I think it's similarly misleading to say that "certain uses of p2p [are] illegal," as it tends to understate the truth of the matter. It's a lie of omission if you fail to acknowledge that those "certain uses" happen to be the most popular ones, by far.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: by criminalizing P2P you make decent people afraid of using P2P applications, and effectively shut it down as a distribution channel for legal purposes. When this is done it becomes easier to convince legislators that P2P should be illegal anyway, because it is exclusively used for illegal purposes.
My last use (and one of the few uses) of Bittorrent was to download a FreeBSD CD image. I never download copyrighted music or movies, but I suspect the very fact that I used the technology is enough reason to put me on a list of people to watch somewhere.
Why does the entertainment industry go directly after the technology instead of its use?
Because it is easy to enforce, of course, and because they are the ones who will get to define what a P2P technology is. Don't be surprised if Internet becomes a kind of passive television where they own the servers and you are only allowed to be a client. That's the situation their 'business model' is based on, and they want to go back to it.
Another piece of the strategy is to make expensive legal requirements on ISP's and content providers so that only big companies can afford to own servers and you, as an individual citizen, are on the receiving, consuming, end only.
P2P is an interesting technology that never achieved its potential because it is being criminalized before reaching maturity. Think of it: torrent links are immune to the Slashdot effect. P2P should be integrated into every browser, and it should be supported as a matter of principle.
Many are pointing out that this guy was not a professor, so what's the big deal? [..] Shall we wait for an exalted professor to get chastised [..]
'Professor' means very different things in different countries. In some countries it is merely a tenured university teacher, and in others it is strictly the head of a department.
Some countries explicitly give non-professors meeting certain criteria permission to let themselves be addressed as professor abroad. It is a completely meaningless distinction in this context. The guy is supposed to enjoy academic freedom.
Methinks you underestimate the difficulty of this task a tiny bit (all too common in computer vision and AI).
In my experience getting a car to follow a precalculated path at decent speed in the first place is quite hard, even in a simulation.
I did this for a game running on a karma physics engine, and I was not allowed to cheat with physics. Controlling oversteer and understeer, and accurately predicting the consequences of wheels loosing contact with the ground, is a lot harder than I expected, even in an idealized artificial environment.
Research wants to be free, but Mp3 players want to be levied.
Nothing funny about it. Listening to music is ungood. Reading scientific papers is doubleplusgood. This is the 'knowledge economy' policy our government talks about in action.
Look at the double digit economic growth rates in China: access to science and information good, access to porn, political rambling, etc ungood. QED
Sure, stuff will blow up, and people will die. People who understood the risks and knew exactly what they were doing. If they run out of people who are willing to hop onboard, they know they must spend time and money on the safety.
Surely there is no way the present 'pro life' US government is going to fund a thinly veiled assisted suicide scheme, unless it can be argued that it is going to bring 'freedom and democracy' to space.
The law of diminishing returns applies - sure, you want to test and make sure the damn thing works, but beyond certain point extra testing and checking is not going to change the safety much - only the pricetag will go up, see NASA:)
This law has been repealed recently; Microsoft and Ford can build cars that can't crash. Let them build the shuttle.
because it takes like 2 and half hours from e.g. Amsterdam to drive to the next big german city, where a lot of people will be more than happy to sell mp3 players to angry dutch customers.
You are overestimating distances. It takes about 50 minutes to the border from Amsterdam, assuming you go in the weekend, and some 75-80 minutes to a town like Kleve. 90-100 minutes if you drive slowly.
Not very long ago the Dutch government also backpedaled on higher taxes on liquors because tax income dropped and Dutch liquor stores in the eastern half of the country went bankrupt. Filling up your car in Germany pays for the trip.
In principle I support the move from income-based taxes to consumption-based taxes, but it drives up taxes as a whole in a small country because of tax evasion.
This tax is completely ridiculous. I own 4 usb drives, an mp3 player, two video recorders, and a cd-rom writer, but I NEVER copied any video or audio illegally. The government still owes me for all the 'theft taxes' I paid over the years for CD-ROMs, audio and video tapes, recording equipment etc.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities.
as part of his observation that urbanization is slowing population growth (which he contends is slowing growth).
Actually, my observation is exactly the opposite. I seem to hear more sympathy for packing everyone together than for spreading them out in the modern environmentalist rhetoric. That's why "sprawl" has become a cuss-word among this bunch.
I consider myself an environmentalist, and I never ever met any other environmentalist who believed urbanization is a bad thing.
But I live in a densely populated country (the Netherlands); Finding a place where you are alone is hard enough even now, with draconic spatial planning that basically only allows construction in existing residential zones.
In my perception public opinion here is starting to embrace unlimited urban sprawl. More houses is has been an issue in elections since WWII. The government can't do very much about it, since most of the Netherlands cannot be built in anyway according to EU rules because of excessive pollution.
Emigration (to Australia and Canada) is increasing, and at the same time the EU is telling scary stories about how we need a million immigrants to solve our 'ageing' problem. Right.
My first USB flash drive was an Apacer steno. I also have four TwinMos drives. The four TwinMos drives fit into the 4-port USB hub on my desk together. I need a cable for my camera, mp3 player, and steno.
If I put the steno into the hub, it will block ALL 4 ports. That's crappy design.
I use two of the TwinMos drives as disks for a portable, silent, low power, non-moving parts mini-itx server. Most important requirement is they physically fit in the USB ports which are directly on top of eachother.
I considered the RAID configuration they tried, but I think I will wait until >1GB becomes affordable. Disk space is pretty tight. Two IDE flash drives in RAID configuration could make an awsome swap file for my silent server, but they are pretty expensive too & hard to find.
I fail to see why population density or distribution should be linearly related to the feasibility of providing broadband in the first place.
Construction (and repairs) of infrastructure in densely populated areas is many times more expensive than in less populated areas. If you are wiring a very densely populated old inner city with streets one and a half car wide and virtually no sidewalks you will bring traffic to a virtual standstill for months or years and cause economic activity to move out of the city.
Most of the US population lives in areas with streets 4 to 8 cars wide. Even in Manhattan streets and sidewalks are pretty wide. I am pretty sure broadband investments per person are much lower than in South Korea, Belgium, or the Netherlands.
Estimates of the Netherlands government (385 inhabitants per sq/km; estimates of the RIVM) indicate that in the present situation each 1% growth of the population causes a 1% decrease in GDP because of extra stress on infrastructural investments.
On the other hand the number of potential customers is higher. Only when population densities are relatively low overall, like in the US and Canada, one would expect wiring to be more profitable in more densely populated areas.
Exactly. We get the biometric passport in 2006 in the Netherlands, and the official reason the government gives is that you are going to need that 'extra functionality' to enter the US.
Either you give your biometric data to the Dutch authorities, or you give it to the US authorities. The Dutch government considers itself a better guardian of our privacy. The Dutch government is easily blackmailed into cooperation by the US government by threatening to revoke valuable customs privileges for cargo on ships from Rotterdam harbor. Our economy is based on transport and trading, after all.
Before 2001 a move like this would have caused an emotional uproar against 'nazi practices', but people just accept it now.
I have been able to avoid having to go to the US in recent years, but this is not good for my career. Given my line of work I will probably be waiting in line for one of those passports. I will keep it wrapped in tin foil though.
A more recent development is that you are apparently also going to need it for just flying near US airspace: a KLM plane on its way to Mexico was turned back last week because the US somehow illegally appropriated the passenger list (from Mexico?) and found two 'suspicious' people on it that are not on any blacklist communicated with the Dutch government or KLM. The Dutch government is very pissed off about this treatment of its citizens and its national carrier.
What the 'right' rules are depends on who you are.
For me -- as a 'foreigner' from your perspective -- filtering all english email messages from senders not in my address book would get rid of over 90% of spam, but being unreachable from Anglosaxon countries is not an option in my line of work.
For my mother filtering anything from senders whose email address does not end in.nl works just fine. She speaks only one language anyway, and it is not English.
From your filtering rules I deduce that the US is still as tolerant as it always has been towards foreigners who want to keep their original family name, including those characters that are not directly available on your keyboard.
Wouldn't cutting the cables though the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean be more effective? You will find a lot of supporters of that idea on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Things like Spamcop are misguided. They will list any foreign message they don't understand as spam and are regularly abused here by people who want interfere with the email communication of others. Subscribing to a government information mailing list and then reporting it as spam is becoming a common tactic.
Are schools in the Netherlands as unruly as they are in the United States? Here in the states, students are often unruly, goof off, talk back and even swear at teachers. The teachers often can't do a thing, because the schools get funding based on attendance so provided that outright assult does not happen, the troublemakers persist.
It's hard to compare. I never visit US high schools. In Europe Dutch youth are not known for their discipline, to put it mildly. They are as unruly, rude, and arrogant as Dutch adults.
Respect for teachers has disappeared completely. Recently a student murdered as teacher, for instance. This kind of thing happens at the vocational schools. We think our education system is in a crisis, but we still score third place worldwide for some reason.
The biggest problem now is that there is a very serious shortage of teachers because nobody wants the job.
Granted, in any given class, only 2-3 students might be like that but its enough to ruin a class. What would happen if something like that happened at a school in the Netherlands?
Same here, of course. We don't have some special methodology for disciplining students. The main difference, I think, is in the differentiation. In preparatory academic education (athenaeum) there are less troublemakers, and talented students are not automatically 'best in their class' because they are grouped with other talented students.
Undifferentiated 'high school' systems are demotivating for the talented students in my opinion. I wonder whether the higher PISA scores are mostly because of the higher performance of the athenaeum students in the sample.
I don't believe, based on my perception of undifferentiated secondary schools in other countries and international assessments like PISA, that the demotivating effect of putting talent with troublemakers is offset with an equal positive motivating effect on the troublemakers. Of course, that's just an 'elitist' university staff opinion.
This may also be a reason why students in other countries fair better on tests...they aren't testing the one's that are in the trade schools.
This is NOT the case for the results of the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment that were recently published and widely covered by the media. A quote from the methodology report (chapter 4) on selecting participants:
The desired base PISA target population in each country consisted of 15-year-old students attending educational institutions located within the country. This meant that countries were to include (i) 15-year-olds enrolled full-time in educational institutions, (ii) 15-year-olds enrolled in educational institutions who attended on only a part-time basis, (iii) students in vocational training types of programmes, or any other related type of educational programmes, and (iv) students attending foreign schools within the country (as well as students from other countries attending any of the programmes in the first three categories).
Education or vocational training programs are usually mandatory for 15 year olds. That's why they compare 15 year olds.
We (I am from the Netherlands) rank third, above Japan. The major difference between vocational and other types of secondary schools here is usually the number of foreign languages these kids learn, and that they spend less time on formal education. Math skills on vocational schools are generally reasonably good, taking the lack of talent of those kids into account.
We also have a 'no child left behind' type of reorganization going on for a decade now, reducing the number of school types and early choices between schools. I work at a university, and we observe that math and writing skills have deteriorated because of later specialization. We make the exams easier every year. Still we rank third in the world?
Seriously? I get perfectly valid results for "Paris hotel". Where you searching for some "Hotel Solomon", or "Hotel Tapes" or something?
I know we used to get an irritating and unwanted redirect to the Dutch version of Google here (which for some reason prefers Dutch language pages accidentally containing the English search phrase). This problem is now solved, but I wonder whether your location influences search results.
When those of us who were using Sun boxes asked "What about us?", the reply was "We have Sun users?"
This is still happening every few weeks where I work.
We don't have any budget or support staff left for anything but windows servers, and we now have several times more windows sysops than we ever had solaris sysops, serving less employees. Volunteers are now patching the suns occasionally. The suns have moved to a former toilet in our department.
We just decided to keep the suns running unsupported until they failed. It has never happened sofar in some four years.
The suns still run some of the websites and our imap mailboxes, code repository, files, etc. but central management doesn't know that (and we cannot have imap mailboxes anymore officially). Budget: 0$
We also run linux servers for development, and central management doesn't know about that either. Official budget: 0$.
We only use the one windows server we have locally for testing purposes if customers demand it. We reinstall the damn thing twice a year with a fresh copy of windows.
Buying MS FUD is one thing, but I surely hope management isn't going to start cheerleading for MS.
Linux downloads may not be a good measure of the actual number of linux machines running, but MS server licenses are not an actual measure of the number of MS servers actually doing something useful except costing money.
Except that people can easily buy enough power to satisfy their needs for a small premimum on top of what a terminal costs. Look at around at the so called thin-clients available. Even the thinnest of them has enough power to be a "fat-client" with substantial processing power.
A cheap, small, completely silent, cool, and very low power consumption 'thin client' running for instance a VIA Eden 533MHz with several (1-4) GB flash memory IS a good investment if bandwidth is less of a problem than space and power.
For a just little more money you can buy a faster machine with much more hard disk storage space but it will consume several times more power, which is a problem if you are running on your UPS' batteries several times a day. Power is also expensive compared to the purchase price of the machine.
Google is aiming in the right direction if it wants to conquer the third world and European and Asian inner city small businesses.
One could imagine a time in the future when a few frames of video (including IR), sonar, or radar from a moving object can be translated to a 3d scene and then matched against a 3d model of the world or a part of it, allowing calculation of the position and path of the moving object.
One could imagine military, and various other, applications for such technology in a future where almost everything that moves is outfitted with video, sonar, or radar and broadcasts this data somewhere to be processed.
The amount of data to be collected and processed would be huge, probably not practical today. But for anyone in the future doing a prior art search for a patent on such a system, there was a posting on/. describing such a system on March 13th, 2005.
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages, and given that a lot of IT is not about advanced math but is about manipulating symbols you would therefore expect women to do rather well in those areas of IT.
Established facts like Maths skills survive linguistic damage suggest that there is no common 'symbol manipulation' library hardwired in out brains, contrary to Chomsky's hypothesis.
Anecdotal evidence from my secondary school period also suggests that (future) programmers are better at Mathematics and decoding the dead languages Latin and ancient Greek, but not noticeable better at speaking or quickly understanding living languages like English, French, and German.
The exodus of women is probably related to the exodus of underqualified, superfluous personnel after the burst of the IT bubble. During a hausse you are more likely to take factors like the skewed distribution of sexes in you company into account when hiring than during a recession. This has no bearing on the capacity of women to learn programming. It simply reflects the history of the IT industry, the relative scarcity of truly qualified women, and the fact that employees married to their job are usually young men.
Unemployment among ethnic minorities also tends to rise during recessions. Political correctness goes out the window when it becomes difficult to make ends meet.
Trudging through tax law and making decision support systems is what I do for a living in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration.
The tax administration here has a free computer program available that is used by close to 80% of taxpayers. There are commercial alternatives, but they have only marginal added value.
They also have some software for internal use that is officially open-source, but they try not to focus too much attention on that. It isn't very useful to private taxpayers anyway.
Good point. The thing that worries me specifically about software patents is that programmers (and their managers) may fear accidentally violating one, given the fud about patents on simple algorithms.
But to be honest I am opposed to patents in any form. They were not invented to protect inventors, but as an instrument for bankrupt kings to deal out monopolies. It is also not a suitable instrument for subsidizing research effort. Tax breaks are more suitable, more transparent, and interfere less with the market.
BTW My employer, the University of Amsterdam, won a number of nobel prizes for science over the last century, but it never collected any patents on the things it invented.
I'm a little baffled as to why Europe and America are exporting all our services to India and all our plastic trinkets to China. One day, they're going to realize they're doing all the work and we're making all the money, leaving us completely and utterly fucked.
Progress is inevitable. Menial jobs like software development and support are outsourced, and we keep the really good stuff; Knowledge intensive jobs like hunting 'pirates' and enforcing patents. We own all the knowledge, so China and India are nothing without us. We'll sue them if they try to play any tricks on us using our patented ideas.
There is nothing to worry about. I am going back to resting on my laurels now.
How many more EU countries right up until approximately 200 years ago had autocratic monarchies? They have been bred for 1000 years to let other people tell them what is good for them or not.
Exactly which people have been free for a 1000 years? They don't live in America.
Of course those jobs will be moved to India soon enough, at which point tens of thousands of small and medium size buisness IT employees will be sued out of existence for patent violations, and Ireland can go back to farming and being poor.
The large corporations arent in the buisness of being nice. They're in the buisness of screwing you in any way they can for short-term profitability.
India is not in the EU. So it makes no sense to file your patents and hire a regiment of lawyers there.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot Solaris. We run Apache on Solaris, SUSE Linux, Windows in that order of importance.
I think it's similarly misleading to say that "certain uses of p2p [are] illegal," as it tends to understate the truth of the matter. It's a lie of omission if you fail to acknowledge that those "certain uses" happen to be the most popular ones, by far.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: by criminalizing P2P you make decent people afraid of using P2P applications, and effectively shut it down as a distribution channel for legal purposes. When this is done it becomes easier to convince legislators that P2P should be illegal anyway, because it is exclusively used for illegal purposes.
My last use (and one of the few uses) of Bittorrent was to download a FreeBSD CD image. I never download copyrighted music or movies, but I suspect the very fact that I used the technology is enough reason to put me on a list of people to watch somewhere.
Why does the entertainment industry go directly after the technology instead of its use?
Because it is easy to enforce, of course, and because they are the ones who will get to define what a P2P technology is. Don't be surprised if Internet becomes a kind of passive television where they own the servers and you are only allowed to be a client. That's the situation their 'business model' is based on, and they want to go back to it.
Another piece of the strategy is to make expensive legal requirements on ISP's and content providers so that only big companies can afford to own servers and you, as an individual citizen, are on the receiving, consuming, end only.
P2P is an interesting technology that never achieved its potential because it is being criminalized before reaching maturity. Think of it: torrent links are immune to the Slashdot effect. P2P should be integrated into every browser, and it should be supported as a matter of principle.
Many are pointing out that this guy was not a professor, so what's the big deal? [..] Shall we wait for an exalted professor to get chastised [..]
'Professor' means very different things in different countries. In some countries it is merely a tenured university teacher, and in others it is strictly the head of a department.
Some countries explicitly give non-professors meeting certain criteria permission to let themselves be addressed as professor abroad. It is a completely meaningless distinction in this context. The guy is supposed to enjoy academic freedom.
Methinks you underestimate the difficulty of this task a tiny bit (all too common in computer vision and AI).
In my experience getting a car to follow a precalculated path at decent speed in the first place is quite hard, even in a simulation.
I did this for a game running on a karma physics engine, and I was not allowed to cheat with physics. Controlling oversteer and understeer, and accurately predicting the consequences of wheels loosing contact with the ground, is a lot harder than I expected, even in an idealized artificial environment.
Research wants to be free, but Mp3 players want to be levied.
Nothing funny about it. Listening to music is ungood. Reading scientific papers is doubleplusgood. This is the 'knowledge economy' policy our government talks about in action.
Look at the double digit economic growth rates in China: access to science and information good, access to porn, political rambling, etc ungood. QED
Sure, stuff will blow up, and people will die. People who understood the risks and knew exactly what they were doing. If they run out of people who are willing to hop onboard, they know they must spend time and money on the safety.
:)
Surely there is no way the present 'pro life' US government is going to fund a thinly veiled assisted suicide scheme, unless it can be argued that it is going to bring 'freedom and democracy' to space.
The law of diminishing returns applies - sure, you want to test and make sure the damn thing works, but beyond certain point extra testing and checking is not going to change the safety much - only the pricetag will go up, see NASA
This law has been repealed recently; Microsoft and Ford can build cars that can't crash. Let them build the shuttle.
because it takes like 2 and half hours from e.g. Amsterdam to drive to the next big german city, where a lot of people will be more than happy to sell mp3 players to angry dutch customers.
You are overestimating distances. It takes about 50 minutes to the border from Amsterdam, assuming you go in the weekend, and some 75-80 minutes to a town like Kleve. 90-100 minutes if you drive slowly.
Not very long ago the Dutch government also backpedaled on higher taxes on liquors because tax income dropped and Dutch liquor stores in the eastern half of the country went bankrupt. Filling up your car in Germany pays for the trip.
In principle I support the move from income-based taxes to consumption-based taxes, but it drives up taxes as a whole in a small country because of tax evasion.
This tax is completely ridiculous. I own 4 usb drives, an mp3 player, two video recorders, and a cd-rom writer, but I NEVER copied any video or audio illegally. The government still owes me for all the 'theft taxes' I paid over the years for CD-ROMs, audio and video tapes, recording equipment etc.
In the article, Brand writes:
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities.
as part of his observation that urbanization is slowing population growth (which he contends is slowing growth).
Actually, my observation is exactly the opposite. I seem to hear more sympathy for packing everyone together than for spreading them out in the modern environmentalist rhetoric. That's why "sprawl" has become a cuss-word among this bunch.
I consider myself an environmentalist, and I never ever met any other environmentalist who believed urbanization is a bad thing.
But I live in a densely populated country (the Netherlands); Finding a place where you are alone is hard enough even now, with draconic spatial planning that basically only allows construction in existing residential zones.
In my perception public opinion here is starting to embrace unlimited urban sprawl. More houses is has been an issue in elections since WWII. The government can't do very much about it, since most of the Netherlands cannot be built in anyway according to EU rules because of excessive pollution.
Emigration (to Australia and Canada) is increasing, and at the same time the EU is telling scary stories about how we need a million immigrants to solve our 'ageing' problem. Right.
I know what you are talking about.
My first USB flash drive was an Apacer steno. I also have four TwinMos drives. The four TwinMos drives fit into the 4-port USB hub on my desk together. I need a cable for my camera, mp3 player, and steno.
If I put the steno into the hub, it will block ALL 4 ports. That's crappy design.
I use two of the TwinMos drives as disks for a portable, silent, low power, non-moving parts mini-itx server. Most important requirement is they physically fit in the USB ports which are directly on top of eachother.
I considered the RAID configuration they tried, but I think I will wait until >1GB becomes affordable. Disk space is pretty tight. Two IDE flash drives in RAID configuration could make an awsome swap file for my silent server, but they are pretty expensive too & hard to find.
Here in Europe we invent things in garden sheds.
That's why I converted the pantry, which used to be the garden shed, into the office I am posting from right now.
I work at a university, but if I ever invent something it really happened in the garden shed.
I fail to see why population density or distribution should be linearly related to the feasibility of providing broadband in the first place.
Construction (and repairs) of infrastructure in densely populated areas is many times more expensive than in less populated areas. If you are wiring a very densely populated old inner city with streets one and a half car wide and virtually no sidewalks you will bring traffic to a virtual standstill for months or years and cause economic activity to move out of the city.
Most of the US population lives in areas with streets 4 to 8 cars wide. Even in Manhattan streets and sidewalks are pretty wide. I am pretty sure broadband investments per person are much lower than in South Korea, Belgium, or the Netherlands.
Estimates of the Netherlands government (385 inhabitants per sq/km; estimates of the RIVM) indicate that in the present situation each 1% growth of the population causes a 1% decrease in GDP because of extra stress on infrastructural investments.
On the other hand the number of potential customers is higher. Only when population densities are relatively low overall, like in the US and Canada, one would expect wiring to be more profitable in more densely populated areas.
Exactly. We get the biometric passport in 2006 in the Netherlands, and the official reason the government gives is that you are going to need that 'extra functionality' to enter the US.
Either you give your biometric data to the Dutch authorities, or you give it to the US authorities. The Dutch government considers itself a better guardian of our privacy. The Dutch government is easily blackmailed into cooperation by the US government by threatening to revoke valuable customs privileges for cargo on ships from Rotterdam harbor. Our economy is based on transport and trading, after all.
Before 2001 a move like this would have caused an emotional uproar against 'nazi practices', but people just accept it now.
I have been able to avoid having to go to the US in recent years, but this is not good for my career. Given my line of work I will probably be waiting in line for one of those passports. I will keep it wrapped in tin foil though.
A more recent development is that you are apparently also going to need it for just flying near US airspace: a KLM plane on its way to Mexico was turned back last week because the US somehow illegally appropriated the passenger list (from Mexico?) and found two 'suspicious' people on it that are not on any blacklist communicated with the Dutch government or KLM. The Dutch government is very pissed off about this treatment of its citizens and its national carrier.
What the 'right' rules are depends on who you are.
.nl works just fine. She speaks only one language anyway, and it is not English.
For me -- as a 'foreigner' from your perspective -- filtering all english email messages from senders not in my address book would get rid of over 90% of spam, but being unreachable from Anglosaxon countries is not an option in my line of work.
For my mother filtering anything from senders whose email address does not end in
From your filtering rules I deduce that the US is still as tolerant as it always has been towards foreigners who want to keep their original family name, including those characters that are not directly available on your keyboard.
Wouldn't cutting the cables though the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean be more effective? You will find a lot of supporters of that idea on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Things like Spamcop are misguided. They will list any foreign message they don't understand as spam and are regularly abused here by people who want interfere with the email communication of others. Subscribing to a government information mailing list and then reporting it as spam is becoming a common tactic.
Are schools in the Netherlands as unruly as they are in the United States? Here in the states, students are often unruly, goof off, talk back and even swear at teachers. The teachers often can't do a thing, because the schools get funding based on attendance so provided that outright assult does not happen, the troublemakers persist.
It's hard to compare. I never visit US high schools. In Europe Dutch youth are not known for their discipline, to put it mildly. They are as unruly, rude, and arrogant as Dutch adults.
Respect for teachers has disappeared completely. Recently a student murdered as teacher, for instance. This kind of thing happens at the vocational schools. We think our education system is in a crisis, but we still score third place worldwide for some reason.
The biggest problem now is that there is a very serious shortage of teachers because nobody wants the job.
Granted, in any given class, only 2-3 students might be like that but its enough to ruin a class. What would happen if something like that happened at a school in the Netherlands?
Same here, of course. We don't have some special methodology for disciplining students. The main difference, I think, is in the differentiation. In preparatory academic education (athenaeum) there are less troublemakers, and talented students are not automatically 'best in their class' because they are grouped with other talented students.
Undifferentiated 'high school' systems are demotivating for the talented students in my opinion. I wonder whether the higher PISA scores are mostly because of the higher performance of the athenaeum students in the sample.
I don't believe, based on my perception of undifferentiated secondary schools in other countries and international assessments like PISA, that the demotivating effect of putting talent with troublemakers is offset with an equal positive motivating effect on the troublemakers. Of course, that's just an 'elitist' university staff opinion.
This may also be a reason why students in other countries fair better on tests...they aren't testing the one's that are in the trade schools.
This is NOT the case for the results of the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment that were recently published and widely covered by the media. A quote from the methodology report (chapter 4) on selecting participants:
The desired base PISA target population in each country consisted of 15-year-old students attending educational institutions located within the country. This meant that countries were to include (i) 15-year-olds enrolled full-time in educational institutions, (ii) 15-year-olds enrolled in educational institutions who attended on only a part-time basis, (iii) students in vocational training types of programmes, or any other related type of educational programmes, and (iv) students attending foreign schools within the
country (as well as students from other countries attending any of the programmes in the first three categories).
Education or vocational training programs are usually mandatory for 15 year olds. That's why they compare 15 year olds.
We (I am from the Netherlands) rank third, above Japan. The major difference between vocational and other types of secondary schools here is usually the number of foreign languages these kids learn, and that they spend less time on formal education. Math skills on vocational schools are generally reasonably good, taking the lack of talent of those kids into account.
We also have a 'no child left behind' type of reorganization going on for a decade now, reducing the number of school types and early choices between schools. I work at a university, and we observe that math and writing skills have deteriorated because of later specialization. We make the exams easier every year. Still we rank third in the world?
Seriously? I get perfectly valid results for "Paris hotel". Where you searching for some "Hotel Solomon", or "Hotel Tapes" or something?
I know we used to get an irritating and unwanted redirect to the Dutch version of Google here (which for some reason prefers Dutch language pages accidentally containing the English search phrase). This problem is now solved, but I wonder whether your location influences search results.
When those of us who were using Sun boxes asked "What about us?", the reply was "We have Sun users?"
This is still happening every few weeks where I work.
We don't have any budget or support staff left for anything but windows servers, and we now have several times more windows sysops than we ever had solaris sysops, serving less employees. Volunteers are now patching the suns occasionally. The suns have moved to a former toilet in our department.
We just decided to keep the suns running unsupported until they failed. It has never happened sofar in some four years.
The suns still run some of the websites and our imap mailboxes, code repository, files, etc. but central management doesn't know that (and we cannot have imap mailboxes anymore officially). Budget: 0$
We also run linux servers for development, and central management doesn't know about that either. Official budget: 0$.
We only use the one windows server we have locally for testing purposes if customers demand it. We reinstall the damn thing twice a year with a fresh copy of windows.
Buying MS FUD is one thing, but I surely hope management isn't going to start cheerleading for MS.
Linux downloads may not be a good measure of the actual number of linux machines running, but MS server licenses are not an actual measure of the number of MS servers actually doing something useful except costing money.
Except that people can easily buy enough power to satisfy their needs for a small premimum on top of what a terminal costs. Look at around at the so called thin-clients available. Even the thinnest of them has enough power to be a "fat-client" with substantial processing power.
A cheap, small, completely silent, cool, and very low power consumption 'thin client' running for instance a VIA Eden 533MHz with several (1-4) GB flash memory IS a good investment if bandwidth is less of a problem than space and power.
For a just little more money you can buy a faster machine with much more hard disk storage space but it will consume several times more power, which is a problem if you are running on your UPS' batteries several times a day. Power is also expensive compared to the purchase price of the machine.
Google is aiming in the right direction if it wants to conquer the third world and European and Asian inner city small businesses.
One could imagine a time in the future when a few frames of video (including IR), sonar, or radar from a moving object can be translated to a 3d scene and then matched against a 3d model of the world or a part of it, allowing calculation of the position and path of the moving object.
/. describing such a system on March 13th, 2005.
One could imagine military, and various other, applications for such technology in a future where almost everything that moves is outfitted with video, sonar, or radar and broadcasts this data somewhere to be processed.
The amount of data to be collected and processed would be huge, probably not practical today. But for anyone in the future doing a prior art search for a patent on such a system, there was a posting on
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages, and given that a lot of IT is not about advanced math but is about manipulating symbols you would therefore expect women to do rather well in those areas of IT.
Established facts like Maths skills survive linguistic damage suggest that there is no common 'symbol manipulation' library hardwired in out brains, contrary to Chomsky's hypothesis.
Anecdotal evidence from my secondary school period also suggests that (future) programmers are better at Mathematics and decoding the dead languages Latin and ancient Greek, but not noticeable better at speaking or quickly understanding living languages like English, French, and German.
The exodus of women is probably related to the exodus of underqualified, superfluous personnel after the burst of the IT bubble. During a hausse you are more likely to take factors like the skewed distribution of sexes in you company into account when hiring than during a recession. This has no bearing on the capacity of women to learn programming. It simply reflects the history of the IT industry, the relative scarcity of truly qualified women, and the fact that employees married to their job are usually young men.
Unemployment among ethnic minorities also tends to rise during recessions. Political correctness goes out the window when it becomes difficult to make ends meet.
Trudging through tax law and making decision support systems is what I do for a living in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration.
The tax administration here has a free computer program available that is used by close to 80% of taxpayers. There are commercial alternatives, but they have only marginal added value.
They also have some software for internal use that is officially open-source, but they try not to focus too much attention on that. It isn't very useful to private taxpayers anyway.
Good point. The thing that worries me specifically about software patents is that programmers (and their managers) may fear accidentally violating one, given the fud about patents on simple algorithms.
But to be honest I am opposed to patents in any form. They were not invented to protect inventors, but as an instrument for bankrupt kings to deal out monopolies. It is also not a suitable instrument for subsidizing research effort. Tax breaks are more suitable, more transparent, and interfere less with the market.
BTW My employer, the University of Amsterdam, won a number of nobel prizes for science over the last century, but it never collected any patents on the things it invented.
I'm a little baffled as to why Europe and America are exporting all our services to India and all our plastic trinkets to China. One day, they're going to realize they're doing all the work and we're making all the money, leaving us completely and utterly fucked.
Progress is inevitable. Menial jobs like software development and support are outsourced, and we keep the really good stuff; Knowledge intensive jobs like hunting 'pirates' and enforcing patents. We own all the knowledge, so China and India are nothing without us. We'll sue them if they try to play any tricks on us using our patented ideas.
There is nothing to worry about. I am going back to resting on my laurels now.
How many more EU countries right up until approximately 200 years ago had autocratic monarchies? They have been bred for 1000 years to let other people tell them what is good for them or not.
Exactly which people have been free for a 1000 years? They don't live in America.
Of course those jobs will be moved to India soon enough, at which point tens of thousands of small and medium size buisness IT employees will be sued out of existence for patent violations, and Ireland can go back to farming and being poor.
The large corporations arent in the buisness of being nice. They're in the buisness of screwing you in any way they can for short-term profitability.
India is not in the EU. So it makes no sense to file your patents and hire a regiment of lawyers there.