Except that the fact that there is a deity is proven by His having spoken through the prophets and through scripture. It is up to you to prove that the combined witness of many is false. Similarly in a court of law if hundreds of people claim your client committed a murder it is up to you to prove that he didn't and that the witnesses are lying.
How is the parent off topic? Christianity does not teach that being made in Christ's image means looking physically similar to Christ. It shows a lack of understanding in the announcement of one of the basic tenants of Christianity. It seems that the the modding down of the parent is due to an inherent bias among/. users. Sadly, things like this are slowly forcing me off/.
I'm learning GLSL right now and I would like to use it with Quartz Composer but I've never really worked with Quartz. Do you know of any tutorials related to using Quartz Composer that specifically deal with using GLSL?
Doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, only matters if they have justification for their claims.
For instance if you told me the earth revolved around the sun you would be right, but if your reason for believing it was that a guy in Omaha likes the sun and so keeps the earth revolving around it by use of his mind, I'd be crazy to believe that the earth revolved around the sun simply on your insane testimony. Similarly if people post comments right or wrong with a complete lack of justification, they aren't worth listening to. They are "right" by chance, but not by an actual argument/proof/reason.
From the article, "The magnets are removed from the crocodile's head when it is released."
Not cruel, not punishment, just making sure they don't know how to get back to the residential area where they will probably be shot if the become a nuisance.
You misunderstand my question. My question is not, "how do we put a textbook on a computer?" I'm fully aware of eBooks. My question is, "how do you get an eBook onto an OLPC once the kid has it?" when nobody here (except the hospital, and only nominally) has internet access (because to buy a modem is 10 months salary here and to keep it running is 3 months salary).
You could preload the OLPCs with eBooks, but they aren't doing that now so until then my question stands.
Also, the problem is that you want textbooks to engage kids. Math problems about the dollar amounts made by a baseball player may engage a kid in the US but here it is meaningless and not engaging at all. Its amazing the number of useless donations that we get here. It seems that our idea in the west is that any old thing we cast off is good for someone, but that is not actually the case. I've seen schools without any computers have how to use computer books that were published in 1980. Completely useless. Of course and OLPC seems to be more useless than that (at least it is modern and a tool) but again, the reality is that here they need textbooks for each year of school for each child far far far more than PCs.
I haven't been personally yet (and may not, we'll see how the DRC-Rwanda situation goes), but I've heard from other westerners that Rwanda has quite a bit more infrastructure than we do here near the Rwenzoris. Perhaps they have less expensive & faster internet that enables OLPC to work well there. As an internet platform here it would be unusable. A single webpage can take 30 minutes to load (although thankfully tonight its doing a bit better). You just can't get enough information in a short enough amount of time with the access we have here for the internet to be viable as an educational tool.
The modem I'm using right now (which has an upload speed of maybe 200 bps and a download speed right now--and this is the non-peak middle of the night speed-- of 7 kbps) costs 90,000/= per a month which is a typical 3 month salary here (I made dinner for five people tonight for less than 1,000/=). Schools have no money to buy internet access (I've been to only one school so far that had it and it was WOEFULLY slower than my current connection). One possible solution might be to get a group of families together to purchase one and pay for it jointly (the purchase of a modem is currently 10 months typical salary). Many of these kids get one meal a day and their parents have trouble affording that, I really just don't see this happening soon. Also, I don't think that educational sites are necessarily a great replacement for textbooks, but I'll admit that I'm ill informed on the subject and you'll probably make me insert my foot in my mouth over that comment =D.
It may be that laptops are in the future for this area and they might be an aid to education but I just don't see them as a silver bullet.
I think before something like this would be viable here a serious amount of retraining for teachers and staff would be required alongside community based projects that involved the parents of the kids and lots and lots of funding. In the meantime it would really be (maybe I should say, Until that happens it really be much more) useful to get some textbooks for the kids so they can learn.
That might be a more helpful idea. I think the trick there is buying the rights to the textbooks to put them on the computer. Has OLPC done this (I honestly don't know, maybe).
I'm typing this from Kagando Village, Uganda. I've been touring the local primary and secondary schools here and I can tell you that these children don't need laptops. Forget about the fact that the adults would probably use them instead of the kids if they were brought here. The reason they don't need laptops is because they much more desperately need good textbooks for every year of school. No amount of educational software is going to make up for the fact that the kids don't have good (or usually even enough) textbooks. $200 a kid could EASILY buy every kid here textbooks for every year of their schooling and would be money MUCH better spent. Maybe this isn't the case in other developing countries but here I really don't think that laptops are the answer. It's a nice gimmick and a nice thought but not the right answer.
Why is Bill Gates the icon for this? Because it ran on.NET? We don't know what the problem was--it was probably programmer error.
Should we put Bjarne Stroustrup's mug up there every time a program written in C++ crashes? Of course not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Mac loving-M$ hating-slashdot user just like the rest of you, but I think the instant insinuation that M$ is to blame is ridiculous.
"Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM?"
Doubtful on both counts. I'm an indie dev who writes games for the iPhone app store. I'm excited because my app just hit 86 reviews after a month and a half in the store. Spore Origins had 86 reviews by dinner last night. Slashdot will get excited about this, some folks on digg will get excited about this, but the rest of the world will see Spore commercials on their TV, drive to Best Buy, and buy a copy. It sucks, but the majority of the people don't care about DRM either way until it is actually messing up their life.
Look, I hate MS as much as the next guy but IE 8 is beta software. Who knows what the final release will be? Let's not count our eggs before they hatch, so to speak.
I think JavaScript as a language isn't really that bad. There are some annoying syntax things, like the definition of an object looking exactly like a function, but for the most part, js is a nice language.
The real problems, in my opinion, are in the implementations. For instance, why does FF support a different event model than IE? Also, I think a lot of problems stem from the insistence on being backwards compatible. document.getElementById(value) may return an input from the DOM that's only had its name attribute set in IE but this causes problems down the road.
It seems like they could fix a lot of this stuff if they would do more divorcing of the past and try to be more consistent, not just with JavaScript but also with CSS and HTML. For instance, make:hover work on all CSS elements and get rid of the onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='red'" crap out of JavaScript. Let CSS set the styles and let JavaScript deal with the actual application code.
Of course with 4+ browsers being developed by people who aren't really always talking with each other, it will never happen. Oh, well.
"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.
Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).
I mostly agree with you except for some of your language use. You say that science is about proving things. This isn't the case. Almost nothing produced by science constitutes a proof. Instead, science is about argumentation to the best explanation. There is no proof that we are made up of atoms, for instance, there is only a huge body of evidence that supports the claim.
Or for another example: there is no proof that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth. Perhaps it does and the movements of the bodies in space are a lot different than we have currently imagined. What we've done by saying the earth revolves around the sun is given a really really really plausible explanation for why we observe certain phenomena but we haven't proven anything.
Proof gets a truth. Science gets at plausibility. A mathematical proof is true-is true-is true... there are no possible worlds where the assumptions made in a mathematical truth are true and yet the conclusion false. Science on the other hand tends to be called "true" but only so long as our evidence continues to support our theories.
Science can disprove certain types of claims. But proving things is not usually within its grasp.
I don't think one needs to be taught how to write viruses.
Case in point for the sake of argument:
A buffer overrun is a common vector for malicious code. Knowing what types of code causes a buffer overrun is required to protect against them. Practicing writing assembly code to insert into the buffer to actually exploit something is not.
Teaching exploitation is not necessarily the same as teaching protection.
I'm hoping that there aren't actually 25k devs signed up. The chatter is that many of the devs who haven't yet been certified have signed up multiple times (as many as 5 or more) in the hope that one of their accounts will win the raffle.
Also, the real hope is that the dev program will leave beta tomorrow and everyone will be let in. Who knows.
The problem is getting found as the great blow you away Sudoku app when there are already 25 poorly written ones in the App store that have already been downloaded and so (maybe) show up higher in search results, only because you couldn't enter the market on the ground floor. (BTW I'm not saying that the sudoku apps in the store are bad, haven't actually looked at them myself--just using them as an example).
Of course, it may very well be (and hopefully is) that Apple has a better algorithm for bringing up new apps to users than that.
If you spend 5.99 on a sudoku app in the next week are you really going to buy a much better one in a month? Probably not, you probably won't even be looking for one. Not that sudoku is the killer app for the iphone but the app that is already available is going to have a HUGE leg up on the app that isn't yet in the store.
I'm not about to say that Apple shouldn't add features to help block phishing scams, but it seems to me that many users who make an educated choice about what browser to use also are aware of phishing scams and don't click links in email (aside from surfing drunk). I mean, to understand why paypal is asking you to switch browsers and to feel that you actually ought to do it implies some understanding of why you are doing it, which in turn means that you probably don't need to switch browsers in the first place. Maybe not, maybe tons of firefox users are saved every day by this, but personally I've never come close to clicking a paypal (or any other important login) link in an email so for me I'll stick with Safari.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the fact that there is a deity is proven by His having spoken through the prophets and through scripture. It is up to you to prove that the combined witness of many is false. Similarly in a court of law if hundreds of people claim your client committed a murder it is up to you to prove that he didn't and that the witnesses are lying.
How is the parent off topic? Christianity does not teach that being made in Christ's image means looking physically similar to Christ. It shows a lack of understanding in the announcement of one of the basic tenants of Christianity. It seems that the the modding down of the parent is due to an inherent bias among /. users. Sadly, things like this are slowly forcing me off /.
I'm new to this, so forgive the ignorance, but isn't Cg an NVIDIA technology? Does it run on ATI?
I'm learning GLSL right now and I would like to use it with Quartz Composer but I've never really worked with Quartz. Do you know of any tutorials related to using Quartz Composer that specifically deal with using GLSL?
Doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, only matters if they have justification for their claims. For instance if you told me the earth revolved around the sun you would be right, but if your reason for believing it was that a guy in Omaha likes the sun and so keeps the earth revolving around it by use of his mind, I'd be crazy to believe that the earth revolved around the sun simply on your insane testimony. Similarly if people post comments right or wrong with a complete lack of justification, they aren't worth listening to. They are "right" by chance, but not by an actual argument/proof/reason.
From the article, "The magnets are removed from the crocodile's head when it is released." Not cruel, not punishment, just making sure they don't know how to get back to the residential area where they will probably be shot if the become a nuisance.
You misunderstand my question. My question is not, "how do we put a textbook on a computer?" I'm fully aware of eBooks. My question is, "how do you get an eBook onto an OLPC once the kid has it?" when nobody here (except the hospital, and only nominally) has internet access (because to buy a modem is 10 months salary here and to keep it running is 3 months salary).
You could preload the OLPCs with eBooks, but they aren't doing that now so until then my question stands.
Also, the problem is that you want textbooks to engage kids. Math problems about the dollar amounts made by a baseball player may engage a kid in the US but here it is meaningless and not engaging at all. Its amazing the number of useless donations that we get here. It seems that our idea in the west is that any old thing we cast off is good for someone, but that is not actually the case. I've seen schools without any computers have how to use computer books that were published in 1980. Completely useless. Of course and OLPC seems to be more useless than that (at least it is modern and a tool) but again, the reality is that here they need textbooks for each year of school for each child far far far more than PCs.
One other thing,
I haven't been personally yet (and may not, we'll see how the DRC-Rwanda situation goes), but I've heard from other westerners that Rwanda has quite a bit more infrastructure than we do here near the Rwenzoris. Perhaps they have less expensive & faster internet that enables OLPC to work well there. As an internet platform here it would be unusable. A single webpage can take 30 minutes to load (although thankfully tonight its doing a bit better). You just can't get enough information in a short enough amount of time with the access we have here for the internet to be viable as an educational tool.
The problem is in the phrase "connecting to ..."
The modem I'm using right now (which has an upload speed of maybe 200 bps and a download speed right now--and this is the non-peak middle of the night speed-- of 7 kbps) costs 90,000/= per a month which is a typical 3 month salary here (I made dinner for five people tonight for less than 1,000/=). Schools have no money to buy internet access (I've been to only one school so far that had it and it was WOEFULLY slower than my current connection). One possible solution might be to get a group of families together to purchase one and pay for it jointly (the purchase of a modem is currently 10 months typical salary). Many of these kids get one meal a day and their parents have trouble affording that, I really just don't see this happening soon. Also, I don't think that educational sites are necessarily a great replacement for textbooks, but I'll admit that I'm ill informed on the subject and you'll probably make me insert my foot in my mouth over that comment =D.
It may be that laptops are in the future for this area and they might be an aid to education but I just don't see them as a silver bullet.
I think before something like this would be viable here a serious amount of retraining for teachers and staff would be required alongside community based projects that involved the parents of the kids and lots and lots of funding. In the meantime it would really be (maybe I should say, Until that happens it really be much more) useful to get some textbooks for the kids so they can learn.
That might be a more helpful idea. I think the trick there is buying the rights to the textbooks to put them on the computer. Has OLPC done this (I honestly don't know, maybe).
Yes, but how do you get them the textbooks?
I'm typing this from Kagando Village, Uganda. I've been touring the local primary and secondary schools here and I can tell you that these children don't need laptops. Forget about the fact that the adults would probably use them instead of the kids if they were brought here. The reason they don't need laptops is because they much more desperately need good textbooks for every year of school. No amount of educational software is going to make up for the fact that the kids don't have good (or usually even enough) textbooks. $200 a kid could EASILY buy every kid here textbooks for every year of their schooling and would be money MUCH better spent. Maybe this isn't the case in other developing countries but here I really don't think that laptops are the answer. It's a nice gimmick and a nice thought but not the right answer.
Sure, that's true, but aren't tags for search purposes. I just don't see myself wanting this story coming up when I search for "Unix."
Or maybe I don't understand the purpose of tagging.
Just curious: how did this story get a Unix tag before it got a Windows tag? Both Chrome and IE 8 are Windows programs (oops, I almost wrote "apps").
Why is Bill Gates the icon for this? Because it ran on .NET? We don't know what the problem was--it was probably programmer error.
Should we put Bjarne Stroustrup's mug up there every time a program written in C++ crashes? Of course not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Mac loving-M$ hating-slashdot user just like the rest of you, but I think the instant insinuation that M$ is to blame is ridiculous.
"Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM?"
Doubtful on both counts. I'm an indie dev who writes games for the iPhone app store. I'm excited because my app just hit 86 reviews after a month and a half in the store. Spore Origins had 86 reviews by dinner last night. Slashdot will get excited about this, some folks on digg will get excited about this, but the rest of the world will see Spore commercials on their TV, drive to Best Buy, and buy a copy. It sucks, but the majority of the people don't care about DRM either way until it is actually messing up their life.
Look, I hate MS as much as the next guy but IE 8 is beta software. Who knows what the final release will be? Let's not count our eggs before they hatch, so to speak.
I think JavaScript as a language isn't really that bad. There are some annoying syntax things, like the definition of an object looking exactly like a function, but for the most part, js is a nice language.
:hover work on all CSS elements and get rid of the onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='red'" crap out of JavaScript. Let CSS set the styles and let JavaScript deal with the actual application code.
The real problems, in my opinion, are in the implementations. For instance, why does FF support a different event model than IE? Also, I think a lot of problems stem from the insistence on being backwards compatible. document.getElementById(value) may return an input from the DOM that's only had its name attribute set in IE but this causes problems down the road.
It seems like they could fix a lot of this stuff if they would do more divorcing of the past and try to be more consistent, not just with JavaScript but also with CSS and HTML. For instance, make
Of course with 4+ browsers being developed by people who aren't really always talking with each other, it will never happen. Oh, well.
"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.
Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).
I mostly agree with you except for some of your language use. You say that science is about proving things. This isn't the case. Almost nothing produced by science constitutes a proof. Instead, science is about argumentation to the best explanation. There is no proof that we are made up of atoms, for instance, there is only a huge body of evidence that supports the claim.
Or for another example: there is no proof that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth. Perhaps it does and the movements of the bodies in space are a lot different than we have currently imagined. What we've done by saying the earth revolves around the sun is given a really really really plausible explanation for why we observe certain phenomena but we haven't proven anything.
Proof gets a truth. Science gets at plausibility. A mathematical proof is true-is true-is true... there are no possible worlds where the assumptions made in a mathematical truth are true and yet the conclusion false. Science on the other hand tends to be called "true" but only so long as our evidence continues to support our theories.
Science can disprove certain types of claims. But proving things is not usually within its grasp.
I don't think one needs to be taught how to write viruses.
Case in point for the sake of argument:
A buffer overrun is a common vector for malicious code. Knowing what types of code causes a buffer overrun is required to protect against them. Practicing writing assembly code to insert into the buffer to actually exploit something is not. Teaching exploitation is not necessarily the same as teaching protection.
I'm hoping that there aren't actually 25k devs signed up. The chatter is that many of the devs who haven't yet been certified have signed up multiple times (as many as 5 or more) in the hope that one of their accounts will win the raffle. Also, the real hope is that the dev program will leave beta tomorrow and everyone will be let in. Who knows.
The problem is getting found as the great blow you away Sudoku app when there are already 25 poorly written ones in the App store that have already been downloaded and so (maybe) show up higher in search results, only because you couldn't enter the market on the ground floor. (BTW I'm not saying that the sudoku apps in the store are bad, haven't actually looked at them myself--just using them as an example).
Of course, it may very well be (and hopefully is) that Apple has a better algorithm for bringing up new apps to users than that.
If you spend 5.99 on a sudoku app in the next week are you really going to buy a much better one in a month? Probably not, you probably won't even be looking for one. Not that sudoku is the killer app for the iphone but the app that is already available is going to have a HUGE leg up on the app that isn't yet in the store.
So aging is a "disease" now. Let me age gracefully and die when its my time. I'll ask the N.I.C.E. to kindly leave, thank you.
I'm not about to say that Apple shouldn't add features to help block phishing scams, but it seems to me that many users who make an educated choice about what browser to use also are aware of phishing scams and don't click links in email (aside from surfing drunk). I mean, to understand why paypal is asking you to switch browsers and to feel that you actually ought to do it implies some understanding of why you are doing it, which in turn means that you probably don't need to switch browsers in the first place. Maybe not, maybe tons of firefox users are saved every day by this, but personally I've never come close to clicking a paypal (or any other important login) link in an email so for me I'll stick with Safari.