Isn't this kind of like saying that since undercover cops are allowed to buy drugs in the course of an investigation, you shouldn't be allowed to be arrested for selling drugs (or weapons or whatever) to an undercover cop, since the cop is allowed to purchase it?
"Undercover Cops" are agents of the law-- so yes, they can and should have more leeway to how they investigate suspected crimes than you, I, Media Sentry, or the RIAA have, since none of us are agents of the law.
Yes, Instant Runoff Elections would be very much worth exploring in America, and there are groups pushing heavily for it.
But that great a change to the electoral system would need strong support from both Democratic and Republican politicians to go through. And do you really think that the Dems and the Repubs are going to agree to a sweeping change that hurts both parties?
What Instant Runoff proponents are doing is focusing on local elections. The idea is to get people used to it for smaller elections (where it's easier to get change) in the hope that as it becomes more familiar, there will be greater pressure to implement it on a larger scale.
(Actually, for the presidential election, you have the whole other kettle-of-fish that is the Electoral College to deal with, making it even more intractable to change.)
Query? Would making political speech under creative commons allow people to edit, change, alter and redistribute things without keeping the initial Text intact? I've seen a few transcripts in the AP that clearly were edited, sometimes in favor, or against a particular candidate, and sometimes blatantly wrong.
It would depend on which Creative Commons license was used.
Think about it. By NOT working for them you've possibly denied them the breakthrough in weapons researc hthat would have
Umm...
A) Created a completly non-lethal but entirely effective weapon with no lasting side effects
...Which is then used as an unlawful interrogation device
B) Created a weapon of mass destruction so powerful it would prevent any conflict as long as you are its sole possessor.
*cough*coldwar*cough*
Therefore, you aare responsible for all the deaths that WILL occur resulting from your inaction on weapons reasearch.
Take this with a cubic meter of salt.
Shhh, remember that people born into a safe home and with a high IQ have a God-given right to succeed. Low achievers were surely bad in a former life. Caste^Wclass^Wmeritocracy is just, because it allows the fortunes of the mightiest to trickle down to the ungrateful average.
Please, Sir, can I have some more?
Actually, it's the smart kids that DON'T come from well-off homes with attentive parents that suffer more from lack of attention from the teacher. The well-off kids will get the attention from their parents, and possibly from private tutors, or maybe even private schools. The smart kids who's parents are struggling just to get by, on the other hand, are VERY much in need of the teacher's attention. They are the ones who suffer the most from the "give all the time-attention-resources to the slower kids" policies.
As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too
So, does the "other way round" mean that the FOSS community uses the DRM, but doesn't play by it's rules (i.e. cracks it)? Um, ok, if that's what you want...
We'll have four polarization states H, V (the normal horizontal and vertical polarization) and +, - the 45 degree polarizations. Now Alice produces a stream of H photons and sends them to Bob. Now if Bob measures to see if they're H/V then he will always get H. But if Bob measures if they're +/- he'll get 50/50 + and -, with each individual photon being + or - at random. After measuring +/-, if Bob then remeasures H/V he'll again get 50/50 H and V. The measuring of +/- destroys the knowledge about H/V
What I found fascinating was seeing this demonstrated to the naked eye using polarized lenses.
When two polarized lenses are placed next to each other at 90 degree angles, no light gets through, because all wavelengths are being blocked.
However, putting a third polarized lens between them at 45 degrees to both makes the group transparent again-- like looking through shaded glass, some of the light was blocked, but not all.
Completely counter-intuitive. I'd have had a hard time believing it without playing with the lenses myself.
Like it or not, there is a strong relationship between a parent's income and how well their child performs in school.
So, what does this have to do with stupidity?
Picture two kids, of equal intelligence. One of them has a quiet place to study, knows he'll be able to go to college if he gets in, and doesn't need to worry about things like the rent or what's for dinner. He goes to a well-funded, high-quality public school with highly rated teachers and a good student-to-teacher ratio
The other lives in a tiny, noisy apartment, and doesn't have anywhere else to study, because there's no good library nearby. He comes home from school wondering (as a friend of mine used to do constantly) if he was going to find all their belongings on the street and an eviction notice on the door. Sometimes he gets a decent meal at night, sometimes he doesn't. He has no reason to believe he has any shot at college, no matter what his grades are. Also, he goes to an underfunded, over-crowded inner city school where the teachers are more concerned with not getting shot, and with making sure no one is making drug deals in the back of the classroom, than with teaching.
Again, assuming equal intelligence, and equal effort put into their studies, which of these kids do you think is going to "perform better in school"?
Did it really take 65 physicists to decide that the best way to test gravitational effects was a particle beam deflection? I suppose simplicity is nice, but I honestly expected something more complicated with that many collaborators...
Or maybe the Slashdot summary of the article isn't giving all the details of the experiment?
my relativity teacher told his class, is a function of time: At first, it was non-zero, then people said it was zero, then it might be non-zero after all.
I saw a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results advancing the theory that the age of the universe is a nonlinear function of time.
They plotted on a graph the age people (or rather, western civilization) thought that the age of the universe was at various points in history--when the 19th century geologists said it had to be at least hundreds of thousands of years old, when the 20th century astronomers said that it had to be even older than that-- and plotted the points on a graph. They formed a smooth curve demonstrating (I think) a geometric increase.
So their theory was that, assuming all the age-of-the-universe estimates were correct, that means the beginning of the universe is moving backwards in time, away from us. In 1000ad, the universe really was 6000 years old, and now it really is 14.5 billion years old, and in another century, it will probably be in the trillions of years old
This is ridiculous. Blocking spam is not so impossible as to warrant outsourcing.
I am sick of IT professionals outsourcing their tasks because they lack the talent to implement solutions on their own. Either swim with the big fish or get out of the pond.
Yeah! And I bet he's not even writing his own OS, but wimping out and using a pre-exiting version of Linux or something. And he's probably using Apache, and not even writing his own web-server. And don't get me started so-called-geeks today who can't even be bothered to write their own kernal!
Running a business is about more than posturing for macho geek cred. Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that doing it yourself is the most effective or cost-efficient solution.
Um, Hello? diagnostic procedure. QA. Reading only, no writing. And yes, in that instance it did need to be run on the Live server, though I'm not going to bother going in to why. If I had been modifying the database, then heck yeah I would have done it differently.
It amazes me that without knowing anything about our database, what we are using it for, or the script in question, you feel qualified to say how read-only scripts should or should not be run.
Out of curiosity why was the process running under your account to begin with? I would think it would be good practice to have any kind of critical processes running on an account which is not connected to any particular individual for just such cases as yours.
The process wasn't critical-- it was a diagnostic script in order to get detailed answers to a couple of questions a product manager had sent me. I had to run it on the live version of the product to be sure I was getting current results. Normally the process would have run about three hours, and killing it wouldn't have caused any problems. Deleting the account without killing the process... that turned out to be another story.
...an email routine (which is used in about 90% of our web applications) with a hard-coded user/password which belongs to an account the owner of which has been gone from the company for almost three years now.
Kind of frightening how common that kind of thing is, isn't it.?
When I was laid off from a previous job-- they cut off my server access immediately. Though it wasn't necessary in my case, it certainly makes sense as a basic policy when letting someone go.
EXCEPT for the fact that they didn't bother to check for running processes first. Completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be laid off, I had kicked of an elaborate SQL script on the live server just before my boss called me into his office. They killed my account with this script still running-- oops. A friend of mine who was still at the company said that the resulting zombie crashed the main Oracle server, requiring a reboot, three days after I left.
So the "safe" choice of immediately removing access caused a major crash, while the "dangerous" choice of not removing access would have caused no problem whatsoever. (I'd say something about irony, but I don't want to kick off a debate on the word's meaning and whether it applies...)
how about if the little guy writes software, and everyone who buys it goes straight to ebay and resells it, without uninstalling...
then the little guy is out of business...
Um, where are you getting the "without uninstalling"? That has nothing to do with this case or TFA.
This court case says that if I buy a copy of Windows Office and decide I don't like it, that I can uninstall it and sell it to someone else. Previously, software companies had been trying to claim that even after uninstalling the software and destroying every backup copy, you still couldn't sell the original CDs.
So you're advocating sending a mission to the moon that is 100% self-sufficient in every way from the time the ship first touches down, bringing everything needed for settlement setup and complete self-sufficiency in a single trip?
Good luck with that.
Oh, and if you do figure out how to do that-- others will figure out how to copy you, so your claim won't be undisputed regardless.
Not only that, but even if the supervisor does decide to keep you, the tenor of the working relationship has changed, and not for the better.
(and if you're working relationship with your boss is already so bad that you don't care if it gets a little worse, then I can guarantee that the "or else" form of salary negotiation won't work in the first place.)
You won't quite be trusted-- which makes you less likely to end up on high profile projects, and makes you less attractive for promotion.
Another option: I was able to donate an ancient, not-great-when-it-was-new lap-top to the local community center.
It was virtually useless to me, but they loved it. Some of the kids they work with are very techie-inclined, but their families can't afford even one computer. The center has computers that they can use, but of course they can't let the kids do anything that might mess them up. So an anchient, free, laptop was just the thing. First the some of the kids had fun figuring out how to work the Linux. And then since it was so old, they could let the kids who loved to tinker with things go to town on it, without worrying that they might break it. Great fun was had by all.
I thought it was the drones that could only mate once, but the queen bees weren't under that restriction? Or am I getting that mixed up with some other insect?
(as an aside, speaking of only mating once: I remember reading that the female preying-mantis eating her mate's head thing was debunked: it turns out the researcher who discovered the phenomena was was keeping his mantises in starvation conditions. Apparently, when they are not starving to death, they don't resort to cannibalism.)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this kind of like saying that since undercover cops are allowed to buy drugs in the course of an investigation, you shouldn't be allowed to be arrested for selling drugs (or weapons or whatever) to an undercover cop, since the cop is allowed to purchase it?
"Undercover Cops" are agents of the law-- so yes, they can and should have more leeway to how they investigate suspected crimes than you, I, Media Sentry, or the RIAA have, since none of us are agents of the law.
Yes, Instant Runoff Elections would be very much worth exploring in America, and there are groups pushing heavily for it.
But that great a change to the electoral system would need strong support from both Democratic and Republican politicians to go through. And do you really think that the Dems and the Repubs are going to agree to a sweeping change that hurts both parties?
What Instant Runoff proponents are doing is focusing on local elections. The idea is to get people used to it for smaller elections (where it's easier to get change) in the hope that as it becomes more familiar, there will be greater pressure to implement it on a larger scale.
(Actually, for the presidential election, you have the whole other kettle-of-fish that is the Electoral College to deal with, making it even more intractable to change.)
Query? Would making political speech under creative commons allow people to edit, change, alter and redistribute things without keeping the initial Text intact? I've seen a few transcripts in the AP that clearly were edited, sometimes in favor, or against a particular candidate, and sometimes blatantly wrong.
It would depend on which Creative Commons license was used.
...I gaurentee that will render the problem moot.
Umm...
A) Created a completly non-lethal but entirely effective weapon with no lasting side effects...Which is then used as an unlawful interrogation device
B) Created a weapon of mass destruction so powerful it would prevent any conflict as long as you are its sole possessor.*cough*coldwar*cough*
Therefore, you aare responsible for all the deaths that WILL occur resulting from your inaction on weapons reasearch. Take this with a cubic meter of salt.Actually, it's the smart kids that DON'T come from well-off homes with attentive parents that suffer more from lack of attention from the teacher. The well-off kids will get the attention from their parents, and possibly from private tutors, or maybe even private schools. The smart kids who's parents are struggling just to get by, on the other hand, are VERY much in need of the teacher's attention. They are the ones who suffer the most from the "give all the time-attention-resources to the slower kids" policies.
So, does the "other way round" mean that the FOSS community uses the DRM, but doesn't play by it's rules (i.e. cracks it)? Um, ok, if that's what you want...
What I found fascinating was seeing this demonstrated to the naked eye using polarized lenses.
When two polarized lenses are placed next to each other at 90 degree angles, no light gets through, because all wavelengths are being blocked.
However, putting a third polarized lens between them at 45 degrees to both makes the group transparent again-- like looking through shaded glass, some of the light was blocked, but not all.
Completely counter-intuitive. I'd have had a hard time believing it without playing with the lenses myself.
So, what does this have to do with stupidity?
Picture two kids, of equal intelligence. One of them has a quiet place to study, knows he'll be able to go to college if he gets in, and doesn't need to worry about things like the rent or what's for dinner. He goes to a well-funded, high-quality public school with highly rated teachers and a good student-to-teacher ratio
The other lives in a tiny, noisy apartment, and doesn't have anywhere else to study, because there's no good library nearby. He comes home from school wondering (as a friend of mine used to do constantly) if he was going to find all their belongings on the street and an eviction notice on the door. Sometimes he gets a decent meal at night, sometimes he doesn't. He has no reason to believe he has any shot at college, no matter what his grades are. Also, he goes to an underfunded, over-crowded inner city school where the teachers are more concerned with not getting shot, and with making sure no one is making drug deals in the back of the classroom, than with teaching.
Again, assuming equal intelligence, and equal effort put into their studies, which of these kids do you think is going to "perform better in school"?
Interesting-- that is surprising.
Or maybe the Slashdot summary of the article isn't giving all the details of the experiment?
Nah, that's crazy talk. ;')
I saw a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results advancing the theory that the age of the universe is a nonlinear function of time.
They plotted on a graph the age people (or rather, western civilization) thought that the age of the universe was at various points in history--when the 19th century geologists said it had to be at least hundreds of thousands of years old, when the 20th century astronomers said that it had to be even older than that-- and plotted the points on a graph. They formed a smooth curve demonstrating (I think) a geometric increase.
So their theory was that, assuming all the age-of-the-universe estimates were correct, that means the beginning of the universe is moving backwards in time, away from us. In 1000ad, the universe really was 6000 years old, and now it really is 14.5 billion years old, and in another century, it will probably be in the trillions of years old
(I love the Journal of Irreproducible Results!)
The "properties" she mentioned were
Would you care to enlighten us either
Yeah! And I bet he's not even writing his own OS, but wimping out and using a pre-exiting version of Linux or something. And he's probably using Apache, and not even writing his own web-server. And don't get me started so-called-geeks today who can't even be bothered to write their own kernal!
Running a business is about more than posturing for macho geek cred. Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that doing it yourself is the most effective or cost-efficient solution.
Um, Hello? diagnostic procedure. QA. Reading only, no writing. And yes, in that instance it did need to be run on the Live server, though I'm not going to bother going in to why. If I had been modifying the database, then heck yeah I would have done it differently.
It amazes me that without knowing anything about our database, what we are using it for, or the script in question, you feel qualified to say how read-only scripts should or should not be run.
no problem.
Out of curiosity why was the process running under your account to begin with? I would think it would be good practice to have any kind of critical processes running on an account which is not connected to any particular individual for just such cases as yours.
The process wasn't critical-- it was a diagnostic script in order to get detailed answers to a couple of questions a product manager had sent me. I had to run it on the live version of the product to be sure I was getting current results. Normally the process would have run about three hours, and killing it wouldn't have caused any problems. Deleting the account without killing the process... that turned out to be another story.
...an email routine (which is used in about 90% of our web applications) with a hard-coded user/password which belongs to an account the owner of which has been gone from the company for almost three years now.
Kind of frightening how common that kind of thing is, isn't it.?
When I was laid off from a previous job-- they cut off my server access immediately. Though it wasn't necessary in my case, it certainly makes sense as a basic policy when letting someone go.
EXCEPT for the fact that they didn't bother to check for running processes first. Completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be laid off, I had kicked of an elaborate SQL script on the live server just before my boss called me into his office. They killed my account with this script still running-- oops. A friend of mine who was still at the company said that the resulting zombie crashed the main Oracle server, requiring a reboot, three days after I left.
So the "safe" choice of immediately removing access caused a major crash, while the "dangerous" choice of not removing access would have caused no problem whatsoever. (I'd say something about irony, but I don't want to kick off a debate on the word's meaning and whether it applies...)
how about if the little guy writes software, and everyone who buys it goes straight to ebay and resells it, without uninstalling...
then the little guy is out of business...
Um, where are you getting the "without uninstalling"? That has nothing to do with this case or TFA.
This court case says that if I buy a copy of Windows Office and decide I don't like it, that I can uninstall it and sell it to someone else. Previously, software companies had been trying to claim that even after uninstalling the software and destroying every backup copy, you still couldn't sell the original CDs.
So you're advocating sending a mission to the moon that is 100% self-sufficient in every way from the time the ship first touches down, bringing everything needed for settlement setup and complete self-sufficiency in a single trip?
Good luck with that.
Oh, and if you do figure out how to do that-- others will figure out how to copy you, so your claim won't be undisputed regardless.
Not only that, but even if the supervisor does decide to keep you, the tenor of the working relationship has changed, and not for the better.
(and if you're working relationship with your boss is already so bad that you don't care if it gets a little worse, then I can guarantee that the "or else" form of salary negotiation won't work in the first place.)
You won't quite be trusted-- which makes you less likely to end up on high profile projects, and makes you less attractive for promotion.
Another option: I was able to donate an ancient, not-great-when-it-was-new lap-top to the local community center.
It was virtually useless to me, but they loved it. Some of the kids they work with are very techie-inclined, but their families can't afford even one computer. The center has computers that they can use, but of course they can't let the kids do anything that might mess them up. So an anchient, free, laptop was just the thing. First the some of the kids had fun figuring out how to work the Linux. And then since it was so old, they could let the kids who loved to tinker with things go to town on it, without worrying that they might break it. Great fun was had by all.
I thought it was the drones that could only mate once, but the queen bees weren't under that restriction? Or am I getting that mixed up with some other insect?
(as an aside, speaking of only mating once: I remember reading that the female preying-mantis eating her mate's head thing was debunked: it turns out the researcher who discovered the phenomena was was keeping his mantises in starvation conditions. Apparently, when they are not starving to death, they don't resort to cannibalism.)
I hadn't heard that about bees. Do they mate with the drones, or reproduce via parthenogenesis?
Ah, thanks. That makes sense :)