One possible contributor to this is that students in the U.S. needn't pass an exit exam in order to graduate high school and enter college. Not strictly true. CAHSEE has been around for a while.
Although, I must admit, if a sophomore can take the test and pass the test, it's not really an "exit" exam in the sense used in other countries (some countries have entrance exam for high school). A true exit exam ought to fail at least 5% of the senior class. And fewer than 10% of underclassmen should be able to pass it. (Numbers pulled out of my arse just now, but the basic principle doesn't change.)
That's what I hear from my freshman-sophomore math majors nearly every day. Actually, if you are speaking strictly of math majors only, as someone with a B.A. in math (and having considered an engineering major for some time), I can say that it may simply be that the students you talk to are not as bright as students in other majors.
Really, the brightest people I knew seemed to major in engineering, like EECS. Things that are profitable. At least that was the case where I got my B.A.
Kids these days simply give up thinking the result isn't there if the search query they entered wasn't giving the result they expected. Er, where do you get that idea? I'm not sure if I qualify as a "kid" (I'm old enough to drink legally), but when the search query does not return the desired result, the standard assumption is that the wrong keywords were specified---unless it was some kind of proper name, in which case it was either misspelled, or the result really doesn't exist, at least not in the index of the search engine being used.
But seriously, I see more older people typing in something for search result and then giving up when they don't get what they want: 1) They haven't internalized the power of Internet search engines as we have, 2) Most of them seem to have lousy keyword-picking skills.
Of course, I'm probably biased, since I haven't been around too many old people (especially not those who blazed the trail for computer science), but I still find your comment unsupported by evidence.
I thought it was a simple common sense: if you are doing anything that can be slightly illegal or basis for a lawsuit, discuss them in person. No non-secure phone lines, and definitely nothing that leaves paper/log trails.
On the other hand, routine deletion of data such as email... somehow seems very fishy to me: Google can keep lifetime's worth of email for any member of the public at no cost, and yet, these companies don't even have an IT structure to keep a decade's worth of company email? If this is not obstruction of justice and destroying of evidence, I don't know what is. (Although, legally speaking, I think they are safe until they have been served, and even then, what's deleted under the usual "data retention policy" is fine---not that I agree with that particular law.)
Sure, but hasn't religion and religious peoples' views been forced on to others for a long time? And still is? Perhaps in some sense some of religious beliefs are being "forced" (in a very limited of that word) on other people, but not (yet/anymore) to the degree that we ought to accept fighting intolerance with intolerance. A question you might ask yourself is, when is the last time that a scientist, or anybody was arrested, executed, burned at the stake, and/or excommunicated for saying that Earth revolves around the Sun? Or for that matter, for saying that God didn't make man and woman? Or for the outright claim that God doesn't exist?
When I said "forced", I mean forced like the Spanish Inquisition, or for a modern equivalent, forced like the Red Scare during the McCarthy era. It has been a long time since anything like that has happened on pretty much any topic, especially on one of science for a long time, as we do live in one of the most tolerant times. Sure, there are controversial issues where religious people dominate, like abortions or gay rights, but those are not, for the most part, issues of science but issues of morals or ethics (or something close to it, I don't know if calling "gay rights" issue an "issue of moral" is exactly the NPOV thing to do here), a traditional domain of religion. Even there, only extremists actually force others to their view with murders and terrorism, not the Pope.
If someone comes out and says that the excommunication and damnation of Galileo was fine, then why should such intolerance be rewarded with meek submission when they parade it around? So, it's "Here, intolerance will not be tolerated," is it? This is only my personal belief, but if you can't tolerate intolerance, you are still intolerant. These scientists are, as far as I (an academic researcher myself) am concerned, bigots.
As long as the intolerance is not being forced on others, the intolerant must be tolerated in a tolerant society.
Stupid users trump all possible security measures (except locking them out of the system for their own good, which isn't really feasible), and there's no shortage of them. It sounds like we need a friendly user helper agent that will remind users that what they are about to do could be dangerous for their data and prevent them from performing such actions. I am thinking that this agent should be enabled by default, cannot be deactivated except by calling customer support to get the deactivation key, and to inspire user confidence, it should look like something that they see everyday. Like a paper clip.
So although Bush may seem stupid (and maybe he finished at the bottom of his class) he still graduated from the same school as Kennedy and other notable Presidents. A C-average student graduating from a private university? That says only one thing—if he had not been born into the Bush family, he would have been lucky to have been a high-school drop-out.
Did you know that MIT has a space in its application form asking whether a member of family or a relative has attended MIT (and I'd assume something similar for most prestigious private colleges)? While I agree that a great number of brilliant people have graduated from, have taught at, and have worket at Yale (and many others), you would be a fool not to realize that a significant fraction of students are there only on the strength of their (mostly social) background, not on academic merit.
Sure, it doesn't come from nowhere, and is in limited supply - but that is true of ANYTHING - even dirt to a far lesser degree. The REAL problem, as I see it, is not that it doesn't come from nowhere, but it goes to nowhere (i.e. space) when released. Nearly everything that we use stays on earth, as a waste product, in a different chemical, etc. If we really need them again (like hydrocarbons), we can simply make them again, with the input of constituent elements and some energy. It's a simple matter of economics of whether it's practical to do that.
Helium, on the other hand, gets released into space and is lost to the earth-bound people like us. The only known way to make more helium is from radioactive decay of uranium, but this is neither a fast nor a renewable process.
When people say "limited supply", they usually mean a fixed quantity of item per unit time (unless it's like land, which is really limited at least until we start colonizing other planets and galaxies). Helium is really limited, in the sense that once we run out, there's no way to replenish the supply in the time scale that we have. We are not talking about, "We can only use X tons of helium per year on scientific endeavors"; we are talking about "We have only X tons of helium for all scientific endeavors, until we finally colonize Mars/Alpha Centauri/etc."
Or how about a computer analogy? If you have a computer with Windows in it and without antivirus, etc, connected to the internet are you guilty of a crime? I can't speak on the "crime" issue, but my campus minimum security standard policy says that a computer needs to have an antivirus and software firewall (of course, I ignore it for the most part, since I figure it's relevant only for the Windows-using population). Oh, and there's a "system and network security" department, and one of its many jobs is to port scan computers do determine whether they have been compromised or not---and they'll cut you off the net if your computer is compromised (which is, of course, one step further than simply not having AV).
My issue is that rather than fight to fix things, you're ready to pack it in and leave the country. Do you know who else packed it in and left their country? Puritans. Pilgrims. The people on Mayflower. Sometimes, leaving is the right thing to do. Leave the losers and be with the like-minded people.
Although, granted, this isn't exactly the 17th century, and there is no "New Land" that the persecuted can flee to. Perhaps we'd better wait until we can start colonizing other planets and large objects in the solar system.;)
Germans, (most) Russians and Italians are all Europeans... so... yeah. But in the US column, we haven't had a war with any of our (immediate) neighbors since 1812, so we're doing pretty good on that front. U.S. haven't had much war with neighbors... well, for the same reason that Australia and her neighbors haven't had much war! U.S. has only two neighbors that border U.S., neither of them could possibly be considered equals in military power (so U.S. won't get any military challenges), and of those two neighbors, U.S. fought with one and practically took half their land (technically "bought", but they weren't willing sellers), and there has been a history of U.S. belligerency towards Canada as well.
As far as the modern history goes, I'd say it's only because U.S. is a superpower and busy meddling in affairs far overseas that it's not buggering its neighbors. That's no credit to U.S. at all.
Maintaining peace for over half a century on a continent with a lot of history and blood feud? Now that's an accomplishment. I am frankly amazed that EU exists at all!
Actually, as far as the draconian U.S. copyright law goes, it's mostly due to Democrats.
Check the laws that Democrats try to pass. Republicans don't care about "content industry" as much as the Democrats do---their campaign funds come from other sources, like oil companies.
If you really feel strongly about copyright laws (and you think it's too restrictive), you should really be a Republican. I know that's one issue that turned me around to Republican side (after all, most young people like to think they are "liberal" and somehow wrongly associate the Democratic party with being progressive), and I know I will never vote for Democrats ever again.
You can't heat water to 600 degrees C because that's far above the boiling point of water Horse petunias. Just raise the ambient pressure. And I suppose someone actually built a container that can withstand that much pressure? Given that less than 400 degrees C requires over 200 atmospheres (and the relationship is definitely not linear---it seemed somewhat exponential, doubling every 50 degrees or so, but I'm not a chemist so I'm not the one to say), or that's about the pressure under 2km of water (for comparison, the deepest point in ocean is 11 km below sea-level).
I suppose that's not overly unimaginable (if not impractical---you are building something with structural integrity of a submarine (or much better) just to boil water), but the point stands. When someone says "heating up water to 600 degrees" without hesitation, that betrays a mind that's not attuned to scientific thinking (like so many Sci-Fi writers saying "100 million light years" or some such nonsense where that distance scale is not deserved).
That chemical energy is equivalent to the amount of energy required to heat 1 kilogram of water 600 degrees Celsius. I would have had much easier time taking the rest of your comment seriously if you said something more like 10 kg of water to 60 degrees C. Or, better yet, 10 kg of water to 70 degrees C from 10 degrees C.
You can't heat water to 600 degrees C because that's far above the boiling point of water, and if you start out with 1 kg of water and try heating it to 600 degrees, well, that's going to take more than 600 kcal.
These floating data centers are not in international waters. Even if taken very seriously, Pirate Bay has no reason to buy any space on any of these, since it is still under jurisdiction of some country.
I mean, Microsoft was suggesting that OLPC make a major change, just so that it can run Windows by itself, but a dual-boot system with two operating systems on it? Either OLPC project caved in and agreed to make its XO notebook more expensive (i.e. more built-in storage), or... well, I guess this could be a good thing---Microsoft might finally be forced to cut the fat and make its OS lean.
I suppose I made the sarcasm too subtle for the criticism to show.
The legal code is written very much for revenge. Rehabilitation... if anything, is a poorly-implemented after-thought.
After all, if rehabilitation is real purpose, we wouldn't have ever had capital punishments, or at least abolished it the first chance we got (oh, like when abolishing capital punishments became a "cool thing" to do internationally).
And if rehabilitation is the real goal, what's with all the "victim's law" and "think of the victims"? This is pretty much all sex offender laws passed in recent memory---the law doesn't care whether sex offender got rehabilitated or not; the law just wants him (or her) to suffer.
The more I learn about Stallman, the more of a kook I realize he is. Maybe he could be Dennis Kucinich's running mate. I hope when you say "learn" you don't mean reading these caricatures of him. I do hope that you mean you have read his essays (well, mostly his. There's also a book called "Free Software, Free Society"), and that you have seen his website, including his hilarious bit about getting revenge for 9/11, and after that, you still genuinely disagree with him.
If that were the case, I suppose that would be O.K., since everyone's entitled to an opinion in a free society. But if you are judging him a kook by these caricatures of him, you are really being unfair. For a fairer view of rms from a prominent leader of free software (a former leader of Debian project) and open source (drafter of Open Source Definition), check out this comment.
Oh come on now, how much of a fanboy do you have to be to think that modifying your own web pages in a way you see fit is equivalent to committing a crime because Google doesnt like it? Well, the thing is, Google search "optimization" does not only involve your own website, but other websites as well. I don't know exact what Google's ToS says, but I do remember that the mother-of-all Google search "optimization" was Google bomb---in fact, being immune from simple keyword flooding was what made Google so effective early on.
And for the Google "bombs" of the commercial sort to support, these black hats have to place lots of links around the web. These show up as comment spam, link spam on Wikipedia, all over the places. I don't know if that's a crime or not (it probably isn't, just as spitting in public is at most a misdemeanor), but it's certainly not right. You are not simply designing your website just the way you like it (deceptive or not), you are also messing up other people's websites so that they can't run those just the way they like it.
Well, and as much as we should be wary of any great power, I think Google has some validity in their claim. After all, have you ever heard of people "Yahoo!ing" other people, or "AskJeevesing" themselves?
It isn't about revenge. The hope is that the system will try to rehabilitate. Which is exactly why we have death sentence. I have seen so many people miss this point. When we find a criminal that we can't humanly rehabilitate ourselves, we send him to God to do it right. Capital punishment simply quickens the divine rehabilitation program.
Your laptop won't be on when they begin their inspection, right? Except, of course, if you hate closing down what you do and starting up everything anew whenever you need to move... so you use hibernate regularly instead of shutdown. You can make the hibernate ask you for your account password, but I don't think you can make it have you log into a different account.
On the whole, it looks like TrueCrypt is the way to go (and TrueCrypt partitions can be made to be unmounted at hibernation time).
Actually, the usual recommended action is not to search for it anywhere, and don't breathe a word about the intended domain name to anyone (treat it like a trade secret, or a great business idea). Just assume that it's available (come up with some alternatives, in case it isn't), and register them immediately when you are ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Although, I must admit, if a sophomore can take the test and pass the test, it's not really an "exit" exam in the sense used in other countries (some countries have entrance exam for high school). A true exit exam ought to fail at least 5% of the senior class. And fewer than 10% of underclassmen should be able to pass it. (Numbers pulled out of my arse just now, but the basic principle doesn't change.)
Really, the brightest people I knew seemed to major in engineering, like EECS. Things that are profitable. At least that was the case where I got my B.A.
But seriously, I see more older people typing in something for search result and then giving up when they don't get what they want: 1) They haven't internalized the power of Internet search engines as we have, 2) Most of them seem to have lousy keyword-picking skills.
Of course, I'm probably biased, since I haven't been around too many old people (especially not those who blazed the trail for computer science), but I still find your comment unsupported by evidence.
I thought it was a simple common sense: if you are doing anything that can be slightly illegal or basis for a lawsuit, discuss them in person. No non-secure phone lines, and definitely nothing that leaves paper/log trails.
... somehow seems very fishy to me: Google can keep lifetime's worth of email for any member of the public at no cost, and yet, these companies don't even have an IT structure to keep a decade's worth of company email? If this is not obstruction of justice and destroying of evidence, I don't know what is. (Although, legally speaking, I think they are safe until they have been served, and even then, what's deleted under the usual "data retention policy" is fine---not that I agree with that particular law.)
On the other hand, routine deletion of data such as email
Better is the Flicker page linked from TFA. The Google cache has already been updated to the weasel version of the story.
When I said "forced", I mean forced like the Spanish Inquisition, or for a modern equivalent, forced like the Red Scare during the McCarthy era. It has been a long time since anything like that has happened on pretty much any topic, especially on one of science for a long time, as we do live in one of the most tolerant times. Sure, there are controversial issues where religious people dominate, like abortions or gay rights, but those are not, for the most part, issues of science but issues of morals or ethics (or something close to it, I don't know if calling "gay rights" issue an "issue of moral" is exactly the NPOV thing to do here), a traditional domain of religion. Even there, only extremists actually force others to their view with murders and terrorism, not the Pope.
As long as the intolerance is not being forced on others, the intolerant must be tolerated in a tolerant society.
Did you know that MIT has a space in its application form asking whether a member of family or a relative has attended MIT (and I'd assume something similar for most prestigious private colleges)? While I agree that a great number of brilliant people have graduated from, have taught at, and have worket at Yale (and many others), you would be a fool not to realize that a significant fraction of students are there only on the strength of their (mostly social) background, not on academic merit.
Helium, on the other hand, gets released into space and is lost to the earth-bound people like us. The only known way to make more helium is from radioactive decay of uranium, but this is neither a fast nor a renewable process.
When people say "limited supply", they usually mean a fixed quantity of item per unit time (unless it's like land, which is really limited at least until we start colonizing other planets and galaxies). Helium is really limited, in the sense that once we run out, there's no way to replenish the supply in the time scale that we have. We are not talking about, "We can only use X tons of helium per year on scientific endeavors"; we are talking about "We have only X tons of helium for all scientific endeavors, until we finally colonize Mars/Alpha Centauri/etc."
Although, granted, this isn't exactly the 17th century, and there is no "New Land" that the persecuted can flee to. Perhaps we'd better wait until we can start colonizing other planets and large objects in the solar system.
As far as the modern history goes, I'd say it's only because U.S. is a superpower and busy meddling in affairs far overseas that it's not buggering its neighbors. That's no credit to U.S. at all.
Maintaining peace for over half a century on a continent with a lot of history and blood feud? Now that's an accomplishment. I am frankly amazed that EU exists at all!
Actually, as far as the draconian U.S. copyright law goes, it's mostly due to Democrats.
Check the laws that Democrats try to pass. Republicans don't care about "content industry" as much as the Democrats do---their campaign funds come from other sources, like oil companies.
If you really feel strongly about copyright laws (and you think it's too restrictive), you should really be a Republican. I know that's one issue that turned me around to Republican side (after all, most young people like to think they are "liberal" and somehow wrongly associate the Democratic party with being progressive), and I know I will never vote for Democrats ever again.
I suppose that's not overly unimaginable (if not impractical---you are building something with structural integrity of a submarine (or much better) just to boil water), but the point stands. When someone says "heating up water to 600 degrees" without hesitation, that betrays a mind that's not attuned to scientific thinking (like so many Sci-Fi writers saying "100 million light years" or some such nonsense where that distance scale is not deserved).
You can't heat water to 600 degrees C because that's far above the boiling point of water, and if you start out with 1 kg of water and try heating it to 600 degrees, well, that's going to take more than 600 kcal.
Call me pedantic, but so was your post.
Not to mention correcting ... incorrectly.
These floating data centers are not in international waters. Even if taken very seriously, Pirate Bay has no reason to buy any space on any of these, since it is still under jurisdiction of some country.
... for Windows alone.
... well, I guess this could be a good thing---Microsoft might finally be forced to cut the fat and make its OS lean.
I mean, Microsoft was suggesting that OLPC make a major change, just so that it can run Windows by itself, but a dual-boot system with two operating systems on it? Either OLPC project caved in and agreed to make its XO notebook more expensive (i.e. more built-in storage), or
I suppose I made the sarcasm too subtle for the criticism to show.
... if anything, is a poorly-implemented after-thought.
The legal code is written very much for revenge. Rehabilitation
After all, if rehabilitation is real purpose, we wouldn't have ever had capital punishments, or at least abolished it the first chance we got (oh, like when abolishing capital punishments became a "cool thing" to do internationally).
And if rehabilitation is the real goal, what's with all the "victim's law" and "think of the victims"? This is pretty much all sex offender laws passed in recent memory---the law doesn't care whether sex offender got rehabilitated or not; the law just wants him (or her) to suffer.
*Whoosh*
But then, it's probably my fault for being so subtle.
If that were the case, I suppose that would be O.K., since everyone's entitled to an opinion in a free society. But if you are judging him a kook by these caricatures of him, you are really being unfair. For a fairer view of rms from a prominent leader of free software (a former leader of Debian project) and open source (drafter of Open Source Definition), check out this comment.
And for the Google "bombs" of the commercial sort to support, these black hats have to place lots of links around the web. These show up as comment spam, link spam on Wikipedia, all over the places. I don't know if that's a crime or not (it probably isn't, just as spitting in public is at most a misdemeanor), but it's certainly not right. You are not simply designing your website just the way you like it (deceptive or not), you are also messing up other people's websites so that they can't run those just the way they like it.
Well, and as much as we should be wary of any great power, I think Google has some validity in their claim. After all, have you ever heard of people "Yahoo!ing" other people, or "AskJeevesing" themselves?
On the whole, it looks like TrueCrypt is the way to go (and TrueCrypt partitions can be made to be unmounted at hibernation time).
Actually, the usual recommended action is not to search for it anywhere, and don't breathe a word about the intended domain name to anyone (treat it like a trade secret, or a great business idea). Just assume that it's available (come up with some alternatives, in case it isn't), and register them immediately when you are ready.