That depends what you mean by "incriminating location". Japan currently has a more or less democratic government, similar for example to the US, so at this moment this should not be a major problem. But in many other countries what they consider a "crime" you may actually consider a right thing to do. In such a case you would not want them to have your fingerprints.
Also, they say they will share the fingerprints with other governments. Which means that next time you participate in disseminating political flyers criticising your increasingly oppressive government, it will be very easy for them to find who you are.
I think lot of preprints used to be postscript because people simply ran TeX and dvips. With pdftex becoming more popular, I expect that is probably soon going to change.
Being deported to Cuba is not the only way for you to stop living in a democracy. I don't know why so many people assume that USA will always, perhaps due to some magical protection bestowed onto the land here, be a democracy. Living in a democracy is both a privilege and a duty. And if we don't fulfill the duty, we will lose the privilege. Some argue that it has already happened. Note that in spite of what some people want you to believe, voting is not the only way to fulfill the duty and exercise the privilege.
so fucking what? all this proves is that younger generations don't have the requirement of remmebering phone numbers. it doesn't prove they aren't capable.
I did not read the article, but i believe the main idea was that with all the new technology that remembers things for us, young people will have less opportunity to exercise their memory. I don't thing it's true, and this is exactly the reason why:
i bet if you asked the under 30's to recite some website addresses they would do far better then the over 50's. it's all completely our of context.
However, he did hear about the unexplainable event in Tunguska, and was thankful no one was killed, as it was clear to him that his death ray had overshot. He then dismantled his machine, as he felt it was too dangerous to keep it.
It didn't overshoot. Superman happened to be flying by, and he saw that the ray would cause the Arctic ice to melt, thus causing massive flooding, so with one mighty punch, he deflected it to Siberia, where it did relatively minor damage.
On the other hand, there are some good things about it. Their architecture (and other majors, engineering, design) students can now use the specific parts of the building as examples of a bad design.
In an ideal world, the teachers will not abuse the system to drive the difficult smart ass kid that always makes smart ass comments and embarrasses teachers into a complete isolation.
In an ideal world, the school principal will not abuse the system to find out which of the kids could possibly have had an access to the information that he has been stealing money from the district, which has lately been brought to the attention of a local newspaper.
In an ideal world, a stupid gym teacher will not abuse the system and tell a bunch of his favourite jocks where exactly is that irritating nerdy kid that cannot even climb a rope currently hiding.
I don't believe that placing bunch of kids under a constant surveillance from which they cannot escape while they are in the school building will help them not to turn out too bad later on. I think it is a bad solution no matter what.
"Gee, these two students have been sticking together all day... and they don't even have all the same classes! Send someone to take a peek."
If the students are that stupid, they deserve to be caught. But it greatly illustrates why a system like this is really bad idea. The last thing we want is for the school administrators and teachers to know which kids hang together all day:
"Hey, you! Yes, you! I see you have been hanging a lot with that troublemaker Smith lately! I am warning you, you better stay away from him, or you are gotta get it!"
That'll tell you where they AREN'T. The whole point is to know where they ARE,...
No it isn't. Really pretty much all the teacher needs to know is that the kid is not in the class. So what is the kid is taking a smoke break in the bathroom? Or if he or she ran to the locker to get a homework they forgot? Or he decided to hang out with his girlfriend in that hidden spot in the school attic instead of going to the class? They are not in the class, when they show up, just ask them why were they missing. You don't need any stupid RFID chip for that. Of course, if a small kid comes to class late, with red cheeks, obviously has been crying, you notice and know something is up, and you act accordingly. I am afraid that with technology such as these chips, teachers will just say "we know where everybody is, we don't really need to pay attention to how they act, how they look like etc."
The kids are supposed to learn how to be responsible, make their own decisions, and generally become members of the society. They cannot learn that while knowing they are under a constant surveillance with no way to escape.
If the building is on fire and not everyone is accounted for, wouldn't having a general idea where they might be in the building count as a plus?
That's pretty much the only legitimate use of the technology. I am quite worried about serious surveillance technologies being introduced "just in the case there is some emergency".
This isn't a privacy issue, but on the contrary, an example of the application of technology to save many man-hours of tedious attendance-taking and embarrassingly mis-pronounced names.
That's bullshit! If a teacher cannot take one look at the class and see who is missing, then you either have too large classes, of the teacher is totally incompetent, and I would not want to have him or her in charge of my kids!
Kids still need to have a physical presence. If they are not in attendance, but their shirt seems to be walking around the school, then it is clear that they have deliberately tried to circumvent the requirement to be in school during school hours.
No, it's clear that some bullies stole their shirt and tossed it around the school building all day, just to get them in trouble.
Seriously, I am glad they didn't have this when I went to school. I mean, will somebody think about the kids who are tardy? No more sneaking into a classroom after the bell rings, with your friends creating a disturbance in the opposite corner of the classroom so the teacher won't notice? No more climbing into the school building through the kitchen window after the main entrance was locked at five till eight? Holly crap, I would actually have to come to school on time!
your only option is to avoid their killing shots while grinding away at them or searching for their vulnerable spots
Well, provided you have a strong pet(s), you can also let your pet(s) handle the enemies, or you can lure them (the enemies, not the pets) into a pit or a trap.:)
Again, no surprise here. Given two dolls, identically looking but one that does all sort of amazing stuff and one that just sits there, which one do you thing the kids will rather play with? They will sometimes pick up the "boring" one as a prop in the play with the "cool" one, but when they are done with it, they will toss it aside.
She also does this with the Tickle-Me-Elmo, incidentally, as long as it is off. She is terrified of the thing if it is turned on, to the extent that she will cower on the other end of the house.
No kidding! I am terrified of that thing too. I find just a regular Elmo pretty frightening, the "tickle-me" variant is just plain scary.
Actually, I just took my sons desktop, an old machine that I bought several years ago for $15 in a garage sale, and converted it temporary from Ubuntu to XP, since he is on a Lego League team and the NXT-G software they use does not run on Linux (not even through Wine). It was never a super fast desktop, but it was pretty responsive even with Gnome on it, and for his needs it was just fine. I put XP on it, turned off every single advanced display setting, and everything else I could, and installed a single piece of software on it, the Minstorms NXT-G. The machine is incredibly slow, to the point where it's barely usable. So I don't think XP would run as fast as Ubuntu in this machine. Maybe 98 (which is what the machine came with when I bought it).
Not bad! How do you make the inverse (white text on black background) pages? I have tried that before, but it never worked for me for some reason. I would like to insert a completely black page every once a while, so i can pause the presentation and include a bit of lecture with whiteboard in the middle. Unfortunately, all our classrooms were designed by an idiot who thought that putting the pull down screen right in front of the whiteboard is a good idea, and although everybody has been complaining about it for years, a brand new building that was just open has exactly the same braindead design. If I want to use the whiteboard, I have to interrupt the presentation and roll up the screen. However, you can still see your last slide projected onto the whiteboard, which is annoying and distracting, and you cannot turn of the projector, because it takes really long to start up again. Having a completely black page would solve this problem.
In Beamer, not only you can include pdf graphics, you can also build your graphics incrementally, which is almost as good as constructing it on the board by hand, except cleaner, less messy, and faster. You can also build your formulas step by step, and emphasize specific parts of formulas and equations as you talk about them.
Hm, that reminds me of a little 'experiment" me and my best friend did once. My chemistry set came with only about 5cm long pretty thin magnesium "tape", just enough to give us a taste of what one can do with it. For a while we tried to get hold of more of the stuff, till my friend somehow came up with pretty large (about 3cm i diameter) chunk of it. We decided to light it in his grandparents apartment, but since we didn't want to fill all the rooms with thick white smoke, we wanted to set it up in an open window. The problem was, the window sill was wooden, so we needed something metallic to put under the magnesium. My friend pulled out a metal container, maybe about 10 gallons, which had almost no gasoline left in it. He claimed it was empty, and put the magnesium on top of it, placed the whole thing on the window sill, and lit the chunk. What followed was quite spectacular: first a huge white fire ball, as the magnesium burned. Then the fire suddenly disappeared for what seemed like a second or two. After a moment that seemed very quiet and dark, compared to the bright magnesium flame, there was a huge loud bang. It turned out that the magnesium burned or melted the metal, and the burning chunk fell inside the container, that was still full of gasoline vapor. Luckily the explosion propelled the burning container out of the window, where it plummeted three stories down onto the yard. We quickly extinguished the burning curtains, threw what remained of them after the container, closed the window, and pretended we had nothing to do with the whole incident. Of course, since the apartment was still filled with smoke, from both the magnesium and the burning curtains, there were horrible burn marks on the window sill, and we were both white as sheets from the fright, we couldn't really hope to fool anybody, but luckily, none of the neighbors were at home, and those that were were already used to my friend's antics, and so nobody ever bothered to investigate what happened. That was our last experiment with magnesium, though.
I got bored of all the pre-drawn experiments and decided to experiment myself. I mixed pretty much every goddamn chemical together.
I had one of those when I was a kid, and after trying all the experiments in the book with my friends (well, all the experiments that didn't seem totally boring), we still had whole bunch of chemicals left over, so we took two test tubes, put all the acids in one of them, all the bases in the other, divided the salts somewhat randomly in the two tubes, and then poured the contents of one tube in the other. Well, the tube cracked from the heat (luckily we were smart enough not to hold it in our hands), and the liquid spilled all over our hard wood floor. My parents were never able to get the stains out. Well, it didn't really matter that much, the floor had those huge burn marks on it already, from my previous experiments with electricity.
Keynote is barely, BARELY mentioned except in a off-hand remark in the beginning and at the end.
That's why it's so devilishly clever! In fact, I think it may actually be a commercial for the LaTeX beamer, simply because it is not mentioned in the article at all!
Influentiability and notability is definitely not the same as popularity. You cannot measure these things by numbers alone. Let's say one of my favorite blogs deals almost exclusively with the LaTeX typesetting system. I believe it may have 100 regular visitors, at most, but in LaTeX community it is fairly highly regarded. It may even have an impact on future development of LaTeX and, indirectly, on the future of computerized typesetting and computer graphics in general. So while it is definitely not what anybody would call popular blog, it may be very influential.
Another example: how many people do you know who actually regularly listen to Velvet Underground? They are definitely not a popular band. However, there is a good number of very popular bands that were, sometimes to a very large extent, influenced by VU, which, in my opinion, makes VU quite notable.
Slashdot Mirror
the "match" found at an incriminating location.
That depends what you mean by "incriminating location". Japan currently has a more or less democratic government, similar for example to the US, so at this moment this should not be a major problem. But in many other countries what they consider a "crime" you may actually consider a right thing to do. In such a case you would not want them to have your fingerprints.
Also, they say they will share the fingerprints with other governments. Which means that next time you participate in disseminating political flyers criticising your increasingly oppressive government, it will be very easy for them to find who you are.
I think lot of preprints used to be postscript because people simply ran TeX and dvips. With pdftex becoming more popular, I expect that is probably soon going to change.
Who in the hell is Gene Simmons, anyway? Never heard about the guy.
Maybe that's a bad question, but would would be the size of Sun's magnetosphere?
Being deported to Cuba is not the only way for you to stop living in a democracy. I don't know why so many people assume that USA will always, perhaps due to some magical protection bestowed onto the land here, be a democracy. Living in a democracy is both a privilege and a duty. And if we don't fulfill the duty, we will lose the privilege. Some argue that it has already happened. Note that in spite of what some people want you to believe, voting is not the only way to fulfill the duty and exercise the privilege.
so fucking what? all this proves is that younger generations don't have the requirement of remmebering phone numbers. it doesn't prove they aren't capable.
I did not read the article, but i believe the main idea was that with all the new technology that remembers things for us, young people will have less opportunity to exercise their memory. I don't thing it's true, and this is exactly the reason why:
i bet if you asked the under 30's to recite some website addresses they would do far better then the over 50's. it's all completely our of context.
However, he did hear about the unexplainable event in Tunguska, and was thankful no one was killed, as it was clear to him that his death ray had overshot. He then dismantled his machine, as he felt it was too dangerous to keep it.
It didn't overshoot. Superman happened to be flying by, and he saw that the ray would cause the Arctic ice to melt, thus causing massive flooding, so with one mighty punch, he deflected it to Siberia, where it did relatively minor damage.
Of course she is, she is an engineer! What else do you want?
On the other hand, there are some good things about it. Their architecture (and other majors, engineering, design) students can now use the specific parts of the building as examples of a bad design.
In an ideal world, the teachers will not abuse the system to drive the difficult smart ass kid that always makes smart ass comments and embarrasses teachers into a complete isolation.
In an ideal world, the school principal will not abuse the system to find out which of the kids could possibly have had an access to the information that he has been stealing money from the district, which has lately been brought to the attention of a local newspaper.
In an ideal world, a stupid gym teacher will not abuse the system and tell a bunch of his favourite jocks where exactly is that irritating nerdy kid that cannot even climb a rope currently hiding.
I don't believe that placing bunch of kids under a constant surveillance from which they cannot escape while they are in the school building will help them not to turn out too bad later on. I think it is a bad solution no matter what.
"Gee, these two students have been sticking together all day... and they don't even have all the same classes! Send someone to take a peek."
If the students are that stupid, they deserve to be caught. But it greatly illustrates why a system like this is really bad idea. The last thing we want is for the school administrators and teachers to know which kids hang together all day:
"Hey, you! Yes, you! I see you have been hanging a lot with that troublemaker Smith lately! I am warning you, you better stay away from him, or you are gotta get it!"
That'll tell you where they AREN'T. The whole point is to know where they ARE,...
No it isn't. Really pretty much all the teacher needs to know is that the kid is not in the class. So what is the kid is taking a smoke break in the bathroom? Or if he or she ran to the locker to get a homework they forgot? Or he decided to hang out with his girlfriend in that hidden spot in the school attic instead of going to the class? They are not in the class, when they show up, just ask them why were they missing. You don't need any stupid RFID chip for that. Of course, if a small kid comes to class late, with red cheeks, obviously has been crying, you notice and know something is up, and you act accordingly. I am afraid that with technology such as these chips, teachers will just say "we know where everybody is, we don't really need to pay attention to how they act, how they look like etc."
The kids are supposed to learn how to be responsible, make their own decisions, and generally become members of the society. They cannot learn that while knowing they are under a constant surveillance with no way to escape.
If the building is on fire and not everyone is accounted for, wouldn't having a general idea where they might be in the building count as a plus?
That's pretty much the only legitimate use of the technology. I am quite worried about serious surveillance technologies being introduced "just in the case there is some emergency".
This isn't a privacy issue, but on the contrary, an example of the application of technology to save many man-hours of tedious attendance-taking and embarrassingly mis-pronounced names.
That's bullshit! If a teacher cannot take one look at the class and see who is missing, then you either have too large classes, of the teacher is totally incompetent, and I would not want to have him or her in charge of my kids!
Kids still need to have a physical presence. If they are not in attendance, but their shirt seems to be walking around the school, then it is clear that they have deliberately tried to circumvent the requirement to be in school during school hours.
No, it's clear that some bullies stole their shirt and tossed it around the school building all day, just to get them in trouble.
Seriously, I am glad they didn't have this when I went to school. I mean, will somebody think about the kids who are tardy? No more sneaking into a classroom after the bell rings, with your friends creating a disturbance in the opposite corner of the classroom so the teacher won't notice? No more climbing into the school building through the kitchen window after the main entrance was locked at five till eight? Holly crap, I would actually have to come to school on time!
At least one kid will try it.
Yeah, I can't wait for the slashdot articles about a kid being suspended from school for a month for using a jamming device.
The first use of this was probably Rogue, which is older than River Raid.
your only option is to avoid their killing shots while grinding away at them or searching for their vulnerable spots
:)
Well, provided you have a strong pet(s), you can also let your pet(s) handle the enemies, or you can lure them (the enemies, not the pets) into a pit or a trap.
Again, no surprise here. Given two dolls, identically looking but one that does all sort of amazing stuff and one that just sits there, which one do you thing the kids will rather play with? They will sometimes pick up the "boring" one as a prop in the play with the "cool" one, but when they are done with it, they will toss it aside.
She also does this with the Tickle-Me-Elmo, incidentally, as long as it is off. She is terrified of the thing if it is turned on, to the extent that she will cower on the other end of the house.
No kidding! I am terrified of that thing too. I find just a regular Elmo pretty frightening, the "tickle-me" variant is just plain scary.
Passed out? What the hell are you putting in their water dish?
Probably valerian.
Actually, I just took my sons desktop, an old machine that I bought several years ago for $15 in a garage sale, and converted it temporary from Ubuntu to XP, since he is on a Lego League team and the NXT-G software they use does not run on Linux (not even through Wine). It was never a super fast desktop, but it was pretty responsive even with Gnome on it, and for his needs it was just fine. I put XP on it, turned off every single advanced display setting, and everything else I could, and installed a single piece of software on it, the Minstorms NXT-G. The machine is incredibly slow, to the point where it's barely usable. So I don't think XP would run as fast as Ubuntu in this machine. Maybe 98 (which is what the machine came with when I bought it).
Not bad! How do you make the inverse (white text on black background) pages? I have tried that before, but it never worked for me for some reason. I would like to insert a completely black page every once a while, so i can pause the presentation and include a bit of lecture with whiteboard in the middle. Unfortunately, all our classrooms were designed by an idiot who thought that putting the pull down screen right in front of the whiteboard is a good idea, and although everybody has been complaining about it for years, a brand new building that was just open has exactly the same braindead design. If I want to use the whiteboard, I have to interrupt the presentation and roll up the screen. However, you can still see your last slide projected onto the whiteboard, which is annoying and distracting, and you cannot turn of the projector, because it takes really long to start up again. Having a completely black page would solve this problem.
In Beamer, not only you can include pdf graphics, you can also build your graphics incrementally, which is almost as good as constructing it on the board by hand, except cleaner, less messy, and faster. You can also build your formulas step by step, and emphasize specific parts of formulas and equations as you talk about them.
Hm, that reminds me of a little 'experiment" me and my best friend did once. My chemistry set came with only about 5cm long pretty thin magnesium "tape", just enough to give us a taste of what one can do with it. For a while we tried to get hold of more of the stuff, till my friend somehow came up with pretty large (about 3cm i diameter) chunk of it. We decided to light it in his grandparents apartment, but since we didn't want to fill all the rooms with thick white smoke, we wanted to set it up in an open window. The problem was, the window sill was wooden, so we needed something metallic to put under the magnesium. My friend pulled out a metal container, maybe about 10 gallons, which had almost no gasoline left in it. He claimed it was empty, and put the magnesium on top of it, placed the whole thing on the window sill, and lit the chunk. What followed was quite spectacular: first a huge white fire ball, as the magnesium burned. Then the fire suddenly disappeared for what seemed like a second or two. After a moment that seemed very quiet and dark, compared to the bright magnesium flame, there was a huge loud bang. It turned out that the magnesium burned or melted the metal, and the burning chunk fell inside the container, that was still full of gasoline vapor. Luckily the explosion propelled the burning container out of the window, where it plummeted three stories down onto the yard. We quickly extinguished the burning curtains, threw what remained of them after the container, closed the window, and pretended we had nothing to do with the whole incident. Of course, since the apartment was still filled with smoke, from both the magnesium and the burning curtains, there were horrible burn marks on the window sill, and we were both white as sheets from the fright, we couldn't really hope to fool anybody, but luckily, none of the neighbors were at home, and those that were were already used to my friend's antics, and so nobody ever bothered to investigate what happened. That was our last experiment with magnesium, though.
I got bored of all the pre-drawn experiments and decided to experiment myself. I mixed pretty much every goddamn chemical together.
I had one of those when I was a kid, and after trying all the experiments in the book with my friends (well, all the experiments that didn't seem totally boring), we still had whole bunch of chemicals left over, so we took two test tubes, put all the acids in one of them, all the bases in the other, divided the salts somewhat randomly in the two tubes, and then poured the contents of one tube in the other. Well, the tube cracked from the heat (luckily we were smart enough not to hold it in our hands), and the liquid spilled all over our hard wood floor. My parents were never able to get the stains out. Well, it didn't really matter that much, the floor had those huge burn marks on it already, from my previous experiments with electricity.
Keynote is barely, BARELY mentioned except in a off-hand remark in the beginning and at the end.
That's why it's so devilishly clever! In fact, I think it may actually be a commercial for the LaTeX beamer, simply because it is not mentioned in the article at all!
Influentiability and notability is definitely not the same as popularity. You cannot measure these things by numbers alone. Let's say one of my favorite blogs deals almost exclusively with the LaTeX typesetting system. I believe it may have 100 regular visitors, at most, but in LaTeX community it is fairly highly regarded. It may even have an impact on future development of LaTeX and, indirectly, on the future of computerized typesetting and computer graphics in general. So while it is definitely not what anybody would call popular blog, it may be very influential.
Another example: how many people do you know who actually regularly listen to Velvet Underground? They are definitely not a popular band. However, there is a good number of very popular bands that were, sometimes to a very large extent, influenced by VU, which, in my opinion, makes VU quite notable.