Moon... etching... I wonder how much power it would take to etch the goatse man onto the surface of the Moon. Now there is a project for a Dr. Evil; people would pay lots not to have to look at the "mooning" every night.
So what we learn of this story is that your target market, decent people who buy Christian rock and "family music", are rampant pirates like anybody else?
A frightening thought that one is obliged to actually prove that there is no key. How does one prove a negative? I mean.. I actually have files of random data on my drive that might look like some kind of encryption. I have gpg encrypted files lying around I have genuinely forgotten the key to. Should someone come investigate my machine, I'd be in deep trouble...
Don't worry, I swore a long time ago that when faced with a person like you in peril, I most certainly will... whatever happens in nature is, by definition, natural.
... should help alleviate boredom during long space voyages, they say.
I must admit I don't quite like imagining the situation of (male) astronauts entertaining themselves in a confined space in a zero-gravity environment. Can you imagine how sticky all the panels and controls of their spacecraft would get over time?
Then again, if they are geeks who just got out of their parents' basement, they are of course used to their keyboards being in a similar condition...
I have had many discussions with math teachers about the way mathematics is taught in schools, particularly in the first few years. There are two schools, and the procedural school seems to be winning.
I am a CompSci major with a minors in math and statistics, and maybe surprisingly, at school mathematics was my weakest subject for a long time. I wasn't exactly bad at it, but it was the only one I didn't quite "grok" until my last two years of school, after which I suddenly became fairly good at it.
The issue was that mathematics does not work the way most other subjects work... you need to understand underlying principles and apply them instead of just memorizing stuff. Yet, especially in the lower grades, this is how math is taught... you just learn to replicate what is essentially an algorithm for performing some tasks.
The argument for this goes something along the lines that for most people it is important to just be able to "count" and do their everyday arithmetic. However, there is this big disconnect sometime around seventh grade (this is in Finland) where algebra comes around that drops some 50% of people straight out of math because of the paradigm shift, and they find it difficult to claw back... I fell victim to this as well. Fortunately I had a great math teacher later on and managed to snap my brain into the math mindset... I was never stupid, but just hadn't understood how the whole damn thing works.
If I had the power over the school curriculum, I would certainly start teaching "philosophy" from first grade. It would in general teach critical thinking, logic, argumentation and things like that. Kids would be introduced to the concepts through simple engagement in a kind of Socratic discourse, where they would learn to recognize proper reasoning when they see it. After this, you could start working with abstract concepts like numbers, sets (Venn diagrams anyone?)... this stuff would be useful in all other subjects, not just math.
A young mind is malleable, and this should be exploited early on to make it THINK instead of knowing how to do long division...
Ok, so, I come from Finland where we have a broad and GOOD public education system... practically everybody here goes through the public education route. Our school kids regularly end up at or very near the top of most international surveys, and people from abroad come to actually learn of how we do it. The rest of Nordic Europe have nearly identical systems which perform comparably.
I only partially agree with your #2, depending on how you meant it. Kids who are clearly disruptive and have issues "are not in school to learn", and they are a distraction to everyone's -- not just the best ones' -- learning process. I went to school with a couple of really loud class clowns for a few years, and yeah, they did waste humongous amounts of teacher time and should have been dealt with despite their "right" of being at school. Rights that are granted must not be abused, and if they are, they can be taken away.
On the other hand, esp. the political right wing tends to love the argument that having to associate with the weaklings destroys the potential of the strong -- which is of course, according to them, the most horrible end result of any policy. They prefer seeing the more vulnerable people being totally destroyed. In this sense, I do not agree -- I firmly believe that a comprehensive public education system CAN accommodate both an egalitarian idea of providing an education for everyone AND challenging the brighter ones while providing meaningful measurements of everyone's academic performance. In particular, both bright (and not) kids' capabilities can be nourished in this context, provided that resources are appropriate.
The fundamental idea is of course that we're spread over a normal distribution, so a baseline teaching standard is easy to establish, and most kids will be somewhere near it. Then you'll just provide some spread in the material... particularly extra credit stuff for the skilled kids. Last, you'll also have to stick to evaluating according to the said normal distribution.. you can not and will not be able to turn everyone into a rocket scientist, and it would be a straw man to claim that this is what public education tries to do. What it can do is provide for the best teaching possible, which lets everyone strive to the best of their capacity. As an added bonus, you get fully comparable results.
Of course a lot of this depends on people being able to agree upon what is "appropriate" education for kids. Fortunately, we do not have these wacky religious culture wars about ID and whatnot here. Sure, I would for one like mandatory Swedish out of the classroom, but can't have everything.
Partly because of this need for broad agreeability, I tend to believe that a public education curriculum needs to focus on providing high quality basics instead of providing wild "choice"... math, languages, history, the works. Leave the rest of the day for kids to do stuff on their own. The problem with bringing "hobbies" into school (like they seem to do in the name of "choice" in the UK and USA) is that it divides up educational resources, thus reducing focus -- which you badly need because you can't provide EVERYTHING for EVERYONE -- and tends to guide pupils off on tangents which ends up filling their days with inordinate amounts of work. Finally, it leaves no time for "genuine" hobbies where one advances self without a requirement to perform. An interesting fact is that in most comparisons Finnish school kids do the LEAST amount of work per week for school, while performing the best...
I graduated school within the top 1% or so, and I don't feel particularly harmed by having been through a public school system. Sure a lot of the stuff was easy for me, but I spent the time I did not spend on schoolwork advancing myself in other ways. As a personal growth issue, it was also beneficial to be among the "normal" frame of reference of people in general from the beginning... first of all, it was a nice realization that yes, I am brighter than most, but it also taught me that those w
... see any attempts of overt centralized control as damage and route around it.
I won't get into the political discussion here, but I do sympathize with the idea that the "public information highways" should not be under the control of any government. I am also somewhat disturbed by the propensity of some Americans to automatically imagine that their "benevolent dictatorship" should be any more acceptable to foreigners than they seem to be accepting of what they see as the "malevolent dictatorship" of the UN... get along, people.
Fortunately, the Internet was designed as a distributed system and a network of networks from the beginning, so I think this discussion is a bit silly and the threats to "wrestle control" from the USA to just show ignorance from the part of our politicians.
As the net is a system of peers of networks that exchange traffic, it should be easy to create a parallel system, should some entity involved in the Internet to become too overbearing. Of course this means giving up of the large-scale benefits of communicating with anybody anywhere, but that would be the price you pay for your control. It is the benefits of being peers that makes the Internet possible in the first place, and to realize those benefits for yourself, you must learn to play together.
The big issue is of course that of the root servers... well... let's set up our own then. Shouldn't be too difficult to isolate America if that is what it gets to. I'm not saying it should be done, but it certainly could be done.
The technological aspects are not really interesting, as there is no centralized control to wrestle from anyone... but it does worry me that there is so little trust going on in the world these days. Everyone seems to be very wary of the other. We haven't progressed that far from the Cold War, and the tensions seem to have shifted where they didn't exist (to this degree) before.
That is why I tend to believe in the need for open, neutral controlling bodies for abstract resources such as DNS that benefit everyone if access is kept open at all costs. The US side of the argument seems to always take the form of "well we want to hold a shotgun to your head just in case we feel like pulling the trigger, but don't worry, we're Good, Godly People and won't do it..." which is hardly convincing... pooling things like this ensures mutual benefit without need for such fears.
Well.. as I see it, a big part of the joke IS the use of Finnish as the language of choice. Of course this results in a lot of language gags that just simply do not translate... but for a Finnish-speaker it is quite hilarious to hear horribly forced translations for sci-fi jargon...
This wouldn't solve the issue I am talking about really. If the user is in Finland, he may want his place names in Finnish or Swedish as both are official languages. I want them in Finnish, my Swedish-speaking pals might want them in Swedish, and a few forced-bilingualism fanatics will insist that the naming must be according to language majority, or always have both names visible.
As things stand, the names seem to be randomly drawn from either language, which can look amusing.
Browser language setting might be a good trigger for this.
The user should be allowed to choose between naming systems and languages based on preference. Take names in Finland for example... the naming is simply inconsistent, there is sometimes no apparent logic to it. The Gulf of Finland is named in Estonian, and a lot of Finnish locations seem to have their name pretty much randomly chosen between their Finnish and Swedish equivalents (both of which are valid, but there should be a system to this... like based on the language majority of the place)
Amen. I was in Assembly 1998 and was disappointed by it already. Too many stupid kids and unruly behaviour caused by this. The organizers need to carry a big stick to keep the immature brats in order, and this creates a bit of a police state feel to the whole thing...
1. Education system that provides tuition all the way to PhD if you have what it takes 2. Openness of the population to gadgets (not has much of a fetish as the Japanese have) 3. High standard of living in general so they have the money to buy these toys 4. 1-3 cause a market for services and the creators to them (this is yet to be fully realized, 3G has been a long time coming) 4. The Nordic Mobile Telephone system of old that eventually gave us Nokia 5. Good old-fashioned engineering traditions (mostly stemming from 1) that were used to build ships and machinery for the paper industry in the old days, and still to a degree today.
Oh well, geeks have always stressed quality over quantity, no? Maybe we would be able to stay that way by her being quite selective with whom she chooses to actually have her offspring with.
There is also lot to say about the benefits of the massive amounts of wild, meaningless, non-productive sex Xena the Warrior Princess, Ph.D., will also have with her reproductively redundant males.
No, it means that the geek species will survive the skewed gender ratio through adopting a polygamist model where one geek girl has a harem of 50 geek boys, using them as her semen producers and sex toys as she pleases while she is not solving differential equations or writing code.
I, for one, welcome our new geek dominatrix overladies!
Something I have never managed to quite understand is why one important feature of Fascism is conveniently ignored by a lot of people attempting a definition. What is missing in my view is ignoring Fascism's insistence of achieving greatness through institutionalizing and enshrining a "naturalistic" struggle for survival.
Fascists in general do not take kindly to what they see as "weakness"... their world is completely sink or swim and Darwinian, and everything else is outright inethical. Just remember Hitler's raving about how he wants to see German youth as noble remorseless beasts, free from weakening things such as empathy and compassion for one's fellow man.
Certainly historical Fascism puts more emphasis on the survival through struggle of nations and races while the modern version stresses the survival of the individual, but I can't help but see parallels between that and what we are being herded towards by the powers that be...
I believe that Statism is merely a tool of Fascism, like it can be the tool of any given ideology. Totalitarian societies can take many forms... Fascism can not be defined merely in terms of the brownshirts, you have to also look at what they want to implement once they get their way.
Aaa, so päike actually is "sun" in Estonian. Ok, that clarifies things, thanks... our "mänty" (pine) is closer to mänti still though:) So the guy is just ripping off Estonian and passing it off as his made up 1337 new language.. at least based on our current knowledge...
It's possible, but according to my understanding Estonian is different enough that it is unlikely that he would come up with a bunch of words which all of them have nearly identical counterparts in Finnish... any Estonian native speakers here who could give us a hint?
By the way, the word "päike" is interesting on its own right. It actually shows understanding of Finnish (Estonian?) grammatical structure which is admirable. The "-ke" ending particle (?) has either a diminutive or substitutive meaning (something is used instead of something)... it's hard to put into English terms, but "päike" could, by some deranged poet, be a made-up Finnish word meaning some kind of daylight...
"Ema" is even closer to "emä", which is often used as "mother" in the context of animals. "Emo" is especially in archaic texts (compare Kalevala) often a word for even a human mother.
I must admit I am not awfully impressed by this guy's invented language without seeing more of it. Interesting, though, that he is stated as knowing Lithuanian and not Finnish -- Lithuanian is after all very different from Finnish, and he cannot have got those words from there.. he must know Finnish at least subconsciously, or then they screwed up with the languages in the article.
Yeah, and hopefully one day we will be able to make it perfectly clear that Finnish is the primary official language and Swedish is the language of some 6% of people... those tend to be a little loud and have huge feelings of entitlement though:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Moon... etching... I wonder how much power it would take to etch the goatse man onto the surface of the Moon. Now there is a project for a Dr. Evil; people would pay lots not to have to look at the "mooning" every night.
So what we learn of this story is that your target market, decent people who buy Christian rock and "family music", are rampant pirates like anybody else?
I think you've got it the wrong way around completely... or then you're just being naive...
It's more like
GI Joe: "HARHAR!! I 0wn j00 Arab dogz!!1 HOWS THAT FOR 9/11!! OH MAN ITS LIKE GTA!! NOW DROP YOUR PANTS FOR A GOOD ABU GHRAIB ASS RAPE!!"
Translator: "We bring you freedom and democracy! Join us in building a new and better Iraq for you and your people!"
A frightening thought that one is obliged to actually prove that there is no key. How does one prove a negative? I mean.. I actually have files of random data on my drive that might look like some kind of encryption. I have gpg encrypted files lying around I have genuinely forgotten the key to. Should someone come investigate my machine, I'd be in deep trouble...
Don't worry, I swore a long time ago that when faced with a person like you in peril, I most certainly will... whatever happens in nature is, by definition, natural.
... should help alleviate boredom during long space voyages, they say.
I must admit I don't quite like imagining the situation of (male) astronauts entertaining themselves in a confined space in a zero-gravity environment. Can you imagine how sticky all the panels and controls of their spacecraft would get over time?
Then again, if they are geeks who just got out of their parents' basement, they are of course used to their keyboards being in a similar condition...
the goatse man somewhere...
I have had many discussions with math teachers about the way mathematics is taught in schools, particularly in the first few years. There are two schools, and the procedural school seems to be winning.
I am a CompSci major with a minors in math and statistics, and maybe surprisingly, at school mathematics was my weakest subject for a long time. I wasn't exactly bad at it, but it was the only one I didn't quite "grok" until my last two years of school, after which I suddenly became fairly good at it.
The issue was that mathematics does not work the way most other subjects work... you need to understand underlying principles and apply them instead of just memorizing stuff. Yet, especially in the lower grades, this is how math is taught... you just learn to replicate what is essentially an algorithm for performing some tasks.
The argument for this goes something along the lines that for most people it is important to just be able to "count" and do their everyday arithmetic. However, there is this big disconnect sometime around seventh grade (this is in Finland) where algebra comes around that drops some 50% of people straight out of math because of the paradigm shift, and they find it difficult to claw back... I fell victim to this as well. Fortunately I had a great math teacher later on and managed to snap my brain into the math mindset... I was never stupid, but just hadn't understood how the whole damn thing works.
If I had the power over the school curriculum, I would certainly start teaching "philosophy" from first grade. It would in general teach critical thinking, logic, argumentation and things like that. Kids would be introduced to the concepts through simple engagement in a kind of Socratic discourse, where they would learn to recognize proper reasoning when they see it. After this, you could start working with abstract concepts like numbers, sets (Venn diagrams anyone?)... this stuff would be useful in all other subjects, not just math.
A young mind is malleable, and this should be exploited early on to make it THINK instead of knowing how to do long division...
Ok, so, I come from Finland where we have a broad and GOOD public education system... practically everybody here goes through the public education route. Our school kids regularly end up at or very near the top of most international surveys, and people from abroad come to actually learn of how we do it. The rest of Nordic Europe have nearly identical systems which perform comparably.
I only partially agree with your #2, depending on how you meant it. Kids who are clearly disruptive and have issues "are not in school to learn", and they are a distraction to everyone's -- not just the best ones' -- learning process. I went to school with a couple of really loud class clowns for a few years, and yeah, they did waste humongous amounts of teacher time and should have been dealt with despite their "right" of being at school. Rights that are granted must not be abused, and if they are, they can be taken away.
On the other hand, esp. the political right wing tends to love the argument that having to associate with the weaklings destroys the potential of the strong -- which is of course, according to them, the most horrible end result of any policy. They prefer seeing the more vulnerable people being totally destroyed. In this sense, I do not agree -- I firmly believe that a comprehensive public education system CAN accommodate both an egalitarian idea of providing an education for everyone AND challenging the brighter ones while providing meaningful measurements of everyone's academic performance. In particular, both bright (and not) kids' capabilities can be nourished in this context, provided that resources are appropriate.
The fundamental idea is of course that we're spread over a normal distribution, so a baseline teaching standard is easy to establish, and most kids will be somewhere near it. Then you'll just provide some spread in the material... particularly extra credit stuff for the skilled kids. Last, you'll also have to stick to evaluating according to the said normal distribution.. you can not and will not be able to turn everyone into a rocket scientist, and it would be a straw man to claim that this is what public education tries to do. What it can do is provide for the best teaching possible, which lets everyone strive to the best of their capacity. As an added bonus, you get fully comparable results.
Of course a lot of this depends on people being able to agree upon what is "appropriate" education for kids. Fortunately, we do not have these wacky religious culture wars about ID and whatnot here. Sure, I would for one like mandatory Swedish out of the classroom, but can't have everything.
Partly because of this need for broad agreeability, I tend to believe that a public education curriculum needs to focus on providing high quality basics instead of providing wild "choice"... math, languages, history, the works. Leave the rest of the day for kids to do stuff on their own. The problem with bringing "hobbies" into school (like they seem to do in the name of "choice" in the UK and USA) is that it divides up educational resources, thus reducing focus -- which you badly need because you can't provide EVERYTHING for EVERYONE -- and tends to guide pupils off on tangents which ends up filling their days with inordinate amounts of work. Finally, it leaves no time for "genuine" hobbies where one advances self without a requirement to perform. An interesting fact is that in most comparisons Finnish school kids do the LEAST amount of work per week for school, while performing the best...
I graduated school within the top 1% or so, and I don't feel particularly harmed by having been through a public school system. Sure a lot of the stuff was easy for me, but I spent the time I did not spend on schoolwork advancing myself in other ways. As a personal growth issue, it was also beneficial to be among the "normal" frame of reference of people in general from the beginning... first of all, it was a nice realization that yes, I am brighter than most, but it also taught me that those w
Start with "main" and go from there :-)
Sure, if you're the kind guy who spends his nights getting his rocks off by doing something like this instead of banging girls for real.
To each his own. I congratulate you for finding your own style of sexual expression.
... see any attempts of overt centralized control as damage and route around it.
I won't get into the political discussion here, but I do sympathize with the idea that the "public information highways" should not be under the control of any government. I am also somewhat disturbed by the propensity of some Americans to automatically imagine that their "benevolent dictatorship" should be any more acceptable to foreigners than they seem to be accepting of what they see as the "malevolent dictatorship" of the UN... get along, people.
Fortunately, the Internet was designed as a distributed system and a network of networks from the beginning, so I think this discussion is a bit silly and the threats to "wrestle control" from the USA to just show ignorance from the part of our politicians.
As the net is a system of peers of networks that exchange traffic, it should be easy to create a parallel system, should some entity involved in the Internet to become too overbearing. Of course this means giving up of the large-scale benefits of communicating with anybody anywhere, but that would be the price you pay for your control. It is the benefits of being peers that makes the Internet possible in the first place, and to realize those benefits for yourself, you must learn to play together.
The big issue is of course that of the root servers... well... let's set up our own then. Shouldn't be too difficult to isolate America if that is what it gets to. I'm not saying it should be done, but it certainly could be done.
The technological aspects are not really interesting, as there is no centralized control to wrestle from anyone... but it does worry me that there is so little trust going on in the world these days. Everyone seems to be very wary of the other. We haven't progressed that far from the Cold War, and the tensions seem to have shifted where they didn't exist (to this degree) before.
That is why I tend to believe in the need for open, neutral controlling bodies for abstract resources such as DNS that benefit everyone if access is kept open at all costs. The US side of the argument seems to always take the form of "well we want to hold a shotgun to your head just in case we feel like pulling the trigger, but don't worry, we're Good, Godly People and won't do it..." which is hardly convincing... pooling things like this ensures mutual benefit without need for such fears.
Well.. as I see it, a big part of the joke IS the use of Finnish as the language of choice. Of course this results in a lot of language gags that just simply do not translate... but for a Finnish-speaker it is quite hilarious to hear horribly forced translations for sci-fi jargon...
This wouldn't solve the issue I am talking about really. If the user is in Finland, he may want his place names in Finnish or Swedish as both are official languages. I want them in Finnish, my Swedish-speaking pals might want them in Swedish, and a few forced-bilingualism fanatics will insist that the naming must be according to language majority, or always have both names visible.
As things stand, the names seem to be randomly drawn from either language, which can look amusing.
Browser language setting might be a good trigger for this.
The user should be allowed to choose between naming systems and languages based on preference. Take names in Finland for example... the naming is simply inconsistent, there is sometimes no apparent logic to it. The Gulf of Finland is named in Estonian, and a lot of Finnish locations seem to have their name pretty much randomly chosen between their Finnish and Swedish equivalents (both of which are valid, but there should be a system to this... like based on the language majority of the place)
Amen. I was in Assembly 1998 and was disappointed by it already. Too many stupid kids and unruly behaviour caused by this. The organizers need to carry a big stick to keep the immature brats in order, and this creates a bit of a police state feel to the whole thing...
1. Education system that provides tuition all the way to PhD if you have what it takes
2. Openness of the population to gadgets (not has much of a fetish as the Japanese have)
3. High standard of living in general so they have the money to buy these toys
4. 1-3 cause a market for services and the creators to them (this is yet to be fully realized, 3G has been a long time coming)
4. The Nordic Mobile Telephone system of old that eventually gave us Nokia
5. Good old-fashioned engineering traditions (mostly stemming from 1) that were used to build ships and machinery for the paper industry in the old days, and still to a degree today.
Spoilsport.
Oh well, geeks have always stressed quality over quantity, no? Maybe we would be able to stay that way by her being quite selective with whom she chooses to actually have her offspring with.
There is also lot to say about the benefits of the massive amounts of wild, meaningless, non-productive sex Xena the Warrior Princess, Ph.D., will also have with her reproductively redundant males.
Right?
No, it means that the geek species will survive the skewed gender ratio through adopting a polygamist model where one geek girl has a harem of 50 geek boys, using them as her semen producers and sex toys as she pleases while she is not solving differential equations or writing code.
I, for one, welcome our new geek dominatrix overladies!
Something I have never managed to quite understand is why one important feature of Fascism is conveniently ignored by a lot of people attempting a definition. What is missing in my view is ignoring Fascism's insistence of achieving greatness through institutionalizing and enshrining a "naturalistic" struggle for survival.
Fascists in general do not take kindly to what they see as "weakness"... their world is completely sink or swim and Darwinian, and everything else is outright inethical. Just remember Hitler's raving about how he wants to see German youth as noble remorseless beasts, free from weakening things such as empathy and compassion for one's fellow man.
Certainly historical Fascism puts more emphasis on the survival through struggle of nations and races while the modern version stresses the survival of the individual, but I can't help but see parallels between that and what we are being herded towards by the powers that be...
I believe that Statism is merely a tool of Fascism, like it can be the tool of any given ideology. Totalitarian societies can take many forms... Fascism can not be defined merely in terms of the brownshirts, you have to also look at what they want to implement once they get their way.
That would be "mäntti" to be exact.
Aaa, so päike actually is "sun" in Estonian. Ok, that clarifies things, thanks... our "mänty" (pine) is closer to mänti still though :) So the guy is just ripping off Estonian and passing it off as his made up 1337 new language.. at least based on our current knowledge...
It's possible, but according to my understanding Estonian is different enough that it is unlikely that he would come up with a bunch of words which all of them have nearly identical counterparts in Finnish... any Estonian native speakers here who could give us a hint?
By the way, the word "päike" is interesting on its own right. It actually shows understanding of Finnish (Estonian?) grammatical structure which is admirable. The "-ke" ending particle (?) has either a diminutive or substitutive meaning (something is used instead of something)... it's hard to put into English terms, but "päike" could, by some deranged poet, be a made-up Finnish word meaning some kind of daylight...
"Ema" is even closer to "emä", which is often used as "mother" in the context of animals. "Emo" is especially in archaic texts (compare Kalevala) often a word for even a human mother.
I must admit I am not awfully impressed by this guy's invented language without seeing more of it. Interesting, though, that he is stated as knowing Lithuanian and not Finnish -- Lithuanian is after all very different from Finnish, and he cannot have got those words from there.. he must know Finnish at least subconsciously, or then they screwed up with the languages in the article.
Yeah, and hopefully one day we will be able to make it perfectly clear that Finnish is the primary official language and Swedish is the language of some 6% of people... those tend to be a little loud and have huge feelings of entitlement though :-(