Pretty much every math journal out there accepts LaTeX. Some of them actually require LaTeX. Lats year I had to help a colleague of mine from our computer science department convert a paper drom word to LaTeX, because he was submitting it into a math journal, and LaTeX was the only format they would accept.
If they don't want to spend time to juggle with TeX, they will not want to spend time to juggle with the MS equation editor. Anyway, most of the brightest mind probably have a secretary who can juggle with TeX for them.
Modern Western society is largely a result of Western history, and focusing on the history that matters isn't unrealistic at all. For example, Gutenberg's printing press revolutionised the spread of information in the West, and is historically important. The movable-type printing presses that were earlier invented independently in China and Korea are merely footnotes. If they had never existed, the world would not be noticeably different.
If by "world" you mean the west. I believe that for most people, world would indeed be quite different if these inventions didn't exist.
The majority of Muslims believe absolutely the Koran, and so think that those of us who don't follow its rules are evil, morally inferior or at best misguided. They don't want guidance from us, they want for us evil atheists to submit to the will of their imaginary god, and start adopting their alien customs.
I know a number of Muslims ( I happen to live in an area of US where there is a substantial Muslim minority), and all of them (every single one I personally know) are very well educated, really pleasant people, who are very tolerant of the fact that I am an atheist. While they observe their religious practices, they make sure these do no adversely affect people around them, and they definitely never attempted to convert me to Islam. That's more then I can say about some of my Christian friends.
There are only two possible outcomes: either they will become secularised like us, and give up their religious nonsense, or we shall be forced to live under a theocracy, based on medieval Arab culture.
If it was medieval Arab culture, that wouldn't be such problem, definitely better than medieval European culture. What Islamic fundamentalists promote is, unfortunately, post-medieval Arab (or Persian) culture.
In the meantime, on Gliese 581c's version of Slashdot:
some gliesians get ecstatic about little pink men. me, i could care less about aliens, i really couldn't. fuck aliens. i just want somewhere else for gliesians to live so us, the gliesian species, survives. that's job #1 for me
i'd be willing to exterminate the little pink suckers too without a second thought if they interfered with our colonization efforts. i'm not in any way joking. gliesians love aliens. i could care fucking less about them...
While the number of planets in our galaxy is huge, the probability of a planet having a composition and climate similar to that of Earth's is extremely remote. Can you elaborate on that? Why would it be remote? Do you have any way to estimate the probability?
On top of that, the probability of life forming on that planet is also very remote Again, can you justify this claim? I am not disputing your claim, I just have no idea how can the probability of this be calculated. I have seen people making this claim several times already, however, none of them ever seemed to care to support the claim with at least some estimate.
and on top of that, the probability that life would have evolved along a similar timeline is also very remote. That I can agree with.
No, Logo teaches them to push a turtle around the screen. It doesn't really convey a sense to young children that they're "programming" a computer. I technically had Logo before I ever had BASIC, and it took me years to realize that it was supposed to be an introduction to programming. Most of us saw it as an introduction to computer graphics. Actually. Logo was not supposed to be an introduction to either of those. It was designed as a means for children to use a computer to create and explore new environments, to experiment. Programing was never the goal, it was just a tool to achieve something else. It was probably more an introduction into math and physics than anything else. Some schools used it to teach programing, and there is a multi volume textbook by Brian Harvey called "Computer Science - Logo Style", and it can be used that way if it is done well, but there isn't really anything that would make it somehow better than other languages for that purpose.
It's always the same. Every time there is a story like this, I always want to ask "what happened to the good old idea of just simply talking to the kid?" Schools have way to many rules these days, and evry time something unexpected hapens, it seems that the "educators" react by arresting the kid, throwing them out of school, sending them to "alternative education center" and so on. If I went to school these days, I probably wouldn't make it past the second grade!
Just simply talk to the kid, figure out why they did it, figure out if there really is any danger involved, if there is, explain it to the kid, make sure they understand, and if it seems that they don't, or that there is something rong with them, send them to a psychologist, talk to the parents, and eventually take some other steps.
When I was in 7th grade, with some friends we tried to make a smoke bomb. We tested it in a school restroom, and managed to burn a large hole in a stall door. We got caught (of course, there was smoke all over the place, plus bunch of classmates who wanted to see the test streaming in and out the restroom, the operation was not exactly secret). I remember we got yelled at by the principal, our parents had to come to school, we got yelled at again at home, our citzenship grade for that period was lowered, and we had to fix the door. We had no idea how to do that, so we ended up filling the hole with plaster of paris, and painting the whole door. The result was really heavy and really solid looking, compared to the original flimsy door, and we joked that one day, when the whole school collapses and gets washed away by weather, the door will still stand there. Our chemistry professor gave us a lecture on responsible handling of chemicals, to which she added several stories of her own school days, that turned otherwise boring lecture into something we could actually relate to and which we actually decided to take seriously.
I can't even imagine what would happen with us if we did something like that nowdays at an american school. We would probably be shot by a fireing squad at the school yard.
As others have already pointed out, knowing that the hardware will work with Linux is very important. If I was buying a new box and had a choice between three similarly priced machines, one with Windows, one with Linux, and one naked, I would pick the Linux one, regardless of which distro it had.
... Linux, configured totally-not-the-way-I-want -it would be one step better...I can't imagine a single person in this crowd who would be happy with the way dell will set it up,... I have been using Debian since Slink, and I have always fiddled with things, compiled my own kernels, partitioned disks my own way etc. Part of the reason was that back then, you pretty much had to do that to make the system work well with your hardware. Last couple of upgrades, however, I just installed the stock kernels, and when upgrading a hard disk, i usually just partition in in one of the suggested ways, as they are good enough. I can imagine that if I bought a pre-installed Linux (no matter which distro, Debian based would be my first preference, as I know my way around it pretty well, and am very used to aptitude, but afaik most of other distros have similar tools that I bet I could learn in a jiffy), pretty much the only change I would do would be taking my old hard disk with the/home partition on it, installing it in the new computer, and mount in on/home on the new computer. That can easily be done without re-installing the system, and it should work on any distro. If the new computer already had a/home partition, I would mount it somewhere else (maybe/usr/local) so it wouldn't get wasted, or re-partition to get rid of it. Again, no need to re-install. The rest would be just installing software - fire up aptitude or whatever tool is there, and start selecting packages.
Recently I installed Ubuntu on two computers for my two older kids, and it was pretty much just put in the CD, and keep choosing OK for the defaults. I can imagine that if I was buying a computer for them and it came with Linux pre-installed, I would just add users, configure network and printing, and it would be ready to go, unless Dell did something horrible completely non-standard, or if they included bunch of crapware that you couldn't easily remove (like in apt-get remove crapware)
...Ask you to show them how to use it (ugh)... As I wrote, I just recently made two Ubuntu boxes for my two older kids, age 8 and 12. I didn't really have to show them anything, they just use it. I had to tell my 8 years old how to start a word processor, and how to print, pretty much exactly the same way I would have to show him to do that on a Windows box. The older one already knew how to do that on Windows (learned that at school), and it took her no time to figure out how to do in in Ubuntu. They both figured out things like how to play games, music, browse the web etc by themselves really fast. Even my 4 year old learned how to start his favorite games in about a minute or so. His brother did it for him once, and that was it. The other day we had a sleepover party with a bunch of third graders, and they were all playing games and browsing the web to their favorite pokemon games sites in no time at all. Some of them noticed that the desktop looks a bit different, that's all.
We're happy because this primarily means not paying for windows when we're not using it, right? What other benefits are there? If I had enough extra money to buy a new box, and I had a choice to buy one with Linux that wasn't much more expensive, I would be happy because that would mean I can have a working solution pretty much right out of the box. I had years of fun fiddling with Linux, but now if you give me something that works well enough right away, I will take it.
It used to be the other way around. Some 10 years ago, to find any information online about Windows was nearly impossible, while I always found anything I needed easily about Linux. I think there are four problems:
1) Lot of information out there is outdated. You can find HOWTO's about configuring something by editing a config file. The problem is that these days most distributions use some sort of GUI config tool, and in order to accommodate that, the config file was moved, split into several other files, etc, and even if you manage to find it and edit it, next time you run the GUI config tool, all your edits will be overwritten. Then there are HOWTO's for ipchains and iptables, XFree86 and Xorg, and so on. Some of them are clearly described as obsolete, and point out newer, more relevant version, but some of them were not even updated for 10 years.
2) Formerly most of the discussion took place on the usenet. Every once a while some good soul extracted the useful information from the usenet discussion and other sources and put it on the web. So if you searched the web, most of the stuff that came up was already processed in some way. Now nearly all discussion boards are web based, and so if you search for something, all the raw discussions, arguments and flamewars come up, and you have to sift through it to extract anything useful. Also, the usenet hierarchy was somewhat organized, so if you for example wanted to post a question or answer about a newsreader, there were only one or two groups you could go to. These days everybody is posting on their own blog, and the whole discussion, if you can even call it that, is completely fragmented.
3) As Linux is becoming more popular, more people end up posting advice, and often they don't really know what they are talking about. Most of them are trying to give back to the community, which is good and should be encouraged, but combined with what I wrote above about web based discussions, it can actually create more damage then good. Perhaps some sort of centralized linux documentation wiki should be created, where all people can contribute by editing a document, rather than arguing on a web forum.
4) In addition to that, Linux is making inroads in corporate world, which is followed by more and more Linux related "corporate speak" on the web. So you search for some problem, and you end up with pages and pages of Novel generated buzzword dripping marketing drivel, which tells you how the stuff you are trying to configure is wonderful, but which is totally useless as it offers no information about the configuration process itself.
I have no idea how to fix it, and I expect it will actually get much worse before (hopefully) getting better.
True, but is it really a good idea to basically start with scientific method? I remember I found learning about scientific method fascinating, partly because I finally understood where all the amazing facts came from. And somehow, even without knowing the words "scientific method", I did not consider the facts to be meaningless. Maybe because I was taught how they are related to each other, and because when I actually learned the words "scientific method", I realized that that's what we have been doing the whole time while learning about science, even though we had no idea how it was called. Just like in math I did not learn "methods of proof" first. Since very early in the curriculum, we were proving things in math, starting with things like methods for multiplication, and even the times tables. They were not rigorous proofs, they were not even called "proofs", I certainly never heard the words "proof by contradiction" till high school, but slowly the need to justify things in math was introduced, from the very beginning.
Speaking about non-higher education (equivalent K-12 education), in europe, asia, etc. when your age is in the single digits (US's grade school) you get a standardized test to see if the state is willing to spend resources to continue to educate you academically or not. If not you get put into a track that is geared more toward manual labor, etc. A little bit older and another round too see if they should continue to spend money on training you for bigger and better things. They basically weed out people that they don't believe have the value to receive further higher-education and believe that they are better suited to something a little less. There is an assumption that not everybody is equal and that even for a base education that it is wasteful to try and bring everybody to the same level. I don't know about Asia, but in most Europe the first "weeding" happens after the 8th grade. The first 8 years are mandatory, and pretty much equal for everybody (save local school differences, and some special programs, where some schools have more of a specific foreign language, some have more math and science, but that's done in US too, so called "magnet" schools). After the 8 years, students decide where to go next: a college prep type high school, a trade oriented high school, a pure trade school, or straight to work force (or unemployment). Those who want to go to high school usually have to pass an entrance exam. In fact, it is the US where you can find bunch of "gifted and talented" programs in public schools, where students have to pass an IQ test just to get into the kindergarten.
In the US everybody gets the same education end to end, that everybody can have an equal base education. They believe that weeding people out is discriminatory, every should get the same base education. That's a nice theory, but I have three kids in the US school system now, elementary and middle school level, and I see bigger differences between schools in just one school district I am looking at than I saw in the whole country back when I went to school in Europe. And it's not just money. It's all in various "gifted and talented" programs, science orientation programs and so on.
There is no official blue-collar educational tracks for the K-12 years in the US, a person will not be prevented from trying to take higher classes because they didn't do perfectly on a standardized test from years ago. (some of this is changing with acknowledging gifted students more and more, but the US still does not categorize kids in gradeschool and determine there future education options and what schools they will not be able to goto in the future) As far as I know, students are not prevented from going to school of their choice because of their categorization at grade school in Europe either. I have several friends who went to a "blue-collar" type trade schools after the mandatory 8 years, and who now hold doctorates in mathematics. It was probably harder for them than for somebody who went to a college prep high school, but the same is true in US: somebody who went to a public school with no special orientation or program will have significantly harder time to get to a good college (and to succeed there) than someone who went to a top level private college prep school.
I am not saying that there are no differences in the way the school systems work, but in my experience the whole thing about the US system being equivalent for everybody while the other systems being discriminatory is largely a myth.
Look, I don't expect everyone to understand my point. The biggest thing I learned from college before I dropped out was how artificial the whole thing was. There was nothing there one couldn't learn from reading a book about various subjects. I dropped out because I was already out in the world producing real things, not grades. I guess this depends a lot on what you did in college. If you just went to the lectures, taking the required classes, spent the time there half asleep, half taking notes, and did just what was required, and nothing more (just enough for a B, I guess), then yes, you didn't get anything you couldn't get from reading a book. If instead, you actually did what you are supposed to do in college, seek the best professors (which almost never the easiest, as a matter of fact, they are almost always the hardest), discussed things with them, asked questions, participated in bunch of student research projects, and in general actively pursued knowledge and experience, you would get something that you can never get from reading a book.
That's not to say that there aren't people who benefit from school -- there are. But the world-changing people are not created by school. They will change the world because of their nature, not because of the facts that were packed into their head. If you thing that college is about packing facts into students heads, then you either went to a very bad college, or you slept the whole way through.
Comparing the ability to write War and Peace to ability to do differential calculus is misguided. It would be more like an ability to do independent research in mathematics, and to publish articles in peer reviewed journals. Ability to do differential calculus could be better compared to an ability to produce well written reports or short stories.
And no, most people I have met who claimed that they "suck at math" did not have a good understanding of the basics. My experience is that by "sucking at math" they usually mean they have serious trouble with introductory algebra, like solving all but the simplest equations and inequalities. As far as calculus go, they ususally have no clue what that is even about. I don't know where you live, but most people who "suck at math" around here do not encounter calculus at high school.
That would be way cool! There actually is a way how to trick dpkg into installing a package anywhere you want it, by setting an environment variable, I believe, but it's rather obscure, definitely not something that could be done by a debian or ubuntu novice. I was just trying to quickly dig through online documentation (I am not at my debian computer right now), and I couldn't find it.
Um, in Ubuntu you're NOT always admin. There is no way to log in as root in Ubuntu. The first user you create gets sudo priveledges automatically, and the "root" account inherits the password of the first user account you create. From then on, any user you create does not have any escelated priveledges whatsoever.
Ehm, actually, the root account does not inherit any password. You are correct that by default, there is no way to log in as root in ubuntu. The reason for that is that the root account does not have a password, and does not allow password-less login. The first user you create is automatically added to the "sudoers" file, which gives him/her the privilege of using sudo. Sudo grants the user temporary root privileges, so that he/she can perform administrative tasks. Later, you can add more users to the sudoers file by granting them administration privileges (There is a GUI for it somewhere in Ubuntu). They can then perform admin tasks using sudo, with their own password, just like the first user.
With this setup, there really is no reason to use the first account only to administer. The only thing that is special about the first account is that it can temporarily gain administrative privileges using sudo, but for normal operation, it has no special access to the system.
You can also use sudo to set up a password for your root account, and thus make it possible to log in as root, but it is generally a bad idea. If you really need to perform some heavy administration task that requires running a number of commands from a terminal with root privileges, and you don't want to keep typing "sudo" in front of each of them, you can always use sudo to get a root shell. See sudo man page to learn how to do it.
If by firefox only site you mean a site that won't let you in unless you are using firefox, I agree. If you mean sites that don't work well in IE, that's quite different.
I have a site that looks like shit in IE. It looks fine in any other browser, including Lynx, but it just looks horrible in IE. You can still access everything with IE, but it just looks really weird. I don't care. It's not a commercial site, I have no profit from it, if you want to look at it using IE and have your eyes hurt, that's your problem. The site uses valid HTML and CSS, and I refuse to spend the time work around IE bugs.
Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service your browser scripting AND cookies must be enabled. I went there with Lynx and got the same message;)
That's not what pdf download does. It lets you chose, for each pdf file, whether you want to open it in the browser, in a pdf viewer, or download it. It would be even better if you could choose which pdf viewer to use, but even the way it is, I find it quite useful.
And on a side-note I'd like to see how you react when there is:
1) No free content available, anywhere 2) Everyone makes you register for access 3) Everyone makes you pay a fee to read anything
First, that will never happen. There are number of organizations that put out free contents without (direct) advertising. Some of them are being financed by grants, some of them receive government support (when it is their job to post free stuff on the internet), some may be supported by interest groups or political parties. Some organizations post free content because it by itself serves as an advertisement for them (lot of universities do that), some organizations provide content for their customers, and it makes no difference, or is actually cheaper, to simply provide it for everybody (again, think about online teaching materials posted by colleges and universities) etc. You could find lot of free content on the internet long time before internet advertising really started to take off.
Second, if there really was no free content available, I would either find some contents worth paying for, or, if I couldn't find anything, I would simply ignore the internet (just like I ignore for example TV now) and find something else to do. No need to fret about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much every math journal out there accepts LaTeX. Some of them actually require LaTeX. Lats year I had to help a colleague of mine from our computer science department convert a paper drom word to LaTeX, because he was submitting it into a math journal, and LaTeX was the only format they would accept.
If they don't want to spend time to juggle with TeX, they will not want to spend time to juggle with the MS equation editor. Anyway, most of the brightest mind probably have a secretary who can juggle with TeX for them.
Modern Western society is largely a result of Western history, and focusing on the history that matters isn't unrealistic at all. For example, Gutenberg's printing press revolutionised the spread of information in the West, and is historically important. The movable-type printing presses that were earlier invented independently in China and Korea are merely footnotes. If they had never existed, the world would not be noticeably different.
If by "world" you mean the west. I believe that for most people, world would indeed be quite different if these inventions didn't exist.
The majority of Muslims believe absolutely the Koran, and so think that those of us who don't follow its rules are evil, morally inferior or at best misguided. They don't want guidance from us, they want for us evil atheists to submit to the will of their imaginary god, and start adopting their alien customs.
I know a number of Muslims ( I happen to live in an area of US where there is a substantial Muslim minority), and all of them (every single one I personally know) are very well educated, really pleasant people, who are very tolerant of the fact that I am an atheist. While they observe their religious practices, they make sure these do no adversely affect people around them, and they definitely never attempted to convert me to Islam. That's more then I can say about some of my Christian friends.
There are only two possible outcomes: either they will become secularised like us, and give up their religious nonsense, or we shall be forced to live under a theocracy, based on medieval Arab culture.
If it was medieval Arab culture, that wouldn't be such problem, definitely better than medieval European culture. What Islamic fundamentalists promote is, unfortunately, post-medieval Arab (or Persian) culture.
Romanies, also known as Gypsies, were also subject to a systematic extermination, very similar to the holocaust of Jews.
i'd be willing to exterminate the little pink suckers too without a second thought if they interfered with our colonization efforts. i'm not in any way joking. gliesians love aliens. i could care fucking less about them
If they are really clever, why would they watch our TV?
Apparently, you have never used Blackboard or (shudder) WebCT.
It's always the same. Every time there is a story like this, I always want to ask "what happened to the good old idea of just simply talking to the kid?" Schools have way to many rules these days, and evry time something unexpected hapens, it seems that the "educators" react by arresting the kid, throwing them out of school, sending them to "alternative education center" and so on. If I went to school these days, I probably wouldn't make it past the second grade!
Just simply talk to the kid, figure out why they did it, figure out if there really is any danger involved, if there is, explain it to the kid, make sure they understand, and if it seems that they don't, or that there is something rong with them, send them to a psychologist, talk to the parents, and eventually take some other steps.
When I was in 7th grade, with some friends we tried to make a smoke bomb. We tested it in a school restroom, and managed to burn a large hole in a stall door. We got caught (of course, there was smoke all over the place, plus bunch of classmates who wanted to see the test streaming in and out the restroom, the operation was not exactly secret). I remember we got yelled at by the principal, our parents had to come to school, we got yelled at again at home, our citzenship grade for that period was lowered, and we had to fix the door. We had no idea how to do that, so we ended up filling the hole with plaster of paris, and painting the whole door. The result was really heavy and really solid looking, compared to the original flimsy door, and we joked that one day, when the whole school collapses and gets washed away by weather, the door will still stand there. Our chemistry professor gave us a lecture on responsible handling of chemicals, to which she added several stories of her own school days, that turned otherwise boring lecture into something we could actually relate to and which we actually decided to take seriously.
I can't even imagine what would happen with us if we did something like that nowdays at an american school. We would probably be shot by a fireing squad at the school yard.
... Linux, configured totally-not-the-way-I-want -it would be one step better...I can't imagine a single person in this crowd who would be happy with the way dell will set it up,... I have been using Debian since Slink, and I have always fiddled with things, compiled my own kernels, partitioned disks my own way etc. Part of the reason was that back then, you pretty much had to do that to make the system work well with your hardware. Last couple of upgrades, however, I just installed the stock kernels, and when upgrading a hard disk, i usually just partition in in one of the suggested ways, as they are good enough. I can imagine that if I bought a pre-installed Linux (no matter which distro, Debian based would be my first preference, as I know my way around it pretty well, and am very used to aptitude, but afaik most of other distros have similar tools that I bet I could learn in a jiffy), pretty much the only change I would do would be taking my old hard disk with theRecently I installed Ubuntu on two computers for my two older kids, and it was pretty much just put in the CD, and keep choosing OK for the defaults. I can imagine that if I was buying a computer for them and it came with Linux pre-installed, I would just add users, configure network and printing, and it would be ready to go, unless Dell did something horrible completely non-standard, or if they included bunch of crapware that you couldn't easily remove (like in apt-get remove crapware)
...Ask you to show them how to use it (ugh)... As I wrote, I just recently made two Ubuntu boxes for my two older kids, age 8 and 12. I didn't really have to show them anything, they just use it. I had to tell my 8 years old how to start a word processor, and how to print, pretty much exactly the same way I would have to show him to do that on a Windows box. The older one already knew how to do that on Windows (learned that at school), and it took her no time to figure out how to do in in Ubuntu. They both figured out things like how to play games, music, browse the web etc by themselves really fast. Even my 4 year old learned how to start his favorite games in about a minute or so. His brother did it for him once, and that was it. The other day we had a sleepover party with a bunch of third graders, and they were all playing games and browsing the web to their favorite pokemon games sites in no time at all. Some of them noticed that the desktop looks a bit different, that's all. We're happy because this primarily means not paying for windows when we're not using it, right? What other benefits are there? If I had enough extra money to buy a new box, and I had a choice to buy one with Linux that wasn't much more expensive, I would be happy because that would mean I can have a working solution pretty much right out of the box. I had years of fun fiddling with Linux, but now if you give me something that works well enough right away, I will take it.It used to be the other way around. Some 10 years ago, to find any information online about Windows was nearly impossible, while I always found anything I needed easily about Linux. I think there are four problems:
1) Lot of information out there is outdated. You can find HOWTO's about configuring something by editing a config file. The problem is that these days most distributions use some sort of GUI config tool, and in order to accommodate that, the config file was moved, split into several other files, etc, and even if you manage to find it and edit it, next time you run the GUI config tool, all your edits will be overwritten. Then there are HOWTO's for ipchains and iptables, XFree86 and Xorg, and so on. Some of them are clearly described as obsolete, and point out newer, more relevant version, but some of them were not even updated for 10 years.
2) Formerly most of the discussion took place on the usenet. Every once a while some good soul extracted the useful information from the usenet discussion and other sources and put it on the web. So if you searched the web, most of the stuff that came up was already processed in some way. Now nearly all discussion boards are web based, and so if you search for something, all the raw discussions, arguments and flamewars come up, and you have to sift through it to extract anything useful. Also, the usenet hierarchy was somewhat organized, so if you for example wanted to post a question or answer about a newsreader, there were only one or two groups you could go to. These days everybody is posting on their own blog, and the whole discussion, if you can even call it that, is completely fragmented.
3) As Linux is becoming more popular, more people end up posting advice, and often they don't really know what they are talking about. Most of them are trying to give back to the community, which is good and should be encouraged, but combined with what I wrote above about web based discussions, it can actually create more damage then good. Perhaps some sort of centralized linux documentation wiki should be created, where all people can contribute by editing a document, rather than arguing on a web forum.
4) In addition to that, Linux is making inroads in corporate world, which is followed by more and more Linux related "corporate speak" on the web. So you search for some problem, and you end up with pages and pages of Novel generated buzzword dripping marketing drivel, which tells you how the stuff you are trying to configure is wonderful, but which is totally useless as it offers no information about the configuration process itself.
I have no idea how to fix it, and I expect it will actually get much worse before (hopefully) getting better.
True, but is it really a good idea to basically start with scientific method? I remember I found learning about scientific method fascinating, partly because I finally understood where all the amazing facts came from. And somehow, even without knowing the words "scientific method", I did not consider the facts to be meaningless. Maybe because I was taught how they are related to each other, and because when I actually learned the words "scientific method", I realized that that's what we have been doing the whole time while learning about science, even though we had no idea how it was called. Just like in math I did not learn "methods of proof" first. Since very early in the curriculum, we were proving things in math, starting with things like methods for multiplication, and even the times tables. They were not rigorous proofs, they were not even called "proofs", I certainly never heard the words "proof by contradiction" till high school, but slowly the need to justify things in math was introduced, from the very beginning.
I am not saying that there are no differences in the way the school systems work, but in my experience the whole thing about the US system being equivalent for everybody while the other systems being discriminatory is largely a myth.
Comparing the ability to write War and Peace to ability to do differential calculus is misguided. It would be more like an ability to do independent research in mathematics, and to publish articles in peer reviewed journals. Ability to do differential calculus could be better compared to an ability to produce well written reports or short stories.
And no, most people I have met who claimed that they "suck at math" did not have a good understanding of the basics. My experience is that by "sucking at math" they usually mean they have serious trouble with introductory algebra, like solving all but the simplest equations and inequalities. As far as calculus go, they ususally have no clue what that is even about. I don't know where you live, but most people who "suck at math" around here do not encounter calculus at high school.
That would be way cool! There actually is a way how to trick dpkg into installing a package anywhere you want it, by setting an environment variable, I believe, but it's rather obscure, definitely not something that could be done by a debian or ubuntu novice. I was just trying to quickly dig through online documentation (I am not at my debian computer right now), and I couldn't find it.
Um, in Ubuntu you're NOT always admin. There is no way to log in as root in Ubuntu. The first user you create gets sudo priveledges automatically, and the "root" account inherits the password of the first user account you create. From then on, any user you create does not have any escelated priveledges whatsoever.
Ehm, actually, the root account does not inherit any password. You are correct that by default, there is no way to log in as root in ubuntu. The reason for that is that the root account does not have a password, and does not allow password-less login. The first user you create is automatically added to the "sudoers" file, which gives him/her the privilege of using sudo. Sudo grants the user temporary root privileges, so that he/she can perform administrative tasks. Later, you can add more users to the sudoers file by granting them administration privileges (There is a GUI for it somewhere in Ubuntu). They can then perform admin tasks using sudo, with their own password, just like the first user.
With this setup, there really is no reason to use the first account only to administer. The only thing that is special about the first account is that it can temporarily gain administrative privileges using sudo, but for normal operation, it has no special access to the system.
You can also use sudo to set up a password for your root account, and thus make it possible to log in as root, but it is generally a bad idea. If you really need to perform some heavy administration task that requires running a number of commands from a terminal with root privileges, and you don't want to keep typing "sudo" in front of each of them, you can always use sudo to get a root shell. See sudo man page to learn how to do it.
If by firefox only site you mean a site that won't let you in unless you are using firefox, I agree. If you mean sites that don't work well in IE, that's quite different.
I have a site that looks like shit in IE. It looks fine in any other browser, including Lynx, but it just looks horrible in IE. You can still access everything with IE, but it just looks really weird. I don't care. It's not a commercial site, I have no profit from it, if you want to look at it using IE and have your eyes hurt, that's your problem. The site uses valid HTML and CSS, and I refuse to spend the time work around IE bugs.
They should be paid enough for competent and intelligent people to be attracted to the job. Apparently it is not the case now.
He spent $6k once to make $1.6k a day.
That's not what pdf download does. It lets you chose, for each pdf file, whether you want to open it in the browser, in a pdf viewer, or download it. It would be even better if you could choose which pdf viewer to use, but even the way it is, I find it quite useful.
TFA is slashdoted, what in the hell do they have against PDF download?
First, that will never happen. There are number of organizations that put out free contents without (direct) advertising. Some of them are being financed by grants, some of them receive government support (when it is their job to post free stuff on the internet), some may be supported by interest groups or political parties. Some organizations post free content because it by itself serves as an advertisement for them (lot of universities do that), some organizations provide content for their customers, and it makes no difference, or is actually cheaper, to simply provide it for everybody (again, think about online teaching materials posted by colleges and universities) etc. You could find lot of free content on the internet long time before internet advertising really started to take off.
Second, if there really was no free content available, I would either find some contents worth paying for, or, if I couldn't find anything, I would simply ignore the internet (just like I ignore for example TV now) and find something else to do. No need to fret about it.