rely on an expert, and cannot be reasonably expected to have the same experience, knowledge and skill that that person has. Many trust a surgeon without ever needing to know all the details about surgery themselves. Nevertheless, experts can still be mistaken and their expertise does not always guarantee that their arguments are valid."
The fact that the GP knows teachers who have experience of unruly classrooms seems a valid point to me. After all, the GP wasn't suggesting that this was the case with the class in question, only that it was a potential factor that ought to be considered.
Honestly the only things that are missing from the iPhone at this point from a usability standpoint are copy/paste, multimedia text messages, and a tether app. I don't need the third and the first and second only bother me once in a blue moon.
You're forgetting multitasking, which is a biggie! (Although, to be fair to you, looks like Apple forgot it too...)
Let's just say that our experience with the proportion of friends who have jailbroken iPhones is slightly different. But my point was simply that developers generally want unfettered access to a platform, and Apple's not giving them that. The iPhone is currently sexy in terms of hardware and capabilities, but it's not going to stay that way forever. If Android or Symbian make application development simpler and more powerful, do you think the iPhone developers will stay with the iPhone?
Not the most controversial point, I would have thought, but looking at the mods, it seems like I offended a few Apple fanboys... seems like inadvertently hit a raw nerve!:)
Respectfully, this is your opinion and is, so far, not born out by current events.
Well, of course it's only my opinion! This is/., after all -- I can almost guarantee I'm completely wrong!:)
That said, a non-jailbroken iPhone is pretty useless as I understand it, without the ability to multitask 3rd party apps and having only one outlet to distribute software. What's working for Apple right now is the shiny trendy iPhone buzz... but if that's going to continue onto something more solid, I'd think they'll need to open up the platform a bit more so that 3rd party apps can be useful.
RIght now, Apple's model is working. Nokia's is worried about Symbian's future and open-sourcing it is a reaction to that. Apple does not need to react.
Not sure you could say Apple's model is working. Everyone's jailbreaking their phones in order to get semi-decent functionality. And Apple's response to this has not been to try and understand the reasons why people want to jailbreak, but simply to attempt to lock down the phones even further.
This strategy isn't going to work for Apple, and ends up discouraging developers. Remember that one of the reasons Symbian is being made open is to encourage development for the platform. And yes, Nokia might be worried by the iPhone, but they're not stupid and not prone to marketing errors -- Symbian isn't the most popular smartphone OS without good reason.
Give me a phone that works, not one that I have to tinker with for a long time to get something simple working.
Guess that must be the reason why Nokia's open-sourcing Symbian. They're sick of phones that just work, and want to make their users suffer for a change...
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
Funny thing is, my parents have a lemon tree in their backyard. It's prolific in producing lemons, and my parents are constantly giving them away to friends, neighbours and pretty much anyone who'll take them. Of course, my parents put in their own time pruning, fertilising (*ahem*) and watering the lemon tree. Yet not one of the many recipients of the fruit of these labours has ever turned around to my folks and said, "Hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch! Why aren't you charging money? Where'd you steal these from?? Are they dodgy or something?"
I think the real reason why people find the free software concept hard to grasp, is thanks to the efforts of Microsoft, the BSA and their kin, who have been pushing the "you must pay for software, or else it's stealing" line for decades.
If you ask me, Microsoft's been selling lemons for far too long...:)
Now, if your "magic" age is 40, and the only contributing factor is age, what percentage of the adult population (in each instance) will contract cancer?
If you get different answers for each group, you still fail, and need to go back to the beginning.
Allow me to ask your questions back at you, slightly adjusted to allow for the GP's point:
Assume 50% of a population dies before they turn 2 years old. Assume the other 50% die at age 60. What is the average (mean) life exepctancy?
Now, 100 years later, only 1% die before they turn two, and 99% die at age 80. What is the average (mean) life expectancy?
Now, if your "magic" age is 70, and the only contributing factor is age, what percentage of the adult population (in each instance) will contract cancer?
I'm half blind, and SD makes me want to gouge my eyes out after watching HD.
Guess you never download movies, then, cause they're far worse resolution than SD. Amazing that anyone does, really...
Seriously. Unless you have a enormous screen and your face pressed to it, you won't notice much difference between SD and HD. HD is a marketting gimmick, like blu-ray.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmmm linux server milk. Creamy goodness.
Uh, that's not milk you're looking at ...
desktops larger than the screen resolution are possible with windows, too.
That's not what he was saying, though: with pretty much any window manager for X, you can drag a window around (and thus partly off-screen) by holding down ALT whilst dragging with the left mouse button. But I'm sure there's some powertoy or similar under windows that does the same thing these days ...
The interesting thing about a time/space ship is that when you can go anywhere anywhen, there suddenly is no 'now' anymore. All time is now.
And everything that's happening now, is happening now ...
How is it snubbing the Pope? In the Dialogue there are three characters, Salviati (the heliocentric pusher), Sagredo (the neutral who is swayed by Salviati's arguments), and Simplicio (the steadfast dunce who can't get past Ptolemy and who is essentially a narrow-minded fool). Throughout the dialogue, we have Salviati arguing strongly for the heliocentric system, Sagredo jumping on the bandwagon, and Simplicio getting confused, reluctantly agreeing, or not wanting to argue further. So we go through four days of dialogue, with Simplicio never even scoring a point against the wit of Salviati, who dismantles Simplicio's arguments easily.
At the very end of the work, Simplicio pops up and says that even though he can't quite understand Salviati's arguments, they seem wondrous to him. But, he says, "neverthelesse I esteem it not true and concluding: but keeping alwayes before the eyes of my mind a solid Doctrine that I have learn't from a most learned and ingenuous person, and with which it is necessary to sit down". And then he spouts out a ghastly paraphrase of the Pope's argument to Galileo -- namely, that despite everything, God might have made it so, just because. In outrageous pantomime, Salviati and Sagredo fall on the ground defeated by this "truly Angelical Doctrine" -- despite spending four days in hot debate it's all too difficult for them to guess God's wisdom, and Hey! let's go and spend an hour in our gondola instead. It's impossible to read the work without ending up thinking the Pope a fool (and, well, a simpleton) and having a laugh along with Galileo at the narrow-mindedness of the church.
As a piece of polemical writing, the Dialogue is brilliant. But as a scholarly argument it's appalling, with Salviati setting up strawman after strawman to "prove" his points. So if I have a deep-seated animosity towards Galileo, it's because he chose to ignore the scientific method that he preached. As a scientist, I can only feel horror that he is idolised for behaviour that goes against every basic tenet of science. Was the church right to haul him before the inquisition? Obviously they weren't -- it was the reaction of a deeply conservative body which couldn't brook with any alternative argument, and utterly deplorable. But they gave Galileo every possible chance to avoid conflict, and his behaviour was similarly appalling in seeking the fight without the evidence to support himself.
Hmmm ... I can't say I agree with you. For anyone with a modicum of common sense it would have been immediately obvious that the tides theory was incorrect. First off, there was the problem that the theory didn't actually predict the observed tides (it predicted exactly one tide per day, at exactly noon every day -- obviously something that anyone living by the sea could see was wrong). But more importantly than that, it was bad physics, and Galileo had just pioneered the modern study of moving bodies. If anyone else had proposed the theory of the tides, Galileo would have shot it down in a second (and would have been scathing about the intelligence of the proposer to boot). Of course, Galileo was desperately keen to prove the heliocentric model, and perhaps might have deluded himself in his desperation. But whether intentionally deliberate or unintentionally deluded, it was bad, bad science and certainly didn't prove his case.
Now, the funny thing about the theory of the tides is that Kepler had previously, and correctly, attributed them to the pull of the moon and the sun (he never quite worked out gravity, but he got very close). Galileo's response to this was to ridicule Kepler. And this brings me to your second point -- Kepler's elliptical orbits -- since Galileo completely ignored them when trying to argue for the heliocentric model. (And to say that Galileo was in correspondence with Kepler is a little laughable, since Galileo pretty much ignored Kepler his entire life. The only time he paid any attention to Kepler at all was when Kepler was the lone voice believing his newly published telescopic observations, and even then he quickly forgot Kepler.) If Galileo had argued that a heliocentric system with elliptical orbits was a conceptually simpler system than the wheels-upon-wheels of Ptolemy, then one might give him a bit of credit. But Galileo was arguing only the wheels-upon-wheels of Copernicus, which in any case had an analogous geocentric competitor in Tycho's model (where the planets orbit the sun, which in turn orbits the earth). Tycho's model was favoured by the Jesuits, but Galileo chose to ignore (once again, one has to wonder, unscrupulously) this model in his Dialogue. Bad science, once again.
The phases of Venus did not disprove the Tychonian model (Venus orbits the sun in this model, so has phases), and so we're back to the lack of a stellar parallax. And yes, this could mean (as Kepler himself had argued) that the stars were very, very far away. But the simplest explanation was simply that the earth didn't orbit the sun, and as a scientist Galileo should have been unbiased enough to admit it. Bad science once more ... are you beginning to see a theme here?
As for the final point about Galileo not being deliberately inflammatory, I have to say I find it difficult to accept that a man so skilled at destroying his enemies in public debate and in print could not grasp the implications of shoving the Pope's conciliatory explanation into the mouth of Simplicio, the village idiot. It was an incredibly stupid thing for anyone to do; for Galileo, who had been admonished many times by the church not to push the issue, it could only have been seen as deliberately inflammatory.
And, of course, it was personal. The Pope had started off admiring Galileo, and in return Galileo snubbed him. Not a smart thing to do, when you're dealing with the ruler of one of the most powerful bodies of the day!
I wouldn't have said Galileo deserved what happened to him through the inquisition, but in a certain sense he did back them into a corner and go out of his way to push the issue in an inflammatory matter. If Galileo had been able to prove the heliocentric model, it might have been different. But, as you probably know, he couldn't prove it (and, worse, came up with a transparently desperate fake-proof in his theory of the tides.) In the end, it's hard to see where else the church could have gone without losing face (and, since they were the church, they weren't about to do that ... something Galileo should have realised a long time before.)
I guess the thing that riles me about the entire episode is that Galileo shunned every scientific principle (the very ones he had done so much to promote) in arguing for a system he could not prove (and which, at the time, the scientific evidence (i.e. lack of an observable stellar paralax) opposed). It was not a conflict of science vs. faith, it was a conflict of faith vs. faith, and it saddens me that he's upheld as a hero for his behaviour. I can't help but agree with Koestler's thesis that Galileo had caused a schism between science and the church that was completely unnecessary.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it...
Galileo stuck his neck out for his views and incurred the wrath of the Church. Of course his achievement would be better known than that of someone who was keeping a low profile.
But Galileo's observations of the moon had nothing to do with his (much later) encounter with the inquisition. In fact, after Galileo published his telescopic observations of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and various stars in 1610, he was feted by the Pope and the Jesuit College as a scientific hero. (The first friction between Galileo and the church occurred six years later, in 1616; but the real trouble -- when he was hauled before the inquisition -- didn't start until 1631.) The issue here is the old scientific game of "who did what first".
That said, this really isn't news; Harriot's 1609 unpublished maps have been known about for years.
Though I do have to say that opening up their platform for custom user extensions was a brilliant move by Mozilla.
It was, wasn't it? It doesn't matter how bloated and buggy FF3 becomes, I'll still keep using it because of the overwhelming power of extensions.
Any new browser really has to support user-made extensions to survive amongst the geeky, one feels.
This isn't evolution
It's natural selection
Not in the scientific sense -- natural selection refers to competition within a species, not between species. This should help.
Shift in population ratios = change in allele frequencies = evolution.
Not sure about the Peppered Moth (I have a book on the subject to read over Christmas, and I'm not going to spoil the story now by checking it) ... but perhaps the GP meant a shift in the population ratios of two different species? In other words, two species of moth, one dark, one white, but no interbreeding between the two. Change in environment leads to the flourishing of one species and the reduction of the other. This isn't evolution.
(Not trying to support the GP or the OP here, btw. The idea of suggesting that convergent evolution (in which organisms adapts to their environment over time) somehow contradicts or negates divergent evolution (in which organisms adapts to their environment over time) is a little nonsensical! Honeyeaters and waxwings seems a rather tame example, though -- if you really want to blow your mind about the power of convergent evolution, try the development of the eye in cephalopods and vertebrates ...)
The only true mouse replacement would be a thought-based medium
Oh, jeez ... knowing my thoughts, that's not safe for a work environment!!
Why couldn't you have one monitor flat to place your hands on, and another in the "regular" position to look at.
Better yet, why not convert that flat monitor to a series of raised buttons, so that you can intuitively use the touch area without having to look away from the raised monitor?
You could achieve the same by Two-Finger-clicking on the touchpad (that's like a Right-Click) and choose "Open link in new window/tab" from the context-menue, but [cmd]-click obviously is much faster.
Funnily enough, using a middle mouse button is even faster ... :)
See gorilla arm: n.
Nah, just think of the delts and traps you'd get after using these things every day. I can see myself at the bar after a hard day of computing, nonchalantly doing my warm down flexes, when a hot babe comes up and checks out my body:
"Oh, hey, *great* shoulders! You must be a geek!"
Where she went wrong was to then write an ignorant, stupid and threatening email to an adult she did not know before properly investigating the matter. Ignorance is correctable and one could argue that there was no particular reason for this individual to know about OS software, however the correct action would therefore have been to contact the adult and request an explanation - certainly not go off on some idiotic rant about harming children's education and illegal copying.
I agree with you there! Her email was a pretty dumb thing to write (something which she seems to have since admitted); but then, the blog writer's response was also over the top (which he has also admitted). Thankfully, though, it's worked out ok with no permanent harm done to anyone.
I'm no child psychologist either, though...so I'm only saying that I wish my argument to be judged on the points I'm asserted, and not simply ignored because some guy said something he heard from some teachers he knows that are as ill-equipped in the classroom as the average teacher on average. I hate it when I make a point and someone else's response essentially boils down to: that's not what someone else I know says! So what? What about the point itself? What do you think?
I don't think you can say that any teacher who fails to control a class is "ill-equipped". I remember when I was a student (in a school where kids had rich parents, and would certainly have had laptops if they'd been invented by then) being in a horrid class of Year 8 kids. For some reason, the school had thrown all the bad eggs into the one basket (together with some unfortunate bystanders like myself) and decided that this would be a good thing. It didn't matter how charismatic or skilled the teachers were with this class (and we had some great teachers at this school) -- these kids caused them to lose their temper, every day, without even trying. They were a pack mentality: they'd constantly probe for a weakness, and as soon as they found one they'd work it until it broke. (Luckily, I got myself transferred out of that pack of thugs, and thus know first hand that in other classes these teachers controlled their classes with charm and grace, never raising their voices or having to make a threat.)
And this is the point the GP was trying to make, I think: you can't make assumptions about the teacher until you know what the class was like. And you certainly can't assume that possessing a linux live CD means that the kid wasn't a troublemaker. (Based on the conversation with the teacher listed in the follow up article, it seems clear the student was being disruptive.)
Admittedly, I'm biased -- one of my long-term girlfriends was a teacher, and through her I met a lot of teachers. Not surprisingly, then, I have a lot of sympathy for teachers who want to enforce some discipline in class. But I would humbly suggest that you try teaching an unruly class for a day, before assuming that any attempt to enforce discipline is a Bad Thing.
Except she wasn't a good teacher. She got pissed off because the student was doing her job, teaching the class.
What on earth makes you conclude that the class was about operating systems?
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly.
That's not exactly what he/she said: to quote the GP, "I don't think overreacting can really come into the picture until we actually know what the class is like." Their point was merely that some school classes are pretty awful in terms of behaviour, and for many teachers the only way to prevent things getting completely out of hand is to rule through uncompromising strictness. Sadly, rational argument is not often something that works very well with a class of rebellious children!
Going back to the original mail the teacher sent (quoted here), all she did was confiscate the linux live CD (fair enough, since it was apparently causing a disruption at the time), and then talk to the student about the issue after class. Whilst her preconceptions about free software were deplorable, and her email to the HeliOS maintainer obviously an overreaction, her actual handling of the matter in class seems perfectly calm and reasonable.
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
From the wikipedia article you just referenced:
"The second form, citing a person who is actually an authority in the relevant field, carries more subjective, cognitive weight. A person who is recognized as an expert authority often has greater experience and knowledge of their field than the average person, so their opinion is more likely than average to be correct. In practical subjects such as car repair, an experienced mechanic who knows how to fix a certain car will be trusted to a greater degree than someone who is not an expert in car repair. There are many cases where one must rely on an expert, and cannot be reasonably expected to have the same experience, knowledge and skill that that person has. Many trust a surgeon without ever needing to know all the details about surgery themselves. Nevertheless, experts can still be mistaken and their expertise does not always guarantee that their arguments are valid."
The fact that the GP knows teachers who have experience of unruly classrooms seems a valid point to me. After all, the GP wasn't suggesting that this was the case with the class in question, only that it was a potential factor that ought to be considered.
Honestly the only things that are missing from the iPhone at this point from a usability standpoint are copy/paste, multimedia text messages, and a tether app. I don't need the third and the first and second only bother me once in a blue moon.
You're forgetting multitasking, which is a biggie! (Although, to be fair to you, looks like Apple forgot it too ...)
Let's just say that our experience with the proportion of friends who have jailbroken iPhones is slightly different. But my point was simply that developers generally want unfettered access to a platform, and Apple's not giving them that. The iPhone is currently sexy in terms of hardware and capabilities, but it's not going to stay that way forever. If Android or Symbian make application development simpler and more powerful, do you think the iPhone developers will stay with the iPhone?
Not the most controversial point, I would have thought, but looking at the mods, it seems like I offended a few Apple fanboys ... seems like inadvertently hit a raw nerve! :)
Respectfully, this is your opinion and is, so far, not born out by current events.
Well, of course it's only my opinion! This is /., after all -- I can almost guarantee I'm completely wrong! :)
That said, a non-jailbroken iPhone is pretty useless as I understand it, without the ability to multitask 3rd party apps and having only one outlet to distribute software. What's working for Apple right now is the shiny trendy iPhone buzz ... but if that's going to continue onto something more solid, I'd think they'll need to open up the platform a bit more so that 3rd party apps can be useful.
Just my $0.02 :)
RIght now, Apple's model is working. Nokia's is worried about Symbian's future and open-sourcing it is a reaction to that. Apple does not need to react.
Not sure you could say Apple's model is working. Everyone's jailbreaking their phones in order to get semi-decent functionality. And Apple's response to this has not been to try and understand the reasons why people want to jailbreak, but simply to attempt to lock down the phones even further.
This strategy isn't going to work for Apple, and ends up discouraging developers. Remember that one of the reasons Symbian is being made open is to encourage development for the platform. And yes, Nokia might be worried by the iPhone, but they're not stupid and not prone to marketing errors -- Symbian isn't the most popular smartphone OS without good reason.
Give me a phone that works, not one that I have to tinker with for a long time to get something simple working.
Guess that must be the reason why Nokia's open-sourcing Symbian. They're sick of phones that just work, and want to make their users suffer for a change ...
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
Funny thing is, my parents have a lemon tree in their backyard. It's prolific in producing lemons, and my parents are constantly giving them away to friends, neighbours and pretty much anyone who'll take them. Of course, my parents put in their own time pruning, fertilising (*ahem*) and watering the lemon tree. Yet not one of the many recipients of the fruit of these labours has ever turned around to my folks and said, "Hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch! Why aren't you charging money? Where'd you steal these from?? Are they dodgy or something?"
I think the real reason why people find the free software concept hard to grasp, is thanks to the efforts of Microsoft, the BSA and their kin, who have been pushing the "you must pay for software, or else it's stealing" line for decades.
If you ask me, Microsoft's been selling lemons for far too long ... :)
Now, if your "magic" age is 40, and the only contributing factor is age, what percentage of the adult population (in each instance) will contract cancer?
If you get different answers for each group, you still fail, and need to go back to the beginning.
Allow me to ask your questions back at you, slightly adjusted to allow for the GP's point:
Assume 50% of a population dies before they turn 2 years old. Assume the other 50% die at age 60. What is the average (mean) life exepctancy?
Now, 100 years later, only 1% die before they turn two, and 99% die at age 80. What is the average (mean) life expectancy?
Now, if your "magic" age is 70, and the only contributing factor is age, what percentage of the adult population (in each instance) will contract cancer?
I'm half blind, and SD makes me want to gouge my eyes out after watching HD.
Guess you never download movies, then, cause they're far worse resolution than SD. Amazing that anyone does, really ...
Seriously. Unless you have a enormous screen and your face pressed to it, you won't notice much difference between SD and HD. HD is a marketting gimmick, like blu-ray.