Wrong again. The paragraph that you cite describes what is in the school's student handbook, but the student handbook does not reflect the addition that the principal just made to the school rules. That is described in the third paragraph of the article, which describes what the principal told the students at an assembly:
Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.
In other words, the principal told the students that they aren't permitted to have blogs. Full stop. The point of the bit that you cited is that in doing this the principal went beyond what is in the student handbook.
My literacy skills are holding up quite nicely. You'll be less likely to make an ass of yourself if you read the
entire article. Basing your posts on the bits that you remember or find appealing doesn't work very well.
You're making some false distinctions. First, the term "dictatorship"
is used in two ways. In its narrowest sense it refers to rule by a dictator, which is rule by a single person. Iran and China are not in this sense dictatorships but rather oligarchies. In its broader sense it refers to any system of government that is dictatorial. Although dictatorial is etymologically related to dictator, it is broader in meaning. In this broader sense, a dictatorship is a system in which power is restricted to a small group and in which it is wielded arbitrarily, without regard for law. In this sense, Iran and China are correctly described as dictatorships.
A theocracy is any system of rule by a religious body. It isn't a term on the same dimension as "democracy", "dictatorship", and "monarchy".
A system of rule by a hereditary religious figure could accurately be described as a theocracy and as a monarchy. The current Iranian system is a theocratic oligarchy mixed with some democratic institutions.
The current Chinese system is an oligarchy that, I would argue, is no longer a "theocracy". That is, the system was once driven by ideology, but that isn't really true any longer. China has effectively abandoned communism. Economically, it is now a capitalist country, albeit one in which the state or the military still own many companies. It retains the dictatorial aspect of the old Communist government but is de facto no longer a communist system.
I don't think it is shocking that a private Mormon college
would require its students to adhere to the rules of Mormonism.
What I find inappropriate is BYU giving the girl a hard time because she had dinner with her parents and THEY drank wine.
BYU has no right to demand that her parents not drink alcohol,
and it is totally unreasonable to expect her not to associate with her parents while she is at BYU.
Wrong. That's NOT what the article says. The principal has prohibited the kids from having blogs at all, regardless of what they discuss on them. He is not just telling them not to reveal information about their school schedules that might conceivably put them in harm's way.
In any case, blogging is not what gets kids in trouble on the net. All of the cases that I've heard of of serious problems involve kids, mostly girls, getting involved with predators in chat rooms. If he were really concerned about the kids, that's what he would warn them about. This guy is either more ignorant about the net than a school principal in this day and age should be, or concern for the kids is just a pretext and he's really trying to prevent the kids from posting anything critical of the school.
Once upon a time, back when Xerox made Lisp machines, a faculty member at a certain institution was one of a number of people who received a Xerox 1108 "Dandelion" workstation. After a while, a number of Xerox 1109 "Dandetiger" workstations were received. As a Big Deal, she expected to trade her Dandelion for a Dandetiger. The computing staff, however, were aware that she used the machine purely as a remote terminal with which to read her email and do her word processing on a Dec 20, whereas they knew that a graduate student would actually benefit from the greater speed of the Dandetiger. Therefore, on the principle "each according to his needs", they gave
her Dandetiger to the grad student. The trick was that the only way a naive user could tell whether a machine was a Dandelion or a Dandetiger was by whether the message panel on the tower read "1108" or "1109".
So one night they hacked her 1108 so that it displayed 1109 and told her that they had swapped her Dandelion for a Dandetiger. She never knew the difference, and
everyone lived happily ever after.
Say what? What do you think they are? Democracies?
Iran has nominally democratic institutions, but it isn't a real democracy because a small group of clerics can veto anything that they regard as inconsistent with Islam and can, and have on numerous occasions, bar candidates that they don't like. Iran has a terrible human rights record, imposes a state religion, and censors the press.
As for China, again there are certain semblences of democracy, but the real power is in the hands of the Communist Party oligarchy. Elected officials have little power and you aren't allowed to run if the party doesn't like you. Labor unions are illegal. The press is censored, and the courts are openly subject to political control.
These are good suggestions, including the one to avoid PERL.
I think that where to start depends on the person's interests. If he wants to be able to write non-trivially useful code soon, one of the scripting languages would be best. On the other hand, if he wants to understand things at a fairly low level and is interested in hardware or operating systems, C is probably the best choice.
Of the scripting languages, I suggest that Tcl deserves serious consideration. One reason is that I don't think that object-orientation is best for a beginner. OO languages are very useful for some things, but they aren't ideal for everything, and object-orientation adds complexity and additional concepts that it's best for the beginner not to have to worry about. So I recommend against languages like Python and Ruby that are obligatorily object oriented.
Tcl also has a very simple syntax which makes it easy to learn.
(Ironically, I think that Tcl is harder to learn for experienced programmers, who tend to make mistakes because they falsely assume that Tcl syntax is like that of Algol-class languages.)
Tcl's other big virtue is the closely associated Tk toolkit, which makes it really easy to get started writing programs with GUIs.
Finally, Tcl has a very helpful newsgroup comp.lang.tcl on which beginners' questions are welcome as well as a helpful wiki.
Re:But they're different companies now!
on
DrDOS Inc Breaking GPL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The city of Sapporo of Sapporo has a grid like this, with streets just numbered East/West or North/South. This is said to be because it was laid out by American engineers in the late 19th century.
My personal web site gets on average one or two visits a month from systems identifying themselves as running CP/M. I always wonder whether there really are people still running CP/M and surfing the web or whether these are just joking misidentifications.
IE 71.7 Unknown 10 Firefox 7.8 Safari 3.6 Konqueror 2.1 Mozilla 2 Netscape 1.1 Links 0.3 Opera 0.3 Others 0.6
The difference is that traffic for my personal site comes primarily from people downloading free software (most of which will run on systems other than GNU/Linux but is known mostly to Linux-oriented people), whereas the traffic for the other site, which deals with the native languages of British Columbia, presumably has no such OS or geek bias.
A third site that I manage, for some friends' fishing lodge, looks like this:
IE 74.8 Firefox 17.6 Mozilla 5.2 Unknown 2.3
If anything, this site will probably be the most representative since the ydli site probably attracts a geekier class of person.
Unfortunately, the number of hits is much smaller so that stats are probably not terribly reliable.
I don't think that Microsoft would have as hard a time
turning MS Windows into a GUI on top of Linux as the WINE
project has. Microsoft has a better knowledge of what the MS Windows API is. The WINE folks have to reverse engineer part of it.
There ought to be a privacy advocate whose job it was to be the
devil's advocate at hearings on search warrants and oppose them.
That way the judge could retain his or her familiar neutral role
and warrants would be subject to great scrutiny.
Easy. The telephone system in the US went through exactly this process. It was once a monopoly. The phone company even owned the phone lines within your house and the telephones: you just rented them. You had to get your equipment from them and have them do all the service. Of course, this meant no competition and it suppressed innovation since depending on the case it was difficult or impossible to add third-party equipment to the system. Now, in contrast, there is competition and you can hook anything up that you want so long as it conforms to certain specs.
Precisely. I'll offer myself as a quasi-neutral observer. I'm a hardcore Unix guy. I've used Unix since 1982. Given the choice between a Mac and a Windows box, I'd take the Mac (and I'm not just talking about OS X). Macs have always been more stable, less buggy, had better graphics and audio and a better window system than Windows. The only situations in which I would have chosen a Windows box are where a program was critically needed that ran only under Windows or if it was important to get the hardware as cheaply as possible. I'd say that for someone like a writer, who could easily get the software he or she needed on a Mac and could afford to spend a little extra, Macs have always been superior to Windows boxes. It may be that these tech writers don't have enough experience of other platforms to make intelligent comparisons (I don't really know since I rarely read these people), but their choice of Macs for their own use seems perfectly rational.
The problem with this argument is that the premise that the mouse and printer won't work under Linux is silly. I've NEVER had a problem with a mouse or a printer and I've used Linux almost exclusively since 1995. Current easy-to-install distributions do a terrific job of detecting hardware and configuring themselves for it. The areas where Linux is more likely to run into trouble with hardware than MS Windows are more esoteric things like high-end graphics cards with proprietary drivers, things that are highly unlikely to be of concern in the situation under discussion.
I don't see how this works in general. Its true that locked mailboxes of the sort found in apartment buildings and post offices only allow things to be inserted if you can open them up, but lots of mailboxes can readily be opened by anybody, and others have slits that allow things to be put in but don't allow anything to be removed, or only allow with considerable difficulty.
Prohibiting other people from inserting things into mail boxes doesn't change the security picture one way or the other.
I think that to see lots of organizations and individuals taking public positions like this and making sure that their government representatives are aware of it. So long as outfits like the RIAA are able to give the impression that they represent the "content creators" and that the only people who have problems with the way "IP" law has developed are people too cheap to pay for their entertainment and long-hair hippie programmers, they'll stay in the driver's seat. It's important for prominent scientists, engineers, inventors, film-makers, authors, musicians and the like, in short, the real creators and innovators, to make it clear that they regard the current IP regime as intolerable.
Re:Actually, he has a point ...
on
Google Terror Threat
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
It's a good point that the US can be damaged by attacks outside the US, where the US has much less control, but I wonder if the US companies' tech centers in India are as critical as parent suggests. The tech companies are not actually run out of their Indian centers, nor is that where their manufacturing is done. It isn't where their basic R&D is done either, in most cases. Taking out phone support would be a blow, but I doubt it would crippling.
Furthermore, what do you mean "thanks to GWB"? True, he did attack al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11, as any President would have, but since then he has neglected Afghanistan, allowing al-Qaeda and the Taliban to remain strong in many areas, has diverted resources under false pretenses to Iraq, which had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and has made Iraq a breeding ground for terrorists and a rallying point for anti-American sentiment. And thanks to his administration's incompetence, blind ideology, and cronyism, US intelligence and security are in most respects even worse than they were.
I don't know whether they are better or worse as breeding grounds for
fungi, but those barley husk pillows are terrific. They give you really
good support and are really comfortable.
If that's what you want, I don't know of anything 100% automated,
but I have written something along those lines that makes the process fast. Check out: SndBite.
The kind of recordings that SndBite was designed for are not as clean as language learning CDs and don't have such regular spacing between utterances, so completely automatic operation wasn't a goal. SndBite is however programmable - the init file is a Tcl program executed by a safe interpreter - so I think that this could be fully automated by exposing a few more of the internal commands in the slave interpreter.
I'm not sure what you mean by "split". Do you just want to chop up the audio on the CD so you've got one word or phrase per file? Or do you have something more complicated in mind, like automatically separating speakers?
These days there's very little about language in a typical English degree, at
least not in North America,probably nothing at all about grammar or history of the language, nor is there much emphasis on clear expository writing. All too many English majors are amateur psychologists, anthropologists, historians, or political scientists, or even worse, historians and philosophers of science.
The nonsense that passes for literary theory these days has got to be seen to be believed. A prime example is Alan Sokal's demonstration that post-modern literary theorists pretending to be able to critique science don't know their rear end from a doorknob.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong again. The paragraph that you cite describes what is in the school's student handbook, but the student handbook does not reflect the addition that the principal just made to the school rules. That is described in the third paragraph of the article, which describes what the principal told the students at an assembly:
In other words, the principal told the students that they aren't permitted to have blogs. Full stop. The point of the bit that you cited is that in doing this the principal went beyond what is in the student handbook.My literacy skills are holding up quite nicely. You'll be less likely to make an ass of yourself if you read the entire article. Basing your posts on the bits that you remember or find appealing doesn't work very well.
You're making some false distinctions. First, the term "dictatorship" is used in two ways. In its narrowest sense it refers to rule by a dictator, which is rule by a single person. Iran and China are not in this sense dictatorships but rather oligarchies. In its broader sense it refers to any system of government that is dictatorial. Although dictatorial is etymologically related to dictator, it is broader in meaning. In this broader sense, a dictatorship is a system in which power is restricted to a small group and in which it is wielded arbitrarily, without regard for law. In this sense, Iran and China are correctly described as dictatorships.
A theocracy is any system of rule by a religious body. It isn't a term on the same dimension as "democracy", "dictatorship", and "monarchy". A system of rule by a hereditary religious figure could accurately be described as a theocracy and as a monarchy. The current Iranian system is a theocratic oligarchy mixed with some democratic institutions. The current Chinese system is an oligarchy that, I would argue, is no longer a "theocracy". That is, the system was once driven by ideology, but that isn't really true any longer. China has effectively abandoned communism. Economically, it is now a capitalist country, albeit one in which the state or the military still own many companies. It retains the dictatorial aspect of the old Communist government but is de facto no longer a communist system.
I don't think it is shocking that a private Mormon college would require its students to adhere to the rules of Mormonism. What I find inappropriate is BYU giving the girl a hard time because she had dinner with her parents and THEY drank wine. BYU has no right to demand that her parents not drink alcohol, and it is totally unreasonable to expect her not to associate with her parents while she is at BYU.
Wrong. That's NOT what the article says. The principal has prohibited the kids from having blogs at all, regardless of what they discuss on them. He is not just telling them not to reveal information about their school schedules that might conceivably put them in harm's way.
In any case, blogging is not what gets kids in trouble on the net. All of the cases that I've heard of of serious problems involve kids, mostly girls, getting involved with predators in chat rooms. If he were really concerned about the kids, that's what he would warn them about. This guy is either more ignorant about the net than a school principal in this day and age should be, or concern for the kids is just a pretext and he's really trying to prevent the kids from posting anything critical of the school.
Once upon a time, back when Xerox made Lisp machines, a faculty member at a certain institution was one of a number of people who received a Xerox 1108 "Dandelion" workstation. After a while, a number of Xerox 1109 "Dandetiger" workstations were received. As a Big Deal, she expected to trade her Dandelion for a Dandetiger. The computing staff, however, were aware that she used the machine purely as a remote terminal with which to read her email and do her word processing on a Dec 20, whereas they knew that a graduate student would actually benefit from the greater speed of the Dandetiger. Therefore, on the principle "each according to his needs", they gave her Dandetiger to the grad student. The trick was that the only way a naive user could tell whether a machine was a Dandelion or a Dandetiger was by whether the message panel on the tower read "1108" or "1109". So one night they hacked her 1108 so that it displayed 1109 and told her that they had swapped her Dandelion for a Dandetiger. She never knew the difference, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Say what? What do you think they are? Democracies? Iran has nominally democratic institutions, but it isn't a real democracy because a small group of clerics can veto anything that they regard as inconsistent with Islam and can, and have on numerous occasions, bar candidates that they don't like. Iran has a terrible human rights record, imposes a state religion, and censors the press.
As for China, again there are certain semblences of democracy, but the real power is in the hands of the Communist Party oligarchy. Elected officials have little power and you aren't allowed to run if the party doesn't like you. Labor unions are illegal. The press is censored, and the courts are openly subject to political control.
These are good suggestions, including the one to avoid PERL. I think that where to start depends on the person's interests. If he wants to be able to write non-trivially useful code soon, one of the scripting languages would be best. On the other hand, if he wants to understand things at a fairly low level and is interested in hardware or operating systems, C is probably the best choice.
Of the scripting languages, I suggest that Tcl deserves serious consideration. One reason is that I don't think that object-orientation is best for a beginner. OO languages are very useful for some things, but they aren't ideal for everything, and object-orientation adds complexity and additional concepts that it's best for the beginner not to have to worry about. So I recommend against languages like Python and Ruby that are obligatorily object oriented.
Tcl also has a very simple syntax which makes it easy to learn. (Ironically, I think that Tcl is harder to learn for experienced programmers, who tend to make mistakes because they falsely assume that Tcl syntax is like that of Algol-class languages.) Tcl's other big virtue is the closely associated Tk toolkit, which makes it really easy to get started writing programs with GUIs.
Finally, Tcl has a very helpful newsgroup comp.lang.tcl on which beginners' questions are welcome as well as a helpful wiki.
The city of Sapporo of Sapporo has a grid like this, with streets just numbered East/West or North/South. This is said to be because it was laid out by American engineers in the late 19th century.
My personal web site gets on average one or two visits a month from systems identifying themselves as running CP/M. I always wonder whether there really are people still running CP/M and surfing the web or whether these are just joking misidentifications.
You can see the disparity caused by different audiences in some sites that I run. My personal site's stats look like this:
Another site that I maintain is quite different:
The difference is that traffic for my personal site comes primarily from people downloading free software (most of which will run on systems other than GNU/Linux but is known mostly to Linux-oriented people), whereas the traffic for the other site, which deals with the native languages of British Columbia, presumably has no such OS or geek bias.
A third site that I manage, for some friends' fishing lodge, looks like this:
If anything, this site will probably be the most representative since the ydli site probably attracts a geekier class of person. Unfortunately, the number of hits is much smaller so that stats are probably not terribly reliable.I don't think that Microsoft would have as hard a time turning MS Windows into a GUI on top of Linux as the WINE project has. Microsoft has a better knowledge of what the MS Windows API is. The WINE folks have to reverse engineer part of it.
There ought to be a privacy advocate whose job it was to be the devil's advocate at hearings on search warrants and oppose them. That way the judge could retain his or her familiar neutral role and warrants would be subject to great scrutiny.
Actually, this is an important observation. It tells us that WINE is a red wine. Nobody would age a white wine for that long.
Easy. The telephone system in the US went through exactly this process. It was once a monopoly. The phone company even owned the phone lines within your house and the telephones: you just rented them. You had to get your equipment from them and have them do all the service. Of course, this meant no competition and it suppressed innovation since depending on the case it was difficult or impossible to add third-party equipment to the system. Now, in contrast, there is competition and you can hook anything up that you want so long as it conforms to certain specs.
How come Halon wasn't allowed in government installations?
Precisely. I'll offer myself as a quasi-neutral observer. I'm a hardcore Unix guy. I've used Unix since 1982. Given the choice between a Mac and a Windows box, I'd take the Mac (and I'm not just talking about OS X). Macs have always been more stable, less buggy, had better graphics and audio and a better window system than Windows. The only situations in which I would have chosen a Windows box are where a program was critically needed that ran only under Windows or if it was important to get the hardware as cheaply as possible. I'd say that for someone like a writer, who could easily get the software he or she needed on a Mac and could afford to spend a little extra, Macs have always been superior to Windows boxes. It may be that these tech writers don't have enough experience of other platforms to make intelligent comparisons (I don't really know since I rarely read these people), but their choice of Macs for their own use seems perfectly rational.
The problem with this argument is that the premise that the mouse and printer won't work under Linux is silly. I've NEVER had a problem with a mouse or a printer and I've used Linux almost exclusively since 1995. Current easy-to-install distributions do a terrific job of detecting hardware and configuring themselves for it. The areas where Linux is more likely to run into trouble with hardware than MS Windows are more esoteric things like high-end graphics cards with proprietary drivers, things that are highly unlikely to be of concern in the situation under discussion.
Good point, but who were the "geniuses" defending slavery on economic grounds? I'm not aware of that.
I don't see how this works in general. Its true that locked mailboxes of the sort found in apartment buildings and post offices only allow things to be inserted if you can open them up, but lots of mailboxes can readily be opened by anybody, and others have slits that allow things to be put in but don't allow anything to be removed, or only allow with considerable difficulty. Prohibiting other people from inserting things into mail boxes doesn't change the security picture one way or the other.
I think that to see lots of organizations and individuals taking public positions like this and making sure that their government representatives are aware of it. So long as outfits like the RIAA are able to give the impression that they represent the "content creators" and that the only people who have problems with the way "IP" law has developed are people too cheap to pay for their entertainment and long-hair hippie programmers, they'll stay in the driver's seat. It's important for prominent scientists, engineers, inventors, film-makers, authors, musicians and the like, in short, the real creators and innovators, to make it clear that they regard the current IP regime as intolerable.
It's a good point that the US can be damaged by attacks outside the US, where the US has much less control, but I wonder if the US companies' tech centers in India are as critical as parent suggests. The tech companies are not actually run out of their Indian centers, nor is that where their manufacturing is done. It isn't where their basic R&D is done either, in most cases. Taking out phone support would be a blow, but I doubt it would crippling.
Furthermore, what do you mean "thanks to GWB"? True, he did attack al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11, as any President would have, but since then he has neglected Afghanistan, allowing al-Qaeda and the Taliban to remain strong in many areas, has diverted resources under false pretenses to Iraq, which had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and has made Iraq a breeding ground for terrorists and a rallying point for anti-American sentiment. And thanks to his administration's incompetence, blind ideology, and cronyism, US intelligence and security are in most respects even worse than they were.
I don't know whether they are better or worse as breeding grounds for fungi, but those barley husk pillows are terrific. They give you really good support and are really comfortable.
If that's what you want, I don't know of anything 100% automated, but I have written something along those lines that makes the process fast. Check out: SndBite. The kind of recordings that SndBite was designed for are not as clean as language learning CDs and don't have such regular spacing between utterances, so completely automatic operation wasn't a goal. SndBite is however programmable - the init file is a Tcl program executed by a safe interpreter - so I think that this could be fully automated by exposing a few more of the internal commands in the slave interpreter.
I'm not sure what you mean by "split". Do you just want to chop up the audio on the CD so you've got one word or phrase per file? Or do you have something more complicated in mind, like automatically separating speakers?
These days there's very little about language in a typical English degree, at least not in North America,probably nothing at all about grammar or history of the language, nor is there much emphasis on clear expository writing. All too many English majors are amateur psychologists, anthropologists, historians, or political scientists, or even worse, historians and philosophers of science. The nonsense that passes for literary theory these days has got to be seen to be believed. A prime example is Alan Sokal's demonstration that post-modern literary theorists pretending to be able to critique science don't know their rear end from a doorknob.