Doesn't this mean that the file of your passwords effectively is stored everywhere that quepasa can be installed? In other words, someone who can guess your passphrase can gain all of your passwords without ever touching your own system. This is a direct consequence of the "ease of use" feature that gives you access to your passwords anywhere.
You don't have to do the random creation of passwords...
A corollary to 1. If the password is generated algorithmicly and strictly as a function of your passphrase and the site you visit, then it is that much farther from being random.
3. When it comes time to change passwords, just change the passphrase.
Others have noted that changing your passphrase invalidates all of your passwords. Alternatively, you could still use the old passphrase for passwords you don't want to change, but over time, it seems to me that this turns into one passphrase per login, which nearly defeats the original purpose.
4. Encryption software tends to be hard to use, and to use it, you have to understand quite a bit about encryption. (What's a [list of public key specific terms]?)
I don't think this issue is limited to public key systems. It's true of all facets of password-based authentication. Few outside the industry (and that means most people) understand, or want to understand, even the basics until they're burned at least once. Most sites that most people use don't use public key systems anyway; this isn't the problem that consumer password manager programs like quepasa are trying to solve.
Beyond the above, how can a quepasa style algorithm deal with sites that require a very limited character set (some banks still base their Web authentication on the same 4-digit PIN that works over the phone or at the ATM) versus sites that support long passwords over a large character set where you would want to use the best possible password?
It seems to me that you give up quite a bit of security even over a typical consumer password management program (and they have their own problems) to use quepasa.
The most consistently bad tech support experiences for me are the increasing number of automated ones. The first response always suggests a fix that my report says I have already tried, or that is obviously inapplicable (because some keywords matched). That means I don't even reach the least experienced human serving on the front lines until step 2.
The most fun I've had was when I tried to return a pair of Sony external speakers to Fry's, claiming correctly that they were incompatible with Windows. Why? Well, these speakers had a special power-saving feature that shut themselves off when they were idle for a short time. As a result, they took a short delay to power themselves back up when they detected a signal again. The power-up time was longer than most error beeps, causing them to be lost. The tech was dumbfounded, but fortunately took them in return.
This is why essays SHOULD be subjectively graded instead of objectively graded. You need to take into account the writing abilities of the student and determine if it's a good or a bad paper based on what they're capable of in addition to technical aspects of the paper.
And would you pay more for a contractor who clearly worked harder and longer but didn't complete what you asked for, versus one who came in and did meet the specification in 1/2 the time? Include brain surgeon or oncologist among the the class of contractors. I certainly wouldn't pay more. So I'd expect their grades to be directly proportional to their results, not their efforts, however sincere.
My father told me about an elementary school teacher he had. He got a B+ on a paper, but wanted an A. So he spent a lot more effort on the next paper, but got a B-. He asked the teacher why, on a paper she agreed was better then the previous one, and she said, "Well, I expect more of you now.". How supremely motivating.
Or, a TA I had in a programming class taught by a famous professor. The weekly assignment included writing a review of another team's previous week's project. Our team did a full QA effort on another team's work, including running test cases through it in addition to a code review. We got a B. I looked over the reviews that got A's, and found that they were all superficial. Most didn't bother to run any tests at all, and many were heavy on style (as in tabs versus spaces) versus substance. So the next week we wrote a superficial review in a fraction of the time and got an A. Again, how supremely motivating.
The two best classes I took, by different professors, had the same grading algorithm: after getting a project approved for reasonable scope at the beginning of the term, you got an A if you finished coding and it worked, a B if you finished coding and were close to working but not done, and a C if you were done or close to done with coding but not working at all. A far more rational and realistic grading scheme.
Isn't this why there are remedial and accelerated english classes? To take into account the different levels of intelligence in students? If you took an 'A' paper from a remedial class, it's quite likely that it would be a 'D' in the accelerated class.
If it doesn't already, I would expect a service like this will eventually include plagiarism detection, due to marketing pressure if nothing else. This is something that human graders do, at least over the space of papers they grade and works they remember.
But if plagiarism detection is added, then the grading service would have to make and retain some encoding of each graded paper, a derivative work, in its database.
Once that happens, the grading service also becomes subject to all of the issues already raised with services like TurnItIn.com, already discussed here.
I also found this comment from ETS's site rather strange, to say the least:
It is important to remember that e-rater is an embedded real-time application; it is not software.
I don't know about that. It seems to me that you could have a Turing test for origami: slip a piece of paper through a chute in a door, ask for a specific fold (crane; carp, note the caption: One uncut square!), wait for the result to slide back to you, then judge the results.
This is a very interesting article. There is already a lot of work on mathematical and computational origami, some elsewhere on the site linked above. The robot is a nice extension. It will be even more interesting as more restrictions are removed over time.
But then, since I'm not registered there (and WP does require registration now), I was only able to reach the article from the link on/.'s home page, and not from the same link at the top of the thread's page.
I think it's much harder to deal with the kinds of issues in the article; issues that most people have little or no direct experience with (Who's been to the moon or Mars or even JPL? Who's actually been to Area 51?). I think it is much more productive addressing issues that either come up in everyday life, or that can be demonstrated directly (hands-on) in a classroom. Then use these to build a good scientific skepticism.
Plenty of pseudo-science can be debunked by properly teaching probability. There are plenty of fun, hands-on demonstrations related to false coincidences. But these are all too rare. I remember a middle school math class argument among several of the top students in the class in a top district. They spent much of the class arguing over whether the probability of getting 2 heads from independently flipping two coins is 1/4 or 1/3, and never came to a resolution. It would have been simple enough for the teacher to run the experiment. My point is that if it's this difficult to get across even a simple result among bright students, then the lesson plan is wrong to begin with, and it certainly doesn't scale up to the more interesting fallacies related to coincidence.
There are plenty more demonstrations that can debunk ESP. Imagine a teacher giving a mind reading demonstration, then showing how it was done, and afterward explaining how the pros do it.
As for the "face" on Mars, the article starts to suggest some of this by bringing in examples closer to "home": local clouds and mountains that look like objects but are much more clearly coincidence.
And another avenue would be to critically examine in class some commercials or other easily accessible and refutable examples of TV propaganda. The goal would be to break down the idea that any media source is unconditionally reliable.
But as long as the gambling industry continues to grow, and particularly those games with fixed odds against the players like the slots and lotteries, I see little hope of wide success.
Yes, many of the formats with problems have been discussed here several times before. But I find the following quote from the article especially disturbing and annoying (emphasis added):
DVDs are a bit tougher than CDs in the sense that the data layer (or layers -- some discs have two) is sandwiched in the middle of the disc between two layers of plastic. But this structure causes problems of its own, especially in early DVDs. The glue that holds the layers together can lose its grip, making the disc unreadable at least in parts.
Users that bend a DVD to remove it from a hard-gripping case are practically begging for this problem, because flexing the disc puts strain on the glue.
So those extremely annoying DVD cases are actually designed to reduce DVD lifetimes and make us re-purchase the same license all that much sooner.
The article also says this (referring to the scientists) [emphasis added]:
They also advised hospitals and residential facilities with immune-compromised residents to use disposable shower curtains.
Kelly and Pace emphasized that the bacteria they found on their shower curtains normally don't cause problems for humans. "We don't want to freak people out, because we're really only talking about immune-compromised people," Kelley said.
For the rest of us, it's clean the curtain every few weeks, or consider glass, they say.
So taking in the whole article, and especially the quotes by the scientists, I don't see anything to worry about for otherwise healthy people. I certainly don't find anything alarmist in the scientists' statements.
An FBI guidance document to its field offices acknowledges that the Patriot Act "greatly broadened" FBI authority to use these letters in relevant investigations. But the document says that FBI supervisors must exercise care in their use, particularly because that part of the Patriot Act is set to expire in 2005 unless renewed by Congress.
tells me that the supervisors are being told to be nice particularly to achieve renewal of the act (after which, what then?), not particularly because it's the right and constitutional thing to do.
... or trucks and chewing gum
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
Yes, just think of the accidents that could happen if they hire Buzz and Mr. Potatohead to manage the heavy lifting!
I have a November 1970 issue of National Geographic with an article entitled "Computer Helps Scholars Re-create an Egyptian Temple" by Ray Winfield Smith that describes something very similar. A summary is embedded here.
The article says that they had to deal with as many as 30,000 pieces, many of which had disappeared over time. They shot B&W pictures of the pieces at the rate of 400/day, and then created punched cards (and then tape image) for each picture. Each card had the piece number and codes for various attributes (such as paint color, figures, hieroglyphs) of the piece. They could then search for other pieces that matched attributes of a subject piece. IBM supplied them access to a computer.
BTW, the issue's headline article was "Behold the Computer Revolution", a nice historical piece now.
Perhaps, but thanks to the way patents work, using it on a PocketPC or mouse driven PC is different 'enough'.
I understand this "just add 'on the Internet' to a previous patent and it's a new one" argument, but I think there is more to it in this wristwatch example.
Microsoft, specifically, and many others have been pushing the convergence of many consumer devices by pushing (or proposing to push) their OSes into them. Wristwatches were specifically mentioned as a potential platform for Windows CE at its introduction, and Linux is already there. They have been telling us, for years, to think of these as just alternate instances of the same thing, and that this is where the industry would be headed.
At the very least, I think this greatly dilutes any recent argument that it's a novel concept to apply any specific wristwatch concepts to any other computing platforms (or vice-versa). More than that, I think it totally invalidates such an argument.
And in this particular case, it's one of the very companies that has been strongly pushing the convergence for a long time that is now trying to patent one of the things they have been "converging".
Even on desktop systems, this is old. Plenty of games have used this technique for a long time. Golf, for instance, in which your swing is determined by how long you hold your click.
If OO just burned up an extra 10 minutes a day for my users by being buggy or quirky, that would cost me $60,000 per user(users bill at $150/hour)!
Over what time frame? If it's a year, then it's $6,500 per user. Alternatively, a 9.2 year upgrade cycle is mighty long in this business. I think some of the points raised by others here are at least as large as this, in both directions.
And maybe more cynically, but not out of line with the thinking at some service firms I've seen, how is it that you lose this money? That time's billable.
Re:Does NASA have too much money?
on
Our Man In Black
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, how realistic are these goals, and how realistic are they (NASA) being in pursuing them?
Let's start with the lunar landings in the late 60's. As I recall, there was concern about bringing back some lunar germ (however unlikely), so they quarantined the crew -- after they exited from the craft, walked in the open (with lunar-exposed gear), and only then entered the quarantine trailer.
Next, how sterile is the stuff we've been sending various places? In various documentaries and reports, there are people in bunny suits capable of keeping dust to a minimum, but hardly capable of preventing a wide range of organisms or even interesting large molecules. Have they been doing / are they doing significantly more than this?
Next, recent articles posted here and elsewhere have raised the probability by quite a bit that nature (via asteroid impacts) is already mixing up the material between us and Mars, including possibly the same interesting organisms and molecules. So the "contamination" may have already occurred naturally.
Next, there are already interesting isolated pockets here that have evolved independently for a very long time, with various amounts of isolation. Ebola, say, on one end and stuff buried deep in Antarctica or near undersea vents on the other end. How closely are the PPO's efforts associated with any efforts associated with these?
Exactly; totally agree. Of course, it goes for any other subject as well.
I think the biggest advantage that parents have over teachers is that they are there in the less formal moments when something sparks their child's interest, and can enlarge on it right then and there, in a much more interesting way. I think it is absolutely vital to make use of these opportunities if you're going to get kids to build on their own inate interest in things, and ultimately foster their ability to teach themselves about things they find interesting (and to keep finding things interesting).
No matter how good your kid's school is, they will eventually get an uninspiring teacher who can easily crush their spirit unless they have already become independently inquisitive and driven (I'm thinking of Mr. Cantwell on The Wonder Years, who could turn the most violent and interesting science into a droll monotone). And when this does happen, then provide backup and encouragement.
Here are some examples:
In kindergarten, my daughter's teacher asked them to name the largest number they knew, and my daughter answered a googol. The teacher said no, there was no such number. She came home disappointed. We talked about it at dinner and sent a nice note back to the teacher, referring her to a dictionary and pointing out that it was, in fact, a child who had come up with the name. Lessons learned: my daughter could have confidence in things she knew, even in the face of an unauthoritative authority, and something could be done about it. Everyone learned something.
One good source of inspiration is paradoxes. These get at the heart of a lot of math and science, yet they are inherently interesting. One of the best for me, a good example of making use of the moment, was when my daughter was watching me play Zork Zero. In one of the puzzles, an executioner will hang you if he can grant your last request, otherwise he will behead you. Getting past the cartoon violence, my daughter caught the paradox and solution, and kept a copy of the narrative on her wall for years.
Another good source of ideas is in several of Feynman's popular books in which he discusses his father's influence on him. Once again, many of these were by making the best use of the moment.
I was referring to the quoted text in the parent. In other words, if Gates were to make a similar statement about a set of Microsoft-only products (and services), then I think people would take it as far more than a statement of arrogance (and have done so). Sorry if that wasn't clear. (And it's late here too...)
slashdot keeps every post you make... What is the difference?
The difference is that you know up-front that your post (not an e-mail) to/. is going to a public forum more or less permanently, and is easily searchable by the world from day 1. That's simply not the case for most sorts of e-mail.
Do you really compose every e-mail as if it were immediately and highly public when the practical probability of exposure is actually far lower? And if you don't, do you really want to move such e-mails into a system that may greatly increase the probability?
Yours is a thoughtful comment; I'm not sure I buy it yet.
... the group would remain active for another year to push for its recommendations.
Am I missing something, or is this fairly unique? Most if not all such ad hoc fact finding groups at this level end up getting disbanded immediately after their report is finished. In fact, there is often great political pressure (in the form of initial budget or time constraints) to wind these up. Any follow-through is left to politicians or the subject organization, often without further review. Here, the group apparently has the charter to continue, to pursue its recommendations.
Of course, this group has international scope. I don't think the two are a coincidence.
And, being on the other coast, I remain amused at how our power problems were largely ignored on the national level, despite covering many western states, until yet another failure closer to eastern leaders reminded them, at least for a few days, that the entire system needs review. I'm not holding my breath, though. (In fact, I recently upgraded my home UPS).
Slashdot Mirror
1. There's no file stored anywhere ...
Doesn't this mean that the file of your passwords effectively is stored everywhere that quepasa can be installed? In other words, someone who can guess your passphrase can gain all of your passwords without ever touching your own system. This is a direct consequence of the "ease of use" feature that gives you access to your passwords anywhere.
You don't have to do the random creation of passwords ...
A corollary to 1. If the password is generated algorithmicly and strictly as a function of your passphrase and the site you visit, then it is that much farther from being random.
3. When it comes time to change passwords, just change the passphrase.
Others have noted that changing your passphrase invalidates all of your passwords. Alternatively, you could still use the old passphrase for passwords you don't want to change, but over time, it seems to me that this turns into one passphrase per login, which nearly defeats the original purpose.
4. Encryption software tends to be hard to use, and to use it, you have to understand quite a bit about encryption. (What's a [list of public key specific terms]?)
I don't think this issue is limited to public key systems. It's true of all facets of password-based authentication. Few outside the industry (and that means most people) understand, or want to understand, even the basics until they're burned at least once. Most sites that most people use don't use public key systems anyway; this isn't the problem that consumer password manager programs like quepasa are trying to solve.
Beyond the above, how can a quepasa style algorithm deal with sites that require a very limited character set (some banks still base their Web authentication on the same 4-digit PIN that works over the phone or at the ATM) versus sites that support long passwords over a large character set where you would want to use the best possible password?
It seems to me that you give up quite a bit of security even over a typical consumer password management program (and they have their own problems) to use quepasa.
The most consistently bad tech support experiences for me are the increasing number of automated ones. The first response always suggests a fix that my report says I have already tried, or that is obviously inapplicable (because some keywords matched). That means I don't even reach the least experienced human serving on the front lines until step 2.
The most fun I've had was when I tried to return a pair of Sony external speakers to Fry's, claiming correctly that they were incompatible with Windows. Why? Well, these speakers had a special power-saving feature that shut themselves off when they were idle for a short time. As a result, they took a short delay to power themselves back up when they detected a signal again. The power-up time was longer than most error beeps, causing them to be lost. The tech was dumbfounded, but fortunately took them in return.
This is why essays SHOULD be subjectively graded instead of objectively graded. You need to take into account the writing abilities of the student and determine if it's a good or a bad paper based on what they're capable of in addition to technical aspects of the paper.
And would you pay more for a contractor who clearly worked harder and longer but didn't complete what you asked for, versus one who came in and did meet the specification in 1/2 the time? Include brain surgeon or oncologist among the the class of contractors. I certainly wouldn't pay more. So I'd expect their grades to be directly proportional to their results, not their efforts, however sincere.
My father told me about an elementary school teacher he had. He got a B+ on a paper, but wanted an A. So he spent a lot more effort on the next paper, but got a B-. He asked the teacher why, on a paper she agreed was better then the previous one, and she said, "Well, I expect more of you now.". How supremely motivating.
Or, a TA I had in a programming class taught by a famous professor. The weekly assignment included writing a review of another team's previous week's project. Our team did a full QA effort on another team's work, including running test cases through it in addition to a code review. We got a B. I looked over the reviews that got A's, and found that they were all superficial. Most didn't bother to run any tests at all, and many were heavy on style (as in tabs versus spaces) versus substance. So the next week we wrote a superficial review in a fraction of the time and got an A. Again, how supremely motivating.
The two best classes I took, by different professors, had the same grading algorithm: after getting a project approved for reasonable scope at the beginning of the term, you got an A if you finished coding and it worked, a B if you finished coding and were close to working but not done, and a C if you were done or close to done with coding but not working at all. A far more rational and realistic grading scheme.
Isn't this why there are remedial and accelerated english classes? To take into account the different levels of intelligence in students? If you took an 'A' paper from a remedial class, it's quite likely that it would be a 'D' in the accelerated class.
This sounds like social promotion to me.
If it doesn't already, I would expect a service like this will eventually include plagiarism detection, due to marketing pressure if nothing else. This is something that human graders do, at least over the space of papers they grade and works they remember.
But if plagiarism detection is added, then the grading service would have to make and retain some encoding of each graded paper, a derivative work, in its database.
Once that happens, the grading service also becomes subject to all of the issues already raised with services like TurnItIn.com, already discussed here.
I also found this comment from ETS's site rather strange, to say the least:
Especially when very old song lyrics like "Barney Google with his goo goo googly eyes" are paired with recent images like Gates [reg req'd] and even Google-logoed Dilbert peering through the OOs.
But then, IANAL.
I don't know about that. It seems to me that you could have a Turing test for origami: slip a piece of paper through a chute in a door, ask for a specific fold (crane; carp, note the caption: One uncut square!), wait for the result to slide back to you, then judge the results.
This is a very interesting article. There is already a lot of work on mathematical and computational origami, some elsewhere on the site linked above. The robot is a nice extension. It will be even more interesting as more restrictions are removed over time.
How handy!
But then, since I'm not registered there (and WP does require registration now), I was only able to reach the article from the link on /.'s home page, and not from the same link at the top of the thread's page.
How interesting!
I think it's much harder to deal with the kinds of issues in the article; issues that most people have little or no direct experience with (Who's been to the moon or Mars or even JPL? Who's actually been to Area 51?). I think it is much more productive addressing issues that either come up in everyday life, or that can be demonstrated directly (hands-on) in a classroom. Then use these to build a good scientific skepticism.
Plenty of pseudo-science can be debunked by properly teaching probability. There are plenty of fun, hands-on demonstrations related to false coincidences. But these are all too rare. I remember a middle school math class argument among several of the top students in the class in a top district. They spent much of the class arguing over whether the probability of getting 2 heads from independently flipping two coins is 1/4 or 1/3, and never came to a resolution. It would have been simple enough for the teacher to run the experiment. My point is that if it's this difficult to get across even a simple result among bright students, then the lesson plan is wrong to begin with, and it certainly doesn't scale up to the more interesting fallacies related to coincidence.
There are plenty more demonstrations that can debunk ESP. Imagine a teacher giving a mind reading demonstration, then showing how it was done, and afterward explaining how the pros do it.
As for the "face" on Mars, the article starts to suggest some of this by bringing in examples closer to "home": local clouds and mountains that look like objects but are much more clearly coincidence.
And another avenue would be to critically examine in class some commercials or other easily accessible and refutable examples of TV propaganda. The goal would be to break down the idea that any media source is unconditionally reliable.
But as long as the gambling industry continues to grow, and particularly those games with fixed odds against the players like the slots and lotteries, I see little hope of wide success.
Yes, many of the formats with problems have been discussed here several times before. But I find the following quote from the article especially disturbing and annoying (emphasis added):
So those extremely annoying DVD cases are actually designed to reduce DVD lifetimes and make us re-purchase the same license all that much sooner.
The article also says this (referring to the scientists) [emphasis added]:
For the rest of us, it's clean the curtain every few weeks, or consider glass, they say.
So taking in the whole article, and especially the quotes by the scientists, I don't see anything to worry about for otherwise healthy people. I certainly don't find anything alarmist in the scientists' statements.
Absent the pre-PATRIOT safeguards, yes.
Further, this quote from the referenced article:
tells me that the supervisors are being told to be nice particularly to achieve renewal of the act (after which, what then?), not particularly because it's the right and constitutional thing to do.
Yes, just think of the accidents that could happen if they hire Buzz and Mr. Potatohead to manage the heavy lifting!
Nice to see this technique advance.
I have a November 1970 issue of National Geographic with an article entitled "Computer Helps Scholars Re-create an Egyptian Temple" by Ray Winfield Smith that describes something very similar. A summary is embedded here.
The article says that they had to deal with as many as 30,000 pieces, many of which had disappeared over time. They shot B&W pictures of the pieces at the rate of 400/day, and then created punched cards (and then tape image) for each picture. Each card had the piece number and codes for various attributes (such as paint color, figures, hieroglyphs) of the piece. They could then search for other pieces that matched attributes of a subject piece. IBM supplied them access to a computer.
BTW, the issue's headline article was "Behold the Computer Revolution", a nice historical piece now.
Perhaps, but thanks to the way patents work, using it on a PocketPC or mouse driven PC is different 'enough'.
I understand this "just add 'on the Internet' to a previous patent and it's a new one" argument, but I think there is more to it in this wristwatch example.
Microsoft, specifically, and many others have been pushing the convergence of many consumer devices by pushing (or proposing to push) their OSes into them. Wristwatches were specifically mentioned as a potential platform for Windows CE at its introduction, and Linux is already there. They have been telling us, for years, to think of these as just alternate instances of the same thing, and that this is where the industry would be headed.
At the very least, I think this greatly dilutes any recent argument that it's a novel concept to apply any specific wristwatch concepts to any other computing platforms (or vice-versa). More than that, I think it totally invalidates such an argument.
And in this particular case, it's one of the very companies that has been strongly pushing the convergence for a long time that is now trying to patent one of the things they have been "converging".
Exactly. I've thought much the same thing. Something like a groklaw that can collect and focus these things, expand on them, and summarize results.
Even on desktop systems, this is old. Plenty of games have used this technique for a long time. Golf, for instance, in which your swing is determined by how long you hold your click.
Nevertheless, interesting to see that Valenti is personally backing up his published stance on the FCC's decency crackdown.
... which I've always thought was a toddler guard in The Village for kids!
Over what time frame? If it's a year, then it's $6,500 per user. Alternatively, a 9.2 year upgrade cycle is mighty long in this business. I think some of the points raised by others here are at least as large as this, in both directions.
And maybe more cynically, but not out of line with the thinking at some service firms I've seen, how is it that you lose this money? That time's billable.
Seriously, how realistic are these goals, and how realistic are they (NASA) being in pursuing them?
Let's start with the lunar landings in the late 60's. As I recall, there was concern about bringing back some lunar germ (however unlikely), so they quarantined the crew -- after they exited from the craft, walked in the open (with lunar-exposed gear), and only then entered the quarantine trailer.
Next, how sterile is the stuff we've been sending various places? In various documentaries and reports, there are people in bunny suits capable of keeping dust to a minimum, but hardly capable of preventing a wide range of organisms or even interesting large molecules. Have they been doing / are they doing significantly more than this?
Next, recent articles posted here and elsewhere have raised the probability by quite a bit that nature (via asteroid impacts) is already mixing up the material between us and Mars, including possibly the same interesting organisms and molecules. So the "contamination" may have already occurred naturally.
Next, there are already interesting isolated pockets here that have evolved independently for a very long time, with various amounts of isolation. Ebola, say, on one end and stuff buried deep in Antarctica or near undersea vents on the other end. How closely are the PPO's efforts associated with any efforts associated with these?
Exactly; totally agree. Of course, it goes for any other subject as well.
I think the biggest advantage that parents have over teachers is that they are there in the less formal moments when something sparks their child's interest, and can enlarge on it right then and there, in a much more interesting way. I think it is absolutely vital to make use of these opportunities if you're going to get kids to build on their own inate interest in things, and ultimately foster their ability to teach themselves about things they find interesting (and to keep finding things interesting).
No matter how good your kid's school is, they will eventually get an uninspiring teacher who can easily crush their spirit unless they have already become independently inquisitive and driven (I'm thinking of Mr. Cantwell on The Wonder Years, who could turn the most violent and interesting science into a droll monotone). And when this does happen, then provide backup and encouragement.
Here are some examples:
I was referring to the quoted text in the parent. In other words, if Gates were to make a similar statement about a set of Microsoft-only products (and services), then I think people would take it as far more than a statement of arrogance (and have done so). Sorry if that wasn't clear. (And it's late here too...)
slashdot keeps every post you make... What is the difference?
The difference is that you know up-front that your post (not an e-mail) to /. is going to a public forum more or less permanently, and is easily searchable by the world from day 1. That's simply not the case for most sorts of e-mail.
Do you really compose every e-mail as if it were immediately and highly public when the practical probability of exposure is actually far lower? And if you don't, do you really want to move such e-mails into a system that may greatly increase the probability?
Yours is a thoughtful comment; I'm not sure I buy it yet.
Am I missing something, or is this fairly unique? Most if not all such ad hoc fact finding groups at this level end up getting disbanded immediately after their report is finished. In fact, there is often great political pressure (in the form of initial budget or time constraints) to wind these up. Any follow-through is left to politicians or the subject organization, often without further review. Here, the group apparently has the charter to continue, to pursue its recommendations.
Of course, this group has international scope. I don't think the two are a coincidence.
And, being on the other coast, I remain amused at how our power problems were largely ignored on the national level, despite covering many western states, until yet another failure closer to eastern leaders reminded them, at least for a few days, that the entire system needs review. I'm not holding my breath, though. (In fact, I recently upgraded my home UPS).