The point is not to infuse bureaucracy into open source, it is to use open source in government.
The govenrnment does not need to do more iota more than this: make it's code open source; be receptive to using open source and accepting open source contributions.
We the open source community get the fruits what we paid tax dollars to produce, and the government doesn't waste money on redundant proprietary code. Everybody wins. Adding bureaucracy to something that is clearly a partnership with the community is just dumb.
Doom Raiders is a sort of Indian Jones/The Mummy parody made by some kids from teh UK. It is truly awesome. They even got the British military to fly a helicopter for them in one of their stunts. Obviously, they had a lot of connections, but it still shows the possibilities of amateur film making.
Grayson is another great. It is actually just a trailer (~7 minutes) but if you saw this on TV you would not for the life you be able to distinguish it from a multimillion dollar production. Well, except for the tell-tale signs of an original plot.:p
Another great is Batman: Deadend. This is just a short. I believe it was shown firts at last year's ComicCon. Like the previous, there were obviously professionals involved, but it was still just a group of friends who put it together, though they happened to be familiar with production methods. The costumes all incredibe. Don't read this if you don't want me to spoil it, but they have Batman, Alien, and Predator costumes that are not in any way inferior to those you saw in the actual movies (personally, I think the Batman costume is better). The dark cinematography is really good too.
Now, nothing I linked to disputes that producing a film is a major effort that requires a lot of work and resources; but it does dispute the idea that you need millions of dollars to do so.
And I figure it's a good opportunity for some of my fellow slashdotters to enjoy some great movies.:)
Well, in that case, my humble apologies for misjudging.:)
I still maintain that when someone does something applaudable, a better recourse is to in fact applaud them, rather than insult them. When insult someone, they get defensive, and it becomes very difficult to persuade them. That is my experience, anyway.
You guys just can't resist can you? Some guy does something you *agree* with and you *still* take the opportunity to snidely demean them?
That's precisely why your voice has come more and more to mean diddly squat in politics. There is no point in trying to win you over, so may as well just ignore you completely.
A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser' and that 'standard mischief won't get you around it.'
So use substandard mischief.:p
I'm quite serious really. Unless the serial number is tiled, just print a full border and keep whatever stuff you want to cut out away from the serial.
If it is tiled, you have a number of options. You could script a program to 'split' the image so that you print unmarked bands in multiple runthroughs which eventually add up to a full image. You could offset some unknown amount and then surround the serial number with other sequences to disguise the actual serial (would take some knowledge of how serials are assigned to do a good diguise). Both of those would require a little hardware modification. But if you're printing $100 bills. . . .
Anyway, those are just some ideas off the top of my head. The point is that if people know what they're up against, they can find a workaround. Ideally, these kinds of tricks would be kept secret. In the case, the point is trip up ignorant cons who don't account for something they don't realize exists.
Oh well. This will still nail the 16 year old delingquents who decide to pull a fast one on the clerk at their local grocery store.
I mean, the essential premise of saying "researchers at UC Berkeley have crunched numbers and determined that 130,000-260,000 excess votes went to Bush in Florida" is that their algorithmic methods of predicting are more accurate than actually counting them. Is it not?
So why not just stay home and let the computers decide?
Personally, I'm inclined to believe that mathematically predicting the decisions of human beings is at least as far off as artificial intelligence.
Sure, part of your vehicle would vaporize and you would probably be centrifuged into your constituent molecules on turns, but just think how fast you could get where you wanted to go?
P.S. I loved "The Incredibles". Thank you pixar for consistently violating the Hollywood tradition of making sucky movies.
Teachers put in about 10-12 hours a day on average, if not more. Untrue. Most teachers at my school put in the minimum 8 that they're at school. They did not have work to do outside of class because they either had us grade our homework and quizzes in class or had the aides (seniors just needing extra credits) grade the work. The only exception was (some of) the honors teachers.
They spend their summers putting together lesson plans, They spend one summer putting together a lesson plan, and for the rest of their careers that is the lesson plan they use. Heck, you can tell which teachers are longtime veterans by how unreadable their handouts have become.
and usually working other part-time jobs. Which to me just highlights the aburdity of all the vacation time they get paid for.
Most of them don't get any help, or very limited help, on supplies, and spend hundreds out of their own pockets to pick up expenses the school won't pay for. On what exactly? Golden protractors?
I never had a teacher buy anything for the class except for sometimes the nice ones would get us candy on halloween or bake us something.
I don't see why you would need to buy anything extra except in lab courses. And the school always covered the expenses for that.
Heck, if the teachers are pressed for supply money, I don't see why they each need they're own personal computer (which they inevitable need the students' help to figure out how to use). My Chem teacher was the only one who put his to good use: he played games on it while we were doing the assigned labs.
If you want better teachers, offer better pay, and better people will apply for the jobs. If we paid high school teachers $50-60k, you'd have some very qualified candidates leaving their current jobs to teach instead. You'd have some very unqualified candidates pursuing jobs, too. Which is just the status quo. I had some awesome teachers. It is just that they were grossly outnumbered by the incompetents. It still comes back to getting rid of the bad teachers, which is what I'm proposing. You need a system that is high quality first; then you hire competively to fill the positions that are vacated by individuals that don't meet your standards. You don't arbitrarily increase wages and presume because you do so that you are getting your money's worth.
$30,000 annual sounds pretty good to me considering they get two weeks off during Christmas, one week off during Easter, and between two and three months off during the summer.
And I have rarely had a teacher who bothered to deal with troublesome students his/her self. If the kids don't behave, they call in an administrator to come deal with it.
If you still insist that is too low, well, starting salary for teachers is around $20,000 (at least where I live), so don't tell me these people don't know what they're getting into when they decide to become teachers.
Fact is, spending on education has increased 85% in the last two decades. Now I ask you, has the quality of education increased that much?
I can tell you first hand that the answer is no. And neither is *more* money going to help. What is going to help is making teachers accountable. I had TWO teachers last year where us 'gifted' kids were the ones pulling the class along. The teachers in question did not even understand the material they were covering. We had to explain it to them and to the other kids who were confused by their non-sensical lectures.
Once there is a system to identify and fire those kind of teachers, THEN you will see improvement.
Every distro has its fanatics. People like me, we get our jollies out of poking fun at them. It's nothing personal.
Besides, there's good reason to move on to making fun of Gentoo users, what with BSD dying and all. . . .;)
Are you so naive to believe that the government wouldn't store additional data with your D.N.A. chain? They'd just keep a file of A's T's C's and G's without assigning a person's SSN or name, or both to it?
I have proposed a database in which that is the only information kept, and in which that is a strict requirement of keeping the information. So, yes, that would be the only information kept in my hypothetical database.
The government might like to have a repository of names connected with in DNA, but I do not think hypothesizing on the existence of one in which that would not be allowed makes me naive....
Sorry, but you need a really, really good reason to convince me that something like that is necessary. The fact that a relatively tiny proportion of people are able to defraud the system is not one of them.
In Oberlin, in Loraine County Ohio, voter turnout is exceptional this year. In fact, 117% of eligible voters have registered.
What would you expect voter turnout to actually be, max? Maybe 70% at most? So the rest are fraudulent votes, probably, barring gross errors made elsewhere.
That is just not acceptable.
How few votes determined the last election? In my state, 377 votes called it.
You have two problems when you tolerate voter fraud. The first is that you let criminals choose your candidate. The second is that you turn your candidates in to criminals, as only those politicians willing to pander to fraudulent votes are likely to get elected.
Before people start jumping on you for "dna database == evil government control of our lives" let me just suggest that a dna database would be less intrusive than our present methods.
Why?
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
The downside: First, electrophoresis probably doesn't scale well to millions of samples. It's a lot better than the old methods, but not really designed at present for large scale work. Second, getting the DNA is going to annoy voters. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swab cheek cells, but still. Third, while I firmly believe this could eliminate almost all voter fraud, this is not some super-secure database. I mean, what method are you using to check whose dna is allowed in? Probably birth certificate and social security card. And as easy as it is to forge those, so would it be to get into the database.
My windows box and I would still be trying to negotiate whether it wanted to boot in "Normal Mode" "Safe Mode" "Last Known Good Configuration" or "Sorry, chap, just not gonna happen."
Slashdot Mirror
Modularize this, extend its applicability, and we can replace 90% of slashdotters with a small shell script!
The govenrnment does not need to do more iota more than this: make it's code open source; be receptive to using open source and accepting open source contributions.
We the open source community get the fruits what we paid tax dollars to produce, and the government doesn't waste money on redundant proprietary code. Everybody wins. Adding bureaucracy to something that is clearly a partnership with the community is just dumb.
Grayson is another great. It is actually just a trailer (~7 minutes) but if you saw this on TV you would not for the life you be able to distinguish it from a multimillion dollar production. Well, except for the tell-tale signs of an original plot. :p
Another great is Batman: Deadend. This is just a short. I believe it was shown firts at last year's ComicCon. Like the previous, there were obviously professionals involved, but it was still just a group of friends who put it together, though they happened to be familiar with production methods. The costumes all incredibe. Don't read this if you don't want me to spoil it, but they have Batman, Alien, and Predator costumes that are not in any way inferior to those you saw in the actual movies (personally, I think the Batman costume is better). The dark cinematography is really good too.
Now, nothing I linked to disputes that producing a film is a major effort that requires a lot of work and resources; but it does dispute the idea that you need millions of dollars to do so.
And I figure it's a good opportunity for some of my fellow slashdotters to enjoy some great movies. :)
Uhh... hydrogen, my friend?
I still maintain that when someone does something applaudable, a better recourse is to in fact applaud them, rather than insult them. When insult someone, they get defensive, and it becomes very difficult to persuade them. That is my experience, anyway.
That's precisely why your voice has come more and more to mean diddly squat in politics. There is no point in trying to win you over, so may as well just ignore you completely.
Punch the monkey!
Well, the chair produces an induction in his... "Ooh! Tingly!!!"
Actually your post was the 10907649th post. Sorry, I'm afraid you were slow.
So use substandard mischief. :p
I'm quite serious really. Unless the serial number is tiled, just print a full border and keep whatever stuff you want to cut out away from the serial.
If it is tiled, you have a number of options. You could script a program to 'split' the image so that you print unmarked bands in multiple runthroughs which eventually add up to a full image. You could offset some unknown amount and then surround the serial number with other sequences to disguise the actual serial (would take some knowledge of how serials are assigned to do a good diguise). Both of those would require a little hardware modification. But if you're printing $100 bills. . . .
Anyway, those are just some ideas off the top of my head. The point is that if people know what they're up against, they can find a workaround. Ideally, these kinds of tricks would be kept secret. In the case, the point is trip up ignorant cons who don't account for something they don't realize exists.
Oh well. This will still nail the 16 year old delingquents who decide to pull a fast one on the clerk at their local grocery store.
Funny, that's exactly what I wanted to do to that book when I had to read it for English class.
But it sure doesn't make it taste any better.
So why not just stay home and let the computers decide?
Personally, I'm inclined to believe that mathematically predicting the decisions of human beings is at least as far off as artificial intelligence.
Sure, part of your vehicle would vaporize and you would probably be centrifuged into your constituent molecules on turns, but just think how fast you could get where you wanted to go?
P.S. I loved "The Incredibles". Thank you pixar for consistently violating the Hollywood tradition of making sucky movies.
Will it run under cygwin? ;)
Untrue. Most teachers at my school put in the minimum 8 that they're at school. They did not have work to do outside of class because they either had us grade our homework and quizzes in class or had the aides (seniors just needing extra credits) grade the work. The only exception was (some of) the honors teachers.
They spend their summers putting together lesson plans,
They spend one summer putting together a lesson plan, and for the rest of their careers that is the lesson plan they use. Heck, you can tell which teachers are longtime veterans by how unreadable their handouts have become.
and usually working other part-time jobs.
Which to me just highlights the aburdity of all the vacation time they get paid for.
Most of them don't get any help, or very limited help, on supplies, and spend hundreds out of their own pockets to pick up expenses the school won't pay for.
On what exactly? Golden protractors?
I never had a teacher buy anything for the class except for sometimes the nice ones would get us candy on halloween or bake us something.
I don't see why you would need to buy anything extra except in lab courses. And the school always covered the expenses for that.
Heck, if the teachers are pressed for supply money, I don't see why they each need they're own personal computer (which they inevitable need the students' help to figure out how to use). My Chem teacher was the only one who put his to good use: he played games on it while we were doing the assigned labs.
If you want better teachers, offer better pay, and better people will apply for the jobs. If we paid high school teachers $50-60k, you'd have some very qualified candidates leaving their current jobs to teach instead.
You'd have some very unqualified candidates pursuing jobs, too. Which is just the status quo. I had some awesome teachers. It is just that they were grossly outnumbered by the incompetents. It still comes back to getting rid of the bad teachers, which is what I'm proposing. You need a system that is high quality first; then you hire competively to fill the positions that are vacated by individuals that don't meet your standards. You don't arbitrarily increase wages and presume because you do so that you are getting your money's worth.
(Headline: "Warplane Strafes a School in New Jersey")
I'm glad to see we're finally getting tough with those failing schools.
$30,000 annual sounds pretty good to me considering they get two weeks off during Christmas, one week off during Easter, and between two and three months off during the summer. And I have rarely had a teacher who bothered to deal with troublesome students his/her self. If the kids don't behave, they call in an administrator to come deal with it. If you still insist that is too low, well, starting salary for teachers is around $20,000 (at least where I live), so don't tell me these people don't know what they're getting into when they decide to become teachers. Fact is, spending on education has increased 85% in the last two decades. Now I ask you, has the quality of education increased that much? I can tell you first hand that the answer is no. And neither is *more* money going to help. What is going to help is making teachers accountable. I had TWO teachers last year where us 'gifted' kids were the ones pulling the class along. The teachers in question did not even understand the material they were covering. We had to explain it to them and to the other kids who were confused by their non-sensical lectures. Once there is a system to identify and fire those kind of teachers, THEN you will see improvement.
Every distro has its fanatics. People like me, we get our jollies out of poking fun at them. It's nothing personal. Besides, there's good reason to move on to making fun of Gentoo users, what with BSD dying and all. . . . ;)
I have proposed a database in which that is the only information kept, and in which that is a strict requirement of keeping the information. So, yes, that would be the only information kept in my hypothetical database.
The government might like to have a repository of names connected with in DNA, but I do not think hypothesizing on the existence of one in which that would not be allowed makes me naive....
In Oberlin, in Loraine County Ohio, voter turnout is exceptional this year. In fact, 117% of eligible voters have registered.
What would you expect voter turnout to actually be, max? Maybe 70% at most? So the rest are fraudulent votes, probably, barring gross errors made elsewhere.
That is just not acceptable.
How few votes determined the last election? In my state, 377 votes called it.
You have two problems when you tolerate voter fraud. The first is that you let criminals choose your candidate. The second is that you turn your candidates in to criminals, as only those politicians willing to pander to fraudulent votes are likely to get elected.
Why?
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
The downside: First, electrophoresis probably doesn't scale well to millions of samples. It's a lot better than the old methods, but not really designed at present for large scale work. Second, getting the DNA is going to annoy voters. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swab cheek cells, but still. Third, while I firmly believe this could eliminate almost all voter fraud, this is not some super-secure database. I mean, what method are you using to check whose dna is allowed in? Probably birth certificate and social security card. And as easy as it is to forge those, so would it be to get into the database.
This is really not so different from how the present internet got started. Will researchers pave the way for a new international fiberoptic network?
My windows box and I would still be trying to negotiate whether it wanted to boot in "Normal Mode" "Safe Mode" "Last Known Good Configuration" or "Sorry, chap, just not gonna happen."
I sure hope my calculations aren't where all that inexplicable "dark matter energy" has been coming from. . .