Wait until all devices are modular via a mesh network, like with Wireless USB or Bluetooth. Then your convergence device will be distributed throughout your body and will be composed of a number of dedicated devices. How cool would that be?
What a lot of people don't realise about Starship Troopers(movie) was that it was actually written to satirize the book and the whole idea that the ideal society is one in which class stratification is enforced through military service. The book was about Heinlein's ideal society, while the movie was about tearing it apart by pointing out everything that could go wrong with his society. It seems like such an "off" movie precisely because it's supposed to give you that feeling that something is wrong with their way of life.
You've just outlined the major reason that scientific programming is not done under Windows. When you're relying on your system to stay online for 3 days while it's compiling or running a simulation, you don't use something that crashes all the time or will restart itself or prompts you for updates, or may even interrupt whatever it is you're doing. The reason my school has a *nix lab is because we use it for scientific programming. It's not something the IT department seems to care about. We wouldn't even think of writing anything truly important for Windows.
Why not go to school for business and work on the game while getting a minor or second major in Computer Science? If it's that big of a motivator for you, the sky's the limit.
How does watermarking remove functionality from a product? You can copy the DVD all you want, go through the analog hole, whatever. Hell, you could post your entire library on bittorrent. The only thing watermarking does is allow for a convenient method of tracking you should you actually use the technology to violate someone's copyright.
This is definitely an acceptable compromise between copyright holders wanting control and the purchaser of a copy of a work wanting control. I'd stand behind watermarking because it restores good faith and trust to the system, which is what I'm really complaining about whenever I bitch about DRM. I just want the copyright holder to trust me so that I don't have to deal with their rights "management." If I wanted their management I would've hired one of them as a consultant.
What the watermark does is skip all the easily broken DRM and go straight to a method by which the copy's origins can be determined. This returns some form of personal accountability to the process of piracy.
To the GP and anyone else who suggests that watermarking is unacceptable because it also reduces functionality, I've got a question. How, exactly, does a watermark with no other DRM prevent you from doing whatever you want with what you buy?
At least you don't have to crawl through internet message boards looking for rumors. I really wish the denizens would take a hint and color the rumor text red so that I can go down to Kuzunoha and tell him I want that one spread without worrying about whether it's really a rumor.
Maybe my gym teachers were a lot better than yours. They cared that we weren't performing, but they weren't total dicks about it. If it makes you feel any better, I can't do a mile in anything under 10 minutes.
Wow, your experience in school is completely different from mine. I really enjoyed the physical conditioning classes that I took in High School even though I'm a nerd. It helped that I wasn't the only nerd in the class. The teachers were all really cool people, too, and they recognized the value of effort since it was a class. Maybe they weren't insulting you but rather trying to push you to go farther. It's been my experience that that's how a lot of the more "manly" men bond, by "giving each other shit." And you know what they say. "No pain, no gain."
I was really upset that my counselor made me waive the second semester of conditioning.
You're making the pretty big assumption that they haven't had their internet "problem" remedied before. Have you ever been to your local library? You can get unfiltered internet access there for whatever you want it for. It's not like it's completely unavailable to anyone who can't afford a DSL line.
I'd wager that these people need television more than the 56k internet that they'd likely be getting at home anyway since it's a perfectly legitimate way to keep up with national and local events. People used it for 40 years before the internet came out.
Besides, have you ever tried surfing the internet on 56k? Everything loads a bunch of high-bandwidth flash ads that curtail your ability to get any information in a reasonable amount of time.
Which would be true except for all the Zork references in Geek culture.
Case in point:
It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
How much of Geek culture refers to pong for inside jokes or shared experiences/insights? Just because something popularized something else doesn't mean that it had cultural significance. A good many movies are popular, but few, if any, actually have lasting cultural significance. Casablanca was one. It's been several decades since that movie was made, yet there are still people who will catch the reference when I say "Dammit Ilsa, you'd better get on that plane, or you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday."
The criterion for the list isn't just that it is a piece of culture. The criterion for the list is that it expanded our culture, or that it made a deep and lasting contribution to who we are and how we identify with each other, or that it expanded our expectations for a video game. Did pong do any of those things?
Color me skeptical, but I don't think you're entirely accurate. I've been skeptical in global warming posts on Slashdot before, and there's usually at least one guy who suggests that I'm in denial and that it's people like me who are going to destroy the planet. I'm interested in the truth, and I'm not above listening to someone who suggests that this is part of a natural cycle. Think of our mean temperature like the angle of a pendulum. As we add more CO2 to the air it acts to drive the pendulum of temperature. That is not what is in question. What is in question is the extent of the driving.
That is where I'm skeptical, but I usually get accused of ignoring the whole issue. Thankfully I haven't been referred to in the same light as a holocaust denier.
Global warming is an extremely emotionally charged issue for a lot of people because of the impact it will have on our future if we do nothing and it turns out the driving from the CO2 results in us cooking the civilization off the face of the planet.
I was talking about ethics, not laws. What is legal and what is ethical are somewhat distant subsets, and what is legal and ethical is a small union of those two subsets. It would be unethical, for example, to show all my friends surveillance pictures of me in the newspaper office taking out a personal ad for a gay lover because I may not want my friends to know that. If they discover it in the newspaper then it's my own damn fault and a completely different story.
It's kind of a grey area in the interface between public services and private life. It's perfectly legal for credit card companies to sell your information to other companies for advertising, but it's not entirely ethical.
I would like to add that it was probably unethical to use a video surveillance tape to attempt to out the blogger when that was not the purpose of the tape. There's a difference between setting up a camera for the express purpose of identifying your customers and setting up a camera to keep your advertising department safe. He wasn't informed that he was being taped for the purpose of outing him. It's reasonable for me to assume that unless there's some pressing criminal investigation that video surveillance tapes will not be used to out me in any way.
To clarify, it would've been okay to identify the blogger if he had made threats or attempted to assault the advertising people. The purpose of the surveillance camera is to identify people who are obviously engaged in criminal activity. I admit that there's a case to be made for it being ethical as a case of public interest, though. Feel free to argue.
She's liable because she left the classroom. Had she maintained better control of her students and moved them away from the computer while calling the main office from her in-class phone she wouldn't have had such liability. I don't know how her room was set up, but if she had simply turned the monitor away from them it would have worked to absolve her of some responsibility. She could have threatened the first person to try to look at the screen while she was blocking it with a lengthy trip to the main office. She didn't. If the monitor broke while she was moving it at least she was trying to protect her charges.
The first rule of classroom management is that you NEVER leave your students unsupervised, not even in an emergency. You are their legal guardian while they're in your classroom.
Because Dick Cheney doesn't have a massive conflict of interest over what nation building company we use in Iraq? I'll give you a hint. THe name starts with an "H" and ends with "alliburton."
Average starting salary in the state of Washington is at about 30k/year. We happen to be 22nd in the nation in terms of salary for teachers, too. As I understand it, that's about 3k above the poverty line.
Of course what a lot of people don't understand is that teachers also get June, July, and August to themselves, as well as getting medical/dental insurance, and retirement plans. It's really not about the money at all. Going into teaching is about having the ability to make a difference in people's lives while still earning a living and being able to do what you really want to do with your off time. That is more than a lot of people get making 50k+ a year.
Overclocking was taping the second pin on your Slot 1 Celeron to disable the clock multiplier lock and then ramping it from 333 to 450 mHz. I remember when AGP and ATX came out and we had to upgrade our boxes to get decent video cards.
Yeah, because 3rd graders are such an excellent metric for the direction of the whole school system. Just out of curiosity, what "levels" are poor? Are they not meeting your expectations, or are they not performing well on some standardized test? If it's a test, what makes you think that that's an accurate metric? If it's your expectations, you're entitled to them.
The reason a lot of elementary and middle school students are bad at math and writing is that their teachers absolutely hate those subjects. If you interview most of the students getting degrees in Elementary Education you'd notice that they're almost all doing it because they can't do math worth crap. The math requirement for elementary ed. in Washington is appalingly low, and the people taking the requirement find it to be difficult. They then take this hatred and fear of math into the classrooms where it's taught to our children. These children graduate years later still thinking they can't do math and furthermore thinking that it's okay because nobody else can either.
Talk to some of the parents of kids who say they can't do math. The parents reinforce this attitude that math is scary and difficult. By the time these children go to high school they're ready to do the absolute minimum required to pass standardized tests.
If you're able to see your door, your mirror is not adjusted correctly. You're supposed to adjust until you're just outside of the range where you would see your door.
Because it is a distinction which allows you to rest easy at night knowing that when you steal someone else's license keys, it's not your actions that caused their problems.
Yeah, it's really Microsoft's fault that the pirates' resort to brute forcing keys. Not the pirates' responsibility at all because it wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't any protection whatsoever.
Seriously? I feel just as awful smashing the alarm clock as I would smashing the puppy. It's insane, I know, but that alarm clock has feelings too, and it's just trying to do its job which is to annoy the hell out of me.
And don't take it to mean that I wouldn't feel anything smashing the puppy, because that's not what I'm trying to imply at all.
What if non-living things are no different than things?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait until all devices are modular via a mesh network, like with Wireless USB or Bluetooth. Then your convergence device will be distributed throughout your body and will be composed of a number of dedicated devices. How cool would that be?
What a lot of people don't realise about Starship Troopers(movie) was that it was actually written to satirize the book and the whole idea that the ideal society is one in which class stratification is enforced through military service. The book was about Heinlein's ideal society, while the movie was about tearing it apart by pointing out everything that could go wrong with his society. It seems like such an "off" movie precisely because it's supposed to give you that feeling that something is wrong with their way of life.
If I had mod points, you would be +5 funny.
You've just outlined the major reason that scientific programming is not done under Windows. When you're relying on your system to stay online for 3 days while it's compiling or running a simulation, you don't use something that crashes all the time or will restart itself or prompts you for updates, or may even interrupt whatever it is you're doing. The reason my school has a *nix lab is because we use it for scientific programming. It's not something the IT department seems to care about. We wouldn't even think of writing anything truly important for Windows.
Why not go to school for business and work on the game while getting a minor or second major in Computer Science? If it's that big of a motivator for you, the sky's the limit.
How does watermarking remove functionality from a product? You can copy the DVD all you want, go through the analog hole, whatever. Hell, you could post your entire library on bittorrent. The only thing watermarking does is allow for a convenient method of tracking you should you actually use the technology to violate someone's copyright.
This is definitely an acceptable compromise between copyright holders wanting control and the purchaser of a copy of a work wanting control. I'd stand behind watermarking because it restores good faith and trust to the system, which is what I'm really complaining about whenever I bitch about DRM. I just want the copyright holder to trust me so that I don't have to deal with their rights "management." If I wanted their management I would've hired one of them as a consultant.
What the watermark does is skip all the easily broken DRM and go straight to a method by which the copy's origins can be determined. This returns some form of personal accountability to the process of piracy.
To the GP and anyone else who suggests that watermarking is unacceptable because it also reduces functionality, I've got a question. How, exactly, does a watermark with no other DRM prevent you from doing whatever you want with what you buy?
God, that was funny. Thank you AC, I can always count on you for a good laugh.
At least you don't have to crawl through internet message boards looking for rumors. I really wish the denizens would take a hint and color the rumor text red so that I can go down to Kuzunoha and tell him I want that one spread without worrying about whether it's really a rumor.
BTW, did you hear that Trish sells ice cream?
Maybe my gym teachers were a lot better than yours. They cared that we weren't performing, but they weren't total dicks about it. If it makes you feel any better, I can't do a mile in anything under 10 minutes.
Wow, your experience in school is completely different from mine. I really enjoyed the physical conditioning classes that I took in High School even though I'm a nerd. It helped that I wasn't the only nerd in the class. The teachers were all really cool people, too, and they recognized the value of effort since it was a class. Maybe they weren't insulting you but rather trying to push you to go farther. It's been my experience that that's how a lot of the more "manly" men bond, by "giving each other shit." And you know what they say. "No pain, no gain."
I was really upset that my counselor made me waive the second semester of conditioning.
You're making the pretty big assumption that they haven't had their internet "problem" remedied before. Have you ever been to your local library? You can get unfiltered internet access there for whatever you want it for. It's not like it's completely unavailable to anyone who can't afford a DSL line.
I'd wager that these people need television more than the 56k internet that they'd likely be getting at home anyway since it's a perfectly legitimate way to keep up with national and local events. People used it for 40 years before the internet came out.
Besides, have you ever tried surfing the internet on 56k? Everything loads a bunch of high-bandwidth flash ads that curtail your ability to get any information in a reasonable amount of time.
Which would be true except for all the Zork references in Geek culture.
Case in point:
It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
How much of Geek culture refers to pong for inside jokes or shared experiences/insights? Just because something popularized something else doesn't mean that it had cultural significance. A good many movies are popular, but few, if any, actually have lasting cultural significance. Casablanca was one. It's been several decades since that movie was made, yet there are still people who will catch the reference when I say "Dammit Ilsa, you'd better get on that plane, or you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday."
The criterion for the list isn't just that it is a piece of culture. The criterion for the list is that it expanded our culture, or that it made a deep and lasting contribution to who we are and how we identify with each other, or that it expanded our expectations for a video game. Did pong do any of those things?
Color me skeptical, but I don't think you're entirely accurate. I've been skeptical in global warming posts on Slashdot before, and there's usually at least one guy who suggests that I'm in denial and that it's people like me who are going to destroy the planet. I'm interested in the truth, and I'm not above listening to someone who suggests that this is part of a natural cycle. Think of our mean temperature like the angle of a pendulum. As we add more CO2 to the air it acts to drive the pendulum of temperature. That is not what is in question. What is in question is the extent of the driving.
That is where I'm skeptical, but I usually get accused of ignoring the whole issue. Thankfully I haven't been referred to in the same light as a holocaust denier.
Global warming is an extremely emotionally charged issue for a lot of people because of the impact it will have on our future if we do nothing and it turns out the driving from the CO2 results in us cooking the civilization off the face of the planet.
I was talking about ethics, not laws. What is legal and what is ethical are somewhat distant subsets, and what is legal and ethical is a small union of those two subsets. It would be unethical, for example, to show all my friends surveillance pictures of me in the newspaper office taking out a personal ad for a gay lover because I may not want my friends to know that. If they discover it in the newspaper then it's my own damn fault and a completely different story.
It's kind of a grey area in the interface between public services and private life. It's perfectly legal for credit card companies to sell your information to other companies for advertising, but it's not entirely ethical.
I agree with you.
I would like to add that it was probably unethical to use a video surveillance tape to attempt to out the blogger when that was not the purpose of the tape. There's a difference between setting up a camera for the express purpose of identifying your customers and setting up a camera to keep your advertising department safe. He wasn't informed that he was being taped for the purpose of outing him. It's reasonable for me to assume that unless there's some pressing criminal investigation that video surveillance tapes will not be used to out me in any way.
To clarify, it would've been okay to identify the blogger if he had made threats or attempted to assault the advertising people. The purpose of the surveillance camera is to identify people who are obviously engaged in criminal activity. I admit that there's a case to be made for it being ethical as a case of public interest, though. Feel free to argue.
She's liable because she left the classroom. Had she maintained better control of her students and moved them away from the computer while calling the main office from her in-class phone she wouldn't have had such liability. I don't know how her room was set up, but if she had simply turned the monitor away from them it would have worked to absolve her of some responsibility. She could have threatened the first person to try to look at the screen while she was blocking it with a lengthy trip to the main office. She didn't. If the monitor broke while she was moving it at least she was trying to protect her charges.
The first rule of classroom management is that you NEVER leave your students unsupervised, not even in an emergency. You are their legal guardian while they're in your classroom.
Because Dick Cheney doesn't have a massive conflict of interest over what nation building company we use in Iraq? I'll give you a hint. THe name starts with an "H" and ends with "alliburton."
And that is why I'm going into the profession.
Average starting salary in the state of Washington is at about 30k/year. We happen to be 22nd in the nation in terms of salary for teachers, too. As I understand it, that's about 3k above the poverty line.
Of course what a lot of people don't understand is that teachers also get June, July, and August to themselves, as well as getting medical/dental insurance, and retirement plans. It's really not about the money at all. Going into teaching is about having the ability to make a difference in people's lives while still earning a living and being able to do what you really want to do with your off time. That is more than a lot of people get making 50k+ a year.
Overclocking was taping the second pin on your Slot 1 Celeron to disable the clock multiplier lock and then ramping it from 333 to 450 mHz. I remember when AGP and ATX came out and we had to upgrade our boxes to get decent video cards.
I for one welcome our new email mapping overlords!
Yeah, because 3rd graders are such an excellent metric for the direction of the whole school system. Just out of curiosity, what "levels" are poor? Are they not meeting your expectations, or are they not performing well on some standardized test? If it's a test, what makes you think that that's an accurate metric? If it's your expectations, you're entitled to them.
The reason a lot of elementary and middle school students are bad at math and writing is that their teachers absolutely hate those subjects. If you interview most of the students getting degrees in Elementary Education you'd notice that they're almost all doing it because they can't do math worth crap. The math requirement for elementary ed. in Washington is appalingly low, and the people taking the requirement find it to be difficult. They then take this hatred and fear of math into the classrooms where it's taught to our children. These children graduate years later still thinking they can't do math and furthermore thinking that it's okay because nobody else can either.
Talk to some of the parents of kids who say they can't do math. The parents reinforce this attitude that math is scary and difficult. By the time these children go to high school they're ready to do the absolute minimum required to pass standardized tests.
If you're able to see your door, your mirror is not adjusted correctly. You're supposed to adjust until you're just outside of the range where you would see your door.
Because it is a distinction which allows you to rest easy at night knowing that when you steal someone else's license keys, it's not your actions that caused their problems.
Yeah, it's really Microsoft's fault that the pirates' resort to brute forcing keys. Not the pirates' responsibility at all because it wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't any protection whatsoever.
Seriously? I feel just as awful smashing the alarm clock as I would smashing the puppy. It's insane, I know, but that alarm clock has feelings too, and it's just trying to do its job which is to annoy the hell out of me.
And don't take it to mean that I wouldn't feel anything smashing the puppy, because that's not what I'm trying to imply at all.
What if non-living things are no different than things?