actually, this weekend there was a bit of a large gathering at MIT, known as Steer Roast...
we mentioned also inviting the time travelers to Roast, but then we realized that if people from the future showed up, none of us would either notice or care.
well, if you assume that foreign/international students have to acquire student visas in order to come and study here, then they already are fairly effectively tracked, since the INS has been part of the dept. of homeland security for several years now. from what i've heard/observed, they're pretty strict on issuing them, and not much less lax on keeping track of them afterwards.
i'm slightly confused by their spurious argument; i understand how transfers would show up as dropouts in one column, but shouldn't they then show up as transfers in another? they say something about how students then end up not appearing to graduate from any institution...if these are school-reported statistics, then the school they graduate from would report that, right? i feel like i'm missing something here.
Unfortunately, in the USA, we have cheapened citizenship so much that there is almost no difference in privileges and rights claimed by non-citizens and a citizens in the USA.
except for that whole voting business, unless i missed something?
oh, and terrorism isn't the exclusive domain of non-citizens. a couple of fellas from middle america managed to take down the oklahoma city building, for one. terrorism is the business of folks who dislike the administration or the country and want to do something substantial about it.
feel free to start persecuting immigrants and see how fast your economy tanks. turning your back on the traditional strength of the US (attracting those looking for a better life and willing to work hard for it) is a great idea.
yeesh. i should be smacked for feeding the troll...
i saw that! oh, wow. it was...honestly, not that terrible, and i was half there for the music anyway. i think the best part was when they take on the FVB (future villain band) and end up throwing steve tyler (yes, this *is* aerosmith) off a platform to his death. there are maybe 10 lines of dialogue in the whole thing; it's all music numbers. steve martin, alice cooper, and george burns (he dances!) also appear.
saw cannibal: the musical a few weeks back, it was awesome! and by awesome, i mean entertaining enough to make up for the cheapo effects, the ridiculous songs, the scene where the guy just *would not* die, and the incredibly implausible ending. definitely up there as a film so bad it's good.
dude...agreed, so agreed. jesus christ vampire slayer was hilarious in some parts, it was so bad. for an even worse movie, not even preferable to the hollywood blockbusters, try "the hunger", with david bowie and susan sarandon. somehow, they manage to make a godawfully slow, boring, "i want to claw my eyes out" movie *despite* lesbian vampire sex scenes between sarandon and a decently hot blonde. now that, my friends, is talent.
I heard from a friend that knows someone that knows someone else,
This friend of yours, does he have any other interesting news? Like, that Prince Nkrumah Fubar of Nigeria has $314 million dollars he'll split with you if you send him $8000?
the tech dept at my school decided to forbid IM programs when they issued everyone with laptops because, of course, they're for academic use only! never mind that since everyone had a laptop, we were now forbidden to have personal computers in our rooms...so anyway, no IM for us. but there was net send, which they couldn't or didn't disable, so they simply forbade any of us to use it. we all ignored it, they attempted to crack down on it, etc. etc. so one evening during study hours, i needed the math hw from my friend and was waiting for her to send me back. ta-da, in walks my counselor. as jenny's msg pops up on my screen.
her: what's that? me: it's a message from jenny. her: huh? me: i needed the math hw, so i net sent her about it. her: what? me: *sigh* we had that meeting, remember, when you said anyone using net send would get detention? her: oh! is that what that is? how do you use it? me: *proceed to show her the command prompt, etc.* her: how interesting. ok, well...stop in my office tomorrow to discuss your punishment. me:.... *she leaves, i close my door and indulge in some loud and creative swearing*
so that's the story of how i showed my idiot bitch counselor how i was breaking the rules, and how i got detention for using net send.
Astounding. Last night marked the beginning of my campaign to introduce my Trekkie boyfriend, who is most notably a fan of DS9, to the wonderful world of Babylon 5. He intends to make me pay for it by addicting me to West Wing, but oh well. Though I doubt anything really substantial will happen, given the way the TV industry works, if it did...well, I know I'd watch it, at least for a while. And I don't watch TV any more.
Now, if only we could have another chance at Crusade...
Sadly, not so much. I've been to a few events there (granted, somewhat extreme circumstances, like Dyke Ball) and the average amount of clothing was a G-string and some duct tape...Not all of them are idiots and sluts, but enough are (and come over to prove it every weekend) that it's not totally the product of jealousy. Of course, to be fair, I'll have to point out that there's a significant number of the same sort in the MIT population, which is probably the root of most of the frustration. I'm not particularly interested in the frat guys they date, but I know some people who are, and they tend to be a trifle more strident. The rest of us just laugh.
Speaking of WPI, though, that's interesting/useful to know; my brother's starting there this fall. I wonder if much has changed...
What do your parents have to do with it? If they don't trust you to be able to take care of yourself in an urban environment, then they shouldn't let you out of the house anyway. College students are adults and can take care of themselves. I don't know what sort of wimps you know, but I wander back to campus from Central Square at 3am at least 3 times a week. The area is really not that sketchy, so long as you keep your eyes open, don't wander down every dark alley, and if you're really worried, take some self-defense classes. If you want to see bad neighborhoods, I can point you to some truly sketchy places; Cambridge is nowhere near that bad.
Ain't that the truth. Speaking as an MIT girl, dating an MIT guy, who knows many similar couples...as well as a few MIT girl-Harvard guy couples, interestingly. As for the frat boys...there's a reason the Wellesley bus is called "the fuck truck."
Here's an article covering some concerns over the proximity cards; sketchy on encryption details, however. http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N62/62card. 62n.html
I'm not sure exactly which product MIT uses, but here's the security page from the company that makes them. Again, sketchy on details. http://indala.com/products/flexpass/flex secur.html
Actually...when word came out that all new IDs would be RFID enabled and the swipe-card readers would be phased out in favor of the proximity detectors, some students were decidedly less than pleased. Mostly it was b/c of the worry that it would be easier for unscrupulous folk to harvest ID numbers and forge their own. The world view that students have access to most places, any time, hasn't really changed; what's changed is an administration that is increasingly viewing hacking specifically and deviant attitudes in general as Not Good Things. But yes, we will likely soon find a way to get around the inconveniences.
I think Stallman is overreacting a trifle, but I understand his concern, and I agree that there's no particular reason the Stata center should have any more stringent security than the rest of the campus buildings. Put the valuable electronics behind locked doors, but let the building as a whole stay open; I don't usually have any reason to be there, but I appreciate walking through b/c it's pretty inside. I don't want to have to worry about whether I've got my ID on me every time I feel like getting inside out of the rain. The rest of campus isn't like that, and there's no reason Stata should be, so far as I can tell. If all of campus were supertight and secure, like some other schools I've visited, then this wouldn't occasion any comment, but it's precisely b/c MIT is by and large a v. open and self-regulating place that this is weird.
Actually, it's the environment he's in that does, in fact, make this a big deal...the majority of MIT buildings have comparatively little security. Labs, of course, generally require a key or an ID with clearance for the newer ones, but the buildings that they're in are open access, at least during the day, and because everything's connected, it's definitely not hard to get inside most of main campus. I can't think of any reason they would make the entire building restricted, but then again, I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with the layout...unless there's large amounts of electronics without at least one door between them and the entrances, it shouldn't be a problem.
One of the consequences of MIT's having several buildings of notable architecture (the Media Lab, Kresge Auditorium, the Chapel, Baker House, Simmons) is that people actually come to look and study them. Hell, I was sitting in the courtyard a few weekends ago when some business-suit fellas walked through to admire the facade ("Just look at those cornices!") I laughed at them, but it's too bad no one will be able to walk into Stata and do the same thing. I'll admit, the outside is a little odd but the inside is fairly nifty, I think it makes a little more sense.
I'm going to chime in with my non-CS-loving.02... So I'm two weeks away from finishing MIT's intro CS class, 6.001, which is taught in Scheme. Submitted my last project 5 minutes ago:) I think it's a good choice for this class b/c it's easy to get started without having to memorize a lot of little details, so students can start programming immediately. As we cover more topics, however, it's capable of illustrating those just as well. For higher-level classes, I have no idea how useful or otherwise Scheme would be. And granted, my only other experience is a bad attempt to teach myself C once upon a time...so Scheme is decent. But for the love of god, find a better editor than Edwin. And they don't rely purely on Scheme; the CS lab course definitely uses Java, for one.
of course I name mine! for network purposes, I give them respectable names: my laptop is Red Robot C-63 (crush all hu-mans!) and my desktop is Trogdor (burninate!). in daily conversation, however, my laptop is known as "special cadet," a moniker inherited from its high-school-issued predecessor, a dell which was infinitely flakier than my current ibm r40. I refer to it as such because it probably got slapped as often as the more "special" of the fellows at the military school across campus...
If someone had made me learn C, how to use a command line, and how a computer works, I'd be eternally grateful. As it is, I don't have the time right now to teach myself or find someone who can, so I'll remain ignorant. Which is too bad, because I can think of nifty things I'd like to try if I had that knowledge, but that opportunity is denied me, because I'm lacking in the basic knowledge. That's what school is about: first, give them the basics in everything, or at least enough of a taste to present them with an idea of what can be done. Then, more in-depth training allows them to go further with what they find interesting.
If the majority of people don't need math, the majority of people also don't need to read literature or learn to write an analytical essay...they'll never ever have to do that in their jobs. But, we teach them that because of the underlying concept of critical thinking and analysis, which is also a major part of math: reading story problems and distilling that text into equations that sum up the situation, for example. It's a different flavor of application and uses a different specific skill set, but it is the same thing.
Brief tangent: I'm reminded of CS Lewis' Narnia book The Horse and His Boy, in which the land of the Calormenes is described as a place where instead of essays, students are taught to tell stories, which is a far better idea because, as the author says, everyone always wants to hear stories, but as far as I know, no one ever wants to read the essays...
And as for problem solving, life is a problem. Math points out (or should, at least) that usually several different methods exist for approaching and solving a problem, and all eventually arrive at an answer, albeit with different amounts of effort along the way and some with interesting side effects too. I think that's a lesson more applicable to life than how to write a haiku.
Dude!
I thought I was the only one who'd ever seen Square One...no one else I knew watched it. I had no idea of the Dragnet connection, being too young...
Slashdot Mirror
actually, this weekend there was a bit of a large gathering at MIT, known as Steer Roast... we mentioned also inviting the time travelers to Roast, but then we realized that if people from the future showed up, none of us would either notice or care.
well, if you assume that foreign/international students have to acquire student visas in order to come and study here, then they already are fairly effectively tracked, since the INS has been part of the dept. of homeland security for several years now. from what i've heard/observed, they're pretty strict on issuing them, and not much less lax on keeping track of them afterwards.
i'm slightly confused by their spurious argument; i understand how transfers would show up as dropouts in one column, but shouldn't they then show up as transfers in another? they say something about how students then end up not appearing to graduate from any institution...if these are school-reported statistics, then the school they graduate from would report that, right? i feel like i'm missing something here.
Unfortunately, in the USA, we have cheapened citizenship so much that there is almost no difference in privileges and rights claimed by non-citizens and a citizens in the USA.
except for that whole voting business, unless i missed something?
oh, and terrorism isn't the exclusive domain of non-citizens. a couple of fellas from middle america managed to take down the oklahoma city building, for one. terrorism is the business of folks who dislike the administration or the country and want to do something substantial about it.
feel free to start persecuting immigrants and see how fast your economy tanks. turning your back on the traditional strength of the US (attracting those looking for a better life and willing to work hard for it) is a great idea.
yeesh. i should be smacked for feeding the troll...
i saw that! oh, wow. it was...honestly, not that terrible, and i was half there for the music anyway. i think the best part was when they take on the FVB (future villain band) and end up throwing steve tyler (yes, this *is* aerosmith) off a platform to his death. there are maybe 10 lines of dialogue in the whole thing; it's all music numbers. steve martin, alice cooper, and george burns (he dances!) also appear.
saw cannibal: the musical a few weeks back, it was awesome! and by awesome, i mean entertaining enough to make up for the cheapo effects, the ridiculous songs, the scene where the guy just *would not* die, and the incredibly implausible ending. definitely up there as a film so bad it's good.
dude...agreed, so agreed. jesus christ vampire slayer was hilarious in some parts, it was so bad. for an even worse movie, not even preferable to the hollywood blockbusters, try "the hunger", with david bowie and susan sarandon. somehow, they manage to make a godawfully slow, boring, "i want to claw my eyes out" movie *despite* lesbian vampire sex scenes between sarandon and a decently hot blonde. now that, my friends, is talent.
I heard from a friend that knows someone that knows someone else,
This friend of yours, does he have any other interesting news? Like, that Prince Nkrumah Fubar of Nigeria has $314 million dollars he'll split with you if you send him $8000?
the tech dept at my school decided to forbid IM programs when they issued everyone with laptops because, of course, they're for academic use only! never mind that since everyone had a laptop, we were now forbidden to have personal computers in our rooms...so anyway, no IM for us. but there was net send, which they couldn't or didn't disable, so they simply forbade any of us to use it. we all ignored it, they attempted to crack down on it, etc. etc. so one evening during study hours, i needed the math hw from my friend and was waiting for her to send me back. ta-da, in walks my counselor. as jenny's msg pops up on my screen.
....
her: what's that?
me: it's a message from jenny.
her: huh?
me: i needed the math hw, so i net sent her about it.
her: what?
me: *sigh* we had that meeting, remember, when you said anyone using net send would get detention?
her: oh! is that what that is? how do you use it?
me: *proceed to show her the command prompt, etc.*
her: how interesting. ok, well...stop in my office tomorrow to discuss your punishment.
me:
*she leaves, i close my door and indulge in some loud and creative swearing*
so that's the story of how i showed my idiot bitch counselor how i was breaking the rules, and how i got detention for using net send.
Astounding. Last night marked the beginning of my campaign to introduce my Trekkie boyfriend, who is most notably a fan of DS9, to the wonderful world of Babylon 5. He intends to make me pay for it by addicting me to West Wing, but oh well. Though I doubt anything really substantial will happen, given the way the TV industry works, if it did...well, I know I'd watch it, at least for a while. And I don't watch TV any more.
Now, if only we could have another chance at Crusade...
Sadly, not so much. I've been to a few events there (granted, somewhat extreme circumstances, like Dyke Ball) and the average amount of clothing was a G-string and some duct tape...Not all of them are idiots and sluts, but enough are (and come over to prove it every weekend) that it's not totally the product of jealousy. Of course, to be fair, I'll have to point out that there's a significant number of the same sort in the MIT population, which is probably the root of most of the frustration. I'm not particularly interested in the frat guys they date, but I know some people who are, and they tend to be a trifle more strident. The rest of us just laugh.
Speaking of WPI, though, that's interesting/useful to know; my brother's starting there this fall. I wonder if much has changed...
What do your parents have to do with it? If they don't trust you to be able to take care of yourself in an urban environment, then they shouldn't let you out of the house anyway. College students are adults and can take care of themselves. I don't know what sort of wimps you know, but I wander back to campus from Central Square at 3am at least 3 times a week. The area is really not that sketchy, so long as you keep your eyes open, don't wander down every dark alley, and if you're really worried, take some self-defense classes. If you want to see bad neighborhoods, I can point you to some truly sketchy places; Cambridge is nowhere near that bad.
Ain't that the truth. Speaking as an MIT girl, dating an MIT guy, who knows many similar couples...as well as a few MIT girl-Harvard guy couples, interestingly. As for the frat boys...there's a reason the Wellesley bus is called "the fuck truck."
Here's an article covering some concerns over the proximity cards; sketchy on encryption details, however.. 62n.html
x secur.html
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N62/62card
I'm not sure exactly which product MIT uses, but here's the security page from the company that makes them. Again, sketchy on details.
http://indala.com/products/flexpass/fle
Actually...when word came out that all new IDs would be RFID enabled and the swipe-card readers would be phased out in favor of the proximity detectors, some students were decidedly less than pleased. Mostly it was b/c of the worry that it would be easier for unscrupulous folk to harvest ID numbers and forge their own. The world view that students have access to most places, any time, hasn't really changed; what's changed is an administration that is increasingly viewing hacking specifically and deviant attitudes in general as Not Good Things. But yes, we will likely soon find a way to get around the inconveniences.
I think Stallman is overreacting a trifle, but I understand his concern, and I agree that there's no particular reason the Stata center should have any more stringent security than the rest of the campus buildings. Put the valuable electronics behind locked doors, but let the building as a whole stay open; I don't usually have any reason to be there, but I appreciate walking through b/c it's pretty inside. I don't want to have to worry about whether I've got my ID on me every time I feel like getting inside out of the rain. The rest of campus isn't like that, and there's no reason Stata should be, so far as I can tell. If all of campus were supertight and secure, like some other schools I've visited, then this wouldn't occasion any comment, but it's precisely b/c MIT is by and large a v. open and self-regulating place that this is weird.
Actually, it's the environment he's in that does, in fact, make this a big deal...the majority of MIT buildings have comparatively little security. Labs, of course, generally require a key or an ID with clearance for the newer ones, but the buildings that they're in are open access, at least during the day, and because everything's connected, it's definitely not hard to get inside most of main campus. I can't think of any reason they would make the entire building restricted, but then again, I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with the layout...unless there's large amounts of electronics without at least one door between them and the entrances, it shouldn't be a problem.
One of the consequences of MIT's having several buildings of notable architecture (the Media Lab, Kresge Auditorium, the Chapel, Baker House, Simmons) is that people actually come to look and study them. Hell, I was sitting in the courtyard a few weekends ago when some business-suit fellas walked through to admire the facade ("Just look at those cornices!") I laughed at them, but it's too bad no one will be able to walk into Stata and do the same thing. I'll admit, the outside is a little odd but the inside is fairly nifty, I think it makes a little more sense.
I'm going to chime in with my non-CS-loving .02... :) I think it's a good choice for this class b/c it's easy to get started without having to memorize a lot of little details, so students can start programming immediately. As we cover more topics, however, it's capable of illustrating those just as well. For higher-level classes, I have no idea how useful or otherwise Scheme would be. And granted, my only other experience is a bad attempt to teach myself C once upon a time...so Scheme is decent. But for the love of god, find a better editor than Edwin. And they don't rely purely on Scheme; the CS lab course definitely uses Java, for one.
So I'm two weeks away from finishing MIT's intro CS class, 6.001, which is taught in Scheme. Submitted my last project 5 minutes ago
of course I name mine!
for network purposes, I give them respectable names: my laptop is Red Robot C-63 (crush all hu-mans!) and my desktop is Trogdor (burninate!).
in daily conversation, however, my laptop is known as "special cadet," a moniker inherited from its high-school-issued predecessor, a dell which was infinitely flakier than my current ibm r40. I refer to it as such because it probably got slapped as often as the more "special" of the fellows at the military school across campus...
If someone had made me learn C, how to use a command line, and how a computer works, I'd be eternally grateful. As it is, I don't have the time right now to teach myself or find someone who can, so I'll remain ignorant. Which is too bad, because I can think of nifty things I'd like to try if I had that knowledge, but that opportunity is denied me, because I'm lacking in the basic knowledge. That's what school is about: first, give them the basics in everything, or at least enough of a taste to present them with an idea of what can be done. Then, more in-depth training allows them to go further with what they find interesting.
If the majority of people don't need math, the majority of people also don't need to read literature or learn to write an analytical essay...they'll never ever have to do that in their jobs. But, we teach them that because of the underlying concept of critical thinking and analysis, which is also a major part of math: reading story problems and distilling that text into equations that sum up the situation, for example. It's a different flavor of application and uses a different specific skill set, but it is the same thing.
Brief tangent: I'm reminded of CS Lewis' Narnia book The Horse and His Boy, in which the land of the Calormenes is described as a place where instead of essays, students are taught to tell stories, which is a far better idea because, as the author says, everyone always wants to hear stories, but as far as I know, no one ever wants to read the essays...
And as for problem solving, life is a problem. Math points out (or should, at least) that usually several different methods exist for approaching and solving a problem, and all eventually arrive at an answer, albeit with different amounts of effort along the way and some with interesting side effects too. I think that's a lesson more applicable to life than how to write a haiku.
Dude! I thought I was the only one who'd ever seen Square One...no one else I knew watched it. I had no idea of the Dragnet connection, being too young...