It sounds like you need to read about the most basic issues in education. You cannot run K12 like a business because you cannot quantify the profit. You cannot make people pay directly: either with cash or with local taxes, as that creates inequality and poor regions get the shaft. So it has to be a Fed tax. You cannot shaft people because it's a human right: everyone should be able to get K12, regardless of income or social standing. This is completely different from the college education, which is not a right, and has been shown to work best when more money is spent on the best students and the worst ones are expelled. Competition already exists in form of private schools, which is completely analogous to USPS/FedEx/UPS situation, but it fixes nothing because it is the public system that needs to be fixed. Again, it is not like postal service, it's like clean water. It has to be clean, period. You cannot afford to wait while the free market forces fix it for you. A bad company is not just going to go out of business, it's going to kill a town full of people first.
And there is one real issue with K12 funding: the main source is local property taxes. Even though US spends a lot on schools, not everyone is getting good education. Fed should provide most of the funding (not around 10 percent as it does now) so that everyone can get the same basic quality education, regardless of whether they live in a poor or rich community or state.
EU, what country is that? A quick look here and here will give you a hint as to why most countries in EU have better functioning schools: they spend money on them. Your puny attempt to drag in "competition" when it comes to protecting a human right (Article 26, look it up) is not going to work. This is a public good, like clean water and not being tortured by the police, and it should be mandated by law.
Amen. Governments and their corporate whelps will learn the hard way that in presence of Internet, the price of privacy is obscurity, and only a private individual can afford to pay it. Since they cannot obscure themselves, they could as well come out and play in the open, stop lying, start listening, and treat everyone fairly, or face the inevitable embarrassment of being caught with their pants down.
Yeah, they just need to find time and talent to edit out sensitive parts without ANY help from the government or whichever party has most to lose if it's dumped raw, and then publicize the result while listening to thinly veiled death threats coming from US congresscritters. Piece of cake.
Child abuse and child pornography have very little in common. If you are a child pornographer, it is virtually impossible for you to be also a child abuser: child abuse is already against the law in every jurisdiction in the world, and if you put pictures of your wrongdoing online, it's like turning yourself in. We all guess that nearly all child abuse is done by parents, who do it without any kind of incentive besides the abuse itself. They don't do it for money, they don't do it to brag. Only the stupidest of them actually take pictures, and the insane ones share them, and it stands to reason that they are also the ones who tend to get caught (another case for non-commercial distribution being legal). We can all also guess that almost all child porn that's out there is done by Russian cyber-criminals, who don't abuse any children themselves, but rather push around badly-cut RARs with compilations of 30 year old photos of children abused by someone else in the past. Of course there must be exceptions, and there are gray areas having to do with the exact legal age, but when it comes to having 8-year-olds participating in sexual acts, the picture is just as above. IMHO, it is a lie that non-commercial distribution of child porn hurts children (abusing children hurts children, and so does child porn production, as so does commercial distribution, and people who engage in any of these should be in jail), and it is true that modern child porn laws are characteristic of a police state.
I guess the "business leaders" prefer the certainty of being locked-in, price-gouged, and spied-on by Microsoft. Oh, and an occasional raid by armed law enforcement officials for making an honest licensing mistake can't be that bad. Yeah, that's much better than the "uncertainty" associated with other flagship FLOSS products like GNU/Linux, Apache, and Firefox.
This is the worst possible way to vindicate the ribbon. OF COURSE keyboard shortcuts are the fastest way to communicate with a word processor, and anyone who actually cares about performance has already created a shortcut for every feature in use and reclaimed the screen by disabling GUI elements. But this has NOTHING to do with the ribbon vs. menus + toolbars discussion, doesn't it?
We already can bring useful functions to the forefront by dragging them into toolbars. I worked with ribbon, and I fail to see how taking three times as much space is better for anything. With the amount of screen they waste, I could drag every button I will ever use out there. We couldn't even customize ribbons via UI until 2010 (seriously?), and now MS is back to configurable tabbed toolbars, just like Delphi and Maya had long before them, but BIGGER! You can be sure of who things: if LibreOffice eventually implements tabbed toolbars, they will be regular size, and we will have an option to use the old interface.
Volatility is actually useful for certain security policies: like storing sensitive passwords in computer memory and working with temporarily decrypted files.
Except that you don't burglarize, you leak security vulnerabilities, which is more like publicizing a lock weakness.
Once they catch you
You don't get it. They won't. The entire DoD + FBI + NSA + CIA + ex-criminal informants can only sometimes catch people like Manning: people who come out and say they did it shortly after the fact. This is the very best they can do.
When dealing with companies and agencies that have a well documented record of behaving like dicks, it's just not worth your trouble to put your name out there. There is a good chance you will be sued, no matter how "responsible" your disclosure procedure was.
A life-saving manual should absolutely be easy to read, and also entertaining. The best example can be found in Fallouts 1 & 2, where each life-saving tip is augmented by a drawing to remind you of the consequences of your actions.
True, but I disagree about "less prone", and I am thinking back to my very recent experience with a Verizon phone. A robust Free software license is the only way to make lock-in more difficult. OSS is just, like you say, orthogonal.
Android is open-source, but it did not make open-source software mainstream. I would say, it's almost doing as much damage as any iPhone I've seen, directly as a result of Google not giving a rat's ass about what proprietary crap vendors screw on top of it. What we are looking at here is exactly the difference between Apache license and GPLv3. I rooted a new Verizon Android for a friend the other day, and it was like pulling teeth. It was a dirty hack done, I can only assume, by a dirty hacker, bless his heart, and there is no guarantee that it will survive the next big update. If ordinary users are not trusted with full access to their devices, and have a locked (for most practical purposes) computer with proprietary top and zero documentation, talking about the licensing of some software components is moot, and "open-source" is just a feel-good word.
I am talking about long-term, worldwide trends. The world is a lot more open and traversable than it used to be. Realize that traveling even a few hundred kilometers used to be a real hazard to one's life just a few centuries ago, and even if one could reach the destination in one piece, there was little guarantee of welcome. On the short run we may see the price of travel rise a bit as we are transitioning away from fossil fuels. We may see some political reaction too: terrorists attack US because of how it conducts its oil business. But eventually (and it looks like pretty soon) we will run out of cheap things to burn and switch to a fusion reactor conveniently located 8 lightminutes into our backyard, and the price of energy will stabilize and start going down again, just as the efficiency goes up.
Bam. And I am tired of hearing about governments or corporation "walling off" the Web or Internet. To make a car analogy, these doomsayers are just like people who predict that evil governments and corporations will all of a sudden start building walls across existing roads in order to prevent people from traveling across the world. Of course, there are walls—we call them "state borders"— and sometimes we build more, but it is pretty damn clear that overall, traveling is becoming cheaper and easier for almost everyone. If we can transport physical goods more freely than ever in history, what are the chances that anyone will make it harder to traffic bits? FUD, nothing but FUD. Internet is here to stay, and to gradually become more widespread, more accessible, more democratic. We have to work to make it happen, of course, but it's a downhill battle from here.
I agree. Spam is forever and fighting it by shutting down spammers will accomplish nothing, even on the medium run. The amount of spam is rigidly capped from below by the presence of netizens who will follow ANY instructions on the belief that they are ordering a cheap aphrodisiac. The only way to get rid of spam is to get rid of stupid people, but that won't do, since they are also the foundation of the modern democracy. I kid, I kid:) Seriously though, we will always have our stupid people, and therefore we are stuck with spam. Have individuals filter if they choose to, case closed.
Counter-intuitively, what turned out to be kind of a shitcase for Assage personally, is also a good thing for Wikileaks, as it simply draws more popular attention to their releases. Actually, I would not call Assange stupid even if he keeps blowing on this flame, as it would be quite selfless. Remember: just like any news is bad news in a fire department, any news is good news in a newspaper.
To add: just 2 kya, religion was inseparable from law. It was basically the same thing, and it was the best thing since sliced bread. Sure, people believed strange things, but it was worth it it prevented them from cutting each others throats and organizing to do something productive. By now this law-ligion stratified (in most countries) into what is known as law and religion today. It is pretty clear, once you think about it, that the US law, for example, is just the most popular religion, whereas the US Constitution is the foundational scripture, and people believe that the power to pass laws is invested in congressional representatives, that a green dollar bill is legal tender, and so on, and so on. IMHO, the secular religion (law) is so much more useful, robust, and humane that it rendered all of the other fanciful ones obsolete, yet they keep persisting as sort of viral programs. Note that many successful religions have explicit proselytization clauses, like "go and spread the good word". This, and the inertia exemplified by the mountain of gold in Vatican, is how they are able to survive, not because of any useful contribution to the humanity.
I am not sure what you mean by that. Even number theorists, who could probably get away with just PA, use the axioms of the group theory all the time, and sometimes opt for using axioms of Analysis to prove some of the peskier theorems. It is true though that all of the existing mainstream math theorems can be translated by a TM into theorems of PA.
But we are not using a formal language here either. Using prefix notation and double-quoting formulas, I could say: {"=SSSS0+SS0SS0"}, which is a theory (in its most general sense—a collection of sentences, not necessarily closed under logical implication) in the language of arithmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you need to read about the most basic issues in education. You cannot run K12 like a business because you cannot quantify the profit. You cannot make people pay directly: either with cash or with local taxes, as that creates inequality and poor regions get the shaft. So it has to be a Fed tax. You cannot shaft people because it's a human right: everyone should be able to get K12, regardless of income or social standing. This is completely different from the college education, which is not a right, and has been shown to work best when more money is spent on the best students and the worst ones are expelled. Competition already exists in form of private schools, which is completely analogous to USPS/FedEx/UPS situation, but it fixes nothing because it is the public system that needs to be fixed. Again, it is not like postal service, it's like clean water. It has to be clean, period. You cannot afford to wait while the free market forces fix it for you. A bad company is not just going to go out of business, it's going to kill a town full of people first.
And there is one real issue with K12 funding: the main source is local property taxes. Even though US spends a lot on schools, not everyone is getting good education. Fed should provide most of the funding (not around 10 percent as it does now) so that everyone can get the same basic quality education, regardless of whether they live in a poor or rich community or state.
Hmm I think you are right, my comment above is misleading in this respect. But competition is still the wrong way to tackle this problem.
EU, what country is that? A quick look here and here will give you a hint as to why most countries in EU have better functioning schools: they spend money on them. Your puny attempt to drag in "competition" when it comes to protecting a human right (Article 26, look it up) is not going to work. This is a public good, like clean water and not being tortured by the police, and it should be mandated by law.
Amen. Governments and their corporate whelps will learn the hard way that in presence of Internet, the price of privacy is obscurity, and only a private individual can afford to pay it. Since they cannot obscure themselves, they could as well come out and play in the open, stop lying, start listening, and treat everyone fairly, or face the inevitable embarrassment of being caught with their pants down.
Yeah, they just need to find time and talent to edit out sensitive parts without ANY help from the government or whichever party has most to lose if it's dumped raw, and then publicize the result while listening to thinly veiled death threats coming from US congresscritters. Piece of cake.
Child abuse and child pornography have very little in common. If you are a child pornographer, it is virtually impossible for you to be also a child abuser: child abuse is already against the law in every jurisdiction in the world, and if you put pictures of your wrongdoing online, it's like turning yourself in. We all guess that nearly all child abuse is done by parents, who do it without any kind of incentive besides the abuse itself. They don't do it for money, they don't do it to brag. Only the stupidest of them actually take pictures, and the insane ones share them, and it stands to reason that they are also the ones who tend to get caught (another case for non-commercial distribution being legal). We can all also guess that almost all child porn that's out there is done by Russian cyber-criminals, who don't abuse any children themselves, but rather push around badly-cut RARs with compilations of 30 year old photos of children abused by someone else in the past. Of course there must be exceptions, and there are gray areas having to do with the exact legal age, but when it comes to having 8-year-olds participating in sexual acts, the picture is just as above. IMHO, it is a lie that non-commercial distribution of child porn hurts children (abusing children hurts children, and so does child porn production, as so does commercial distribution, and people who engage in any of these should be in jail), and it is true that modern child porn laws are characteristic of a police state.
I guess the "business leaders" prefer the certainty of being locked-in, price-gouged, and spied-on by Microsoft. Oh, and an occasional raid by armed law enforcement officials for making an honest licensing mistake can't be that bad. Yeah, that's much better than the "uncertainty" associated with other flagship FLOSS products like GNU/Linux, Apache, and Firefox.
ctrl+p or ctrl+s
This is the worst possible way to vindicate the ribbon. OF COURSE keyboard shortcuts are the fastest way to communicate with a word processor, and anyone who actually cares about performance has already created a shortcut for every feature in use and reclaimed the screen by disabling GUI elements. But this has NOTHING to do with the ribbon vs. menus + toolbars discussion, doesn't it?
We already can bring useful functions to the forefront by dragging them into toolbars. I worked with ribbon, and I fail to see how taking three times as much space is better for anything. With the amount of screen they waste, I could drag every button I will ever use out there. We couldn't even customize ribbons via UI until 2010 (seriously?), and now MS is back to configurable tabbed toolbars, just like Delphi and Maya had long before them, but BIGGER! You can be sure of who things: if LibreOffice eventually implements tabbed toolbars, they will be regular size, and we will have an option to use the old interface.
Volatility is actually useful for certain security policies: like storing sensitive passwords in computer memory and working with temporarily decrypted files.
Except that you don't burglarize, you leak security vulnerabilities, which is more like publicizing a lock weakness.
Once they catch you
You don't get it. They won't. The entire DoD + FBI + NSA + CIA + ex-criminal informants can only sometimes catch people like Manning: people who come out and say they did it shortly after the fact. This is the very best they can do.
When dealing with companies and agencies that have a well documented record of behaving like dicks, it's just not worth your trouble to put your name out there. There is a good chance you will be sued, no matter how "responsible" your disclosure procedure was.
IMHO, the problem is the desire to be famous NOW. Sign your leaks with strong encryption and leak them anonymously, and you will be safe.
A life-saving manual should absolutely be easy to read, and also entertaining. The best example can be found in Fallouts 1 & 2, where each life-saving tip is augmented by a drawing to remind you of the consequences of your actions.
True, but I disagree about "less prone", and I am thinking back to my very recent experience with a Verizon phone. A robust Free software license is the only way to make lock-in more difficult. OSS is just, like you say, orthogonal.
Android is open-source, but it did not make open-source software mainstream. I would say, it's almost doing as much damage as any iPhone I've seen, directly as a result of Google not giving a rat's ass about what proprietary crap vendors screw on top of it. What we are looking at here is exactly the difference between Apache license and GPLv3. I rooted a new Verizon Android for a friend the other day, and it was like pulling teeth. It was a dirty hack done, I can only assume, by a dirty hacker, bless his heart, and there is no guarantee that it will survive the next big update. If ordinary users are not trusted with full access to their devices, and have a locked (for most practical purposes) computer with proprietary top and zero documentation, talking about the licensing of some software components is moot, and "open-source" is just a feel-good word.
I am talking about long-term, worldwide trends. The world is a lot more open and traversable than it used to be. Realize that traveling even a few hundred kilometers used to be a real hazard to one's life just a few centuries ago, and even if one could reach the destination in one piece, there was little guarantee of welcome. On the short run we may see the price of travel rise a bit as we are transitioning away from fossil fuels. We may see some political reaction too: terrorists attack US because of how it conducts its oil business. But eventually (and it looks like pretty soon) we will run out of cheap things to burn and switch to a fusion reactor conveniently located 8 lightminutes into our backyard, and the price of energy will stabilize and start going down again, just as the efficiency goes up.
Bam. And I am tired of hearing about governments or corporation "walling off" the Web or Internet. To make a car analogy, these doomsayers are just like people who predict that evil governments and corporations will all of a sudden start building walls across existing roads in order to prevent people from traveling across the world. Of course, there are walls—we call them "state borders"— and sometimes we build more, but it is pretty damn clear that overall, traveling is becoming cheaper and easier for almost everyone. If we can transport physical goods more freely than ever in history, what are the chances that anyone will make it harder to traffic bits? FUD, nothing but FUD. Internet is here to stay, and to gradually become more widespread, more accessible, more democratic. We have to work to make it happen, of course, but it's a downhill battle from here.
I agree. Spam is forever and fighting it by shutting down spammers will accomplish nothing, even on the medium run. The amount of spam is rigidly capped from below by the presence of netizens who will follow ANY instructions on the belief that they are ordering a cheap aphrodisiac. The only way to get rid of spam is to get rid of stupid people, but that won't do, since they are also the foundation of the modern democracy. I kid, I kid :) Seriously though, we will always have our stupid people, and therefore we are stuck with spam. Have individuals filter if they choose to, case closed.
Counter-intuitively, what turned out to be kind of a shitcase for Assage personally, is also a good thing for Wikileaks, as it simply draws more popular attention to their releases. Actually, I would not call Assange stupid even if he keeps blowing on this flame, as it would be quite selfless. Remember: just like any news is bad news in a fire department, any news is good news in a newspaper.
"C++0x" can be naturally interpreted as 1337 "CHOx".
To add: just 2 kya, religion was inseparable from law. It was basically the same thing, and it was the best thing since sliced bread. Sure, people believed strange things, but it was worth it it prevented them from cutting each others throats and organizing to do something productive. By now this law-ligion stratified (in most countries) into what is known as law and religion today. It is pretty clear, once you think about it, that the US law, for example, is just the most popular religion, whereas the US Constitution is the foundational scripture, and people believe that the power to pass laws is invested in congressional representatives, that a green dollar bill is legal tender, and so on, and so on. IMHO, the secular religion (law) is so much more useful, robust, and humane that it rendered all of the other fanciful ones obsolete, yet they keep persisting as sort of viral programs. Note that many successful religions have explicit proselytization clauses, like "go and spread the good word". This, and the inertia exemplified by the mountain of gold in Vatican, is how they are able to survive, not because of any useful contribution to the humanity.
I am not sure what you mean by that. Even number theorists, who could probably get away with just PA, use the axioms of the group theory all the time, and sometimes opt for using axioms of Analysis to prove some of the peskier theorems. It is true though that all of the existing mainstream math theorems can be translated by a TM into theorems of PA.
But we are not using a formal language here either. Using prefix notation and double-quoting formulas, I could say: {"=SSSS0+SS0SS0"}, which is a theory (in its most general sense—a collection of sentences, not necessarily closed under logical implication) in the language of arithmetic.
2+2=4 is indeed a theorem of arithmetic, but it does not preclude it from being an axiom or the only member of a theory.