The coolest MS activation hack I've seen is for vista. They emulate an OEM bios (usually asus) and install a key that allows the OS not to have to be activated via the internet (lest consumers have to deal with that after buying their new Vista machine). Works flawlessly, well from what I've heard it does. How would I know?
From my understand, and I could quite possibly be wrong here, the DRM they're talking about never touched anything in that situation you described. This is about playing DRMd high def content, usually HD-DVDs, on computers running Vista and having the quality degraded when played over high quality but unprotected (read: DVI) ports (presumably to prevent HD content getting out into the wild, which is so astoundingly naive I'm at a loss to describe it) and that's not what you're doing.
the rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills necessary in mathematics are absolutely essential to an educated person A resounding and absolute "Yes!" on this. No question about it. Eloquently summarized by your final sentence on the underlying goal of all education, "...to learn to think" . On all this we agree, but where we begin to diverge is at the idea that math is a proper and necessary tool to accomplish this for everyone. I simply don't agree with that statement. I, like many others, slogged through four difficult, agonizing years of math education in high school. Those classes, at least as they were taught at my school and when I was being taught there, did no more to teach me "rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills" than any other classes. I was simply memorizing and regurgitating equations and formulas--and very poorly I might add. I believe the highest grade I ever received in one of my math classes was a merciful C-.
The class that came closest to your ideal was my AP Physics course (that did not use calc). This was largely because we had the benefit of a brilliant and qualified instructor who was amazing at taking complex ideas and explaining them in simple and easy to understand ways (and all without us feeling like he was "talking down" to us). He was constantly stepping back from the actual work at hand and showing us how it fit into the logical, natural world at large. His lectures weren't just about learning what we needed to make the school look good on tests, he constantly reaffirmed that it was the process of discovery that was important. He wanted to teach students how to be good scientists, not good test takers.
My point with all this is that "rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills" ARE NOT the exclusive domain of mathematics. If you look, and have the correct approach to teaching the subject, you can find this just about anywhere.
Wow, I actually wasn't aware of that, I don't know anyone who uses MSN (or they do but also use AIM). I know links in Pidgin open just fine in FF after I click them. It sounds like a problem with MSN not honoring the systems default browser setting and just passing the link on to IE to open up regardless of how the user defined that option. That's an MSN problem, not Firefox's fault. I doubt the Mozilla people could fix it even if they wanted to.
I read that same article earlier today. Did you notice the part where Germany and several other countries dropped out too? And the price tag? We could throw that money somewhere else, maybe...hire a few more math and science teachers?
If kids are doing that now, and it was kind of like that for some back when I was in the public education system here in California (which wasn't all that long ago), it's because they're responding to outside pressure to have the highest possible GPA any way they can, no matter what they have to sacrifice--including actually learning anything. I never paid much attention to grades in high school, I took classes that interested me (and admittedly had rather poor attendance for classes that didn't) regardless of how difficult they were even if that meant getting a lower grade. I could have easily gotten a full point higher on my GPA if I had taken "safe" classes.
Some people just don't grok mathematics. I'm one of them. But strangely, I really enjoyed my Physics classes. The sooner you can identify who those kids are, the sooner you can get them learning things they're going to be able to actually absorb and use. Obviously some math is necessary for everyone to learn, the cutoff point is probably around the algebra-precalc area where learning more isn't going to help anyone who isn't considering pursuing a science or engineering degree. When you're talking about advanced math courses like mentioned here, let's keep those classes stocked with students who: 1) actually want to be there and 2) can use this environment to excel and advance there science/math education
The only place where it really looks native is on Linux/BSD/Unix running Gnome. But I thought nothing looks native on Linux;)
Seriously though, FF on XP does a pretty good job of integrating into the OS, things can get a little strange with different themes but the default one matches luna pretty well. The options menu probably strays farthest from looking windows-like but even that is pretty close to what you'd expect to see. On Linux, well we're pretty much used to every program doing its own thing already; just the nature of OSS I suppose.
The wireless works perfectly with <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=19<nobr>7<wbr></wbr></nobr> 102">this</a> (First link in the thread is the deb). Second option listed there uses ndiswrapper and the closed source driver. I use the first one with out any problems, although I've not done any serious testing for range to compare the two and my laptop is only 10ft away from the access point most of the point. Not quite out of the box support, but it's getting there.
I'm typing this on an Acer Aspire 5100 with the same graphics and using Compiz-fusion with most of the plugins enabled. Ubuntu 7.04 has a feature to download and install the needed "restricted" files.
I just found a beat up mini mag with some old stuff of mine. Damn thing still worked too, their durability is legendary. I've also got a burner sitting here not being used. It's not a 16x and the article specifically mentions that, would other speed burners still work? Otherwise I'm going to buy a 16x just to rip out the diode. I don't own a soldering iron (I know, I know turn in my geek card and gun). Guess I'm going to radioshack this weekend. This should be pretty damn fun.
Technically, there are examples of animals using tools. The chimp using the stick to get at termites is the commonly cited one. They even show an ability to select the best stick to use, and modify it to some extent. However, there's a big difference between fishing out termites with a stick, or using a leg bone as a cudgel to challenge a competing tribe for domination of a watering hole, and making things like hand axes, shovels, or bowls. Humans make tools that require many complex steps, most tool users in nature just pick things up off the ground. It's not a binary situation; humans and animals are all on a continuum of technical skill and complexity. Relative distance is what distinguishes us.
...But the value on family has real value as it promotes more kids which promotes larger numbers of people who think like you... Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that this isn't the case. I'm saying that this NEEDS TO CHANGE. If we keep going down that path we're going to live in a world with 10B or more people. Why does it stop at 10B? Because that's about the point where famine, disease, war and genocide will balance out production (give or take some depending on technological advances or other things we can't predict). And then the real fun begins! Population wars. Conflicts over WATER will make this centuries oil conflicts look like a Sunday afternoon in the park. Combine that with the fact that it's nearly possible for any nation state with even a modest amount of money to spend on defense to have a nuclear program and you're going to have the bloodiest period of human history we've ever seen. It's only going to work differently if every culture on earth were to agree, at the same time, to change. This wont happen, we can agree on that at least. So your mind set does fit the (sad) reality of our current world, but damn it we HAVE to try for something better.
PS. From the gist of your original post I'm guessing your(sic) either gay or infertile. Neither, actually.
I said Judeo-Christian tradition because that's what (most) Western society has in common. Doubtless it exists in most of the other religions of the world, including Buddhism and even children raised in Atheist households are taught that this is what's expected of them.
There are scarce few socio-economical problems you could talk about that would not be helped, and many that would be outright eliminated, by a decline and ultimate stabilization of the world population. If you could get the population down to say, 2B or less it would be possible for nearly everyone to live as well as middle class Westerners do today. And the notion that you are unable to make a free choice because of your heritage is laughable, you just don't want to. Pleas understand that I'm not attacking you for this, it's a normal thing to want, but it's only helpful as long as we're still trapped in the farcical rat race with the other cultures and nations of the world, where out producing your enemy with your genetic resources is the goal. I don't accept social Darwinism as an inevitability, and it's certainly not some sort of universal, perfect truth. We can do better. We have a responsibility to better as the only species in history that has had the capacity to.
You mentioned adoption and I'll comment briefly on that. Do you grok how difficult that process is for even stable, successful couples? Now imagine the difficulty for a single man trying to adopt. Hell, it was illegal in certain locals until relatively recently. I know there has been progress made in the last few decades, but it's still incredibly difficult.
I didn't "opt-out" of anything, it just sort of worked out that way. You might as well have a tax system based on height or skin color, makes about as much sense. I'm sure you could find studies saying tall white people do better, society should promote them to have more kids! It wouldn't make me as frustrated if the motivation really was a "greater good" altruism, but I'm suspicious that most of it comes from Judeo-Christian tradition and pure cultural momentum propagating down through the generations by way of self fulfilling laws and various shaping mechanisms such as stigmas and what's considerd "normal". There is a better way.
That's not far from the truth in the US already. It's in our tax structure, insurance, oh and all the wonderful benefits you'll get screwed out of when you're in the military and unmarried. You're pretty much punished for being single, which really sucks for people who aren't ever going to get married.
Strange, were you using 7.04? I remember, back before I reinstalled and went Linux only for this laptop, the default partitioning was setup to shrink my empty space of the windows partition and install Ubuntu on the freed space. Grub set up the dual booting (with Ubuntu as the default option) and both OSs booted and worked perfectly. I found myself booting into Windows less and less and about a month ago did a clean install selecting the second option, "Use entire hard disk."
Anything that takes away functionality like the alcohol detecting system or software locks that limit horsepower or top speed based on car model are bad in my opinion. It seems like a perfect example of (mis)applying technology to solve a social problem. The second system mentioned seems like a good idea because you're providing the driver with useful information, I would prefer maybe an audio alert to the potential strangulation by my seatbelt, but that's just me. And car makers better have the sense to make this easy to disable should it become common place.
Maybe I should just get into restoring cars that were made before the integration of microprocessors:)
For me, it comes down to a simple question. Was, at any point, a child in danger? And the answer is no here. I don't have any children of my own, and probably never will, so I guess I'll never fully understand the thinkings of parents; but to me, it really seems like NBC and all the people they collaborated with are overstepping the law to make "good tv".
Slashdot Mirror
Epic, the makers of the Unreal Tournament series, removed the CD/DVD checks from UT2003/4 and I'm pretty sure from their other games too.
The coolest MS activation hack I've seen is for vista. They emulate an OEM bios (usually asus) and install a key that allows the OS not to have to be activated via the internet (lest consumers have to deal with that after buying their new Vista machine). Works flawlessly, well from what I've heard it does. How would I know?
The asteroids arcade machine comes to mind...
From my understand, and I could quite possibly be wrong here, the DRM they're talking about never touched anything in that situation you described. This is about playing DRMd high def content, usually HD-DVDs, on computers running Vista and having the quality degraded when played over high quality but unprotected (read: DVI) ports (presumably to prevent HD content getting out into the wild, which is so astoundingly naive I'm at a loss to describe it) and that's not what you're doing.
The class that came closest to your ideal was my AP Physics course (that did not use calc). This was largely because we had the benefit of a brilliant and qualified instructor who was amazing at taking complex ideas and explaining them in simple and easy to understand ways (and all without us feeling like he was "talking down" to us). He was constantly stepping back from the actual work at hand and showing us how it fit into the logical, natural world at large. His lectures weren't just about learning what we needed to make the school look good on tests, he constantly reaffirmed that it was the process of discovery that was important. He wanted to teach students how to be good scientists, not good test takers.
My point with all this is that "rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills" ARE NOT the exclusive domain of mathematics. If you look, and have the correct approach to teaching the subject, you can find this just about anywhere.
Wow, I actually wasn't aware of that, I don't know anyone who uses MSN (or they do but also use AIM). I know links in Pidgin open just fine in FF after I click them. It sounds like a problem with MSN not honoring the systems default browser setting and just passing the link on to IE to open up regardless of how the user defined that option. That's an MSN problem, not Firefox's fault. I doubt the Mozilla people could fix it even if they wanted to.
I read that same article earlier today. Did you notice the part where Germany and several other countries dropped out too? And the price tag? We could throw that money somewhere else, maybe...hire a few more math and science teachers?
If kids are doing that now, and it was kind of like that for some back when I was in the public education system here in California (which wasn't all that long ago), it's because they're responding to outside pressure to have the highest possible GPA any way they can, no matter what they have to sacrifice--including actually learning anything. I never paid much attention to grades in high school, I took classes that interested me (and admittedly had rather poor attendance for classes that didn't) regardless of how difficult they were even if that meant getting a lower grade. I could have easily gotten a full point higher on my GPA if I had taken "safe" classes.
Some people just don't grok mathematics. I'm one of them. But strangely, I really enjoyed my Physics classes. The sooner you can identify who those kids are, the sooner you can get them learning things they're going to be able to actually absorb and use. Obviously some math is necessary for everyone to learn, the cutoff point is probably around the algebra-precalc area where learning more isn't going to help anyone who isn't considering pursuing a science or engineering degree. When you're talking about advanced math courses like mentioned here, let's keep those classes stocked with students who: 1) actually want to be there and 2) can use this environment to excel and advance there science/math education
about:blank
Seriously though, FF on XP does a pretty good job of integrating into the OS, things can get a little strange with different themes but the default one matches luna pretty well. The options menu probably strays farthest from looking windows-like but even that is pretty close to what you'd expect to see. On Linux, well we're pretty much used to every program doing its own thing already; just the nature of OSS I suppose.
The wireless works perfectly with <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=19<nobr>7<wbr></wbr></nobr> 102">this</a> (First link in the thread is the deb). Second option listed there uses ndiswrapper and the closed source driver. I use the first one with out any problems, although I've not done any serious testing for range to compare the two and my laptop is only 10ft away from the access point most of the point. Not quite out of the box support, but it's getting there.
I'm typing this on an Acer Aspire 5100 with the same graphics and using Compiz-fusion with most of the plugins enabled. Ubuntu 7.04 has a feature to download and install the needed "restricted" files.
I just found a beat up mini mag with some old stuff of mine. Damn thing still worked too, their durability is legendary. I've also got a burner sitting here not being used. It's not a 16x and the article specifically mentions that, would other speed burners still work? Otherwise I'm going to buy a 16x just to rip out the diode. I don't own a soldering iron (I know, I know turn in my geek card and gun). Guess I'm going to radioshack this weekend. This should be pretty damn fun.
Two words: personal responsibility
Technically, there are examples of animals using tools. The chimp using the stick to get at termites is the commonly cited one. They even show an ability to select the best stick to use, and modify it to some extent. However, there's a big difference between fishing out termites with a stick, or using a leg bone as a cudgel to challenge a competing tribe for domination of a watering hole, and making things like hand axes, shovels, or bowls. Humans make tools that require many complex steps, most tool users in nature just pick things up off the ground. It's not a binary situation; humans and animals are all on a continuum of technical skill and complexity. Relative distance is what distinguishes us.
...But the value on family has real value as it promotes more kids which promotes larger numbers of people who think like you... Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that this isn't the case. I'm saying that this NEEDS TO CHANGE. If we keep going down that path we're going to live in a world with 10B or more people. Why does it stop at 10B? Because that's about the point where famine, disease, war and genocide will balance out production (give or take some depending on technological advances or other things we can't predict). And then the real fun begins! Population wars. Conflicts over WATER will make this centuries oil conflicts look like a Sunday afternoon in the park. Combine that with the fact that it's nearly possible for any nation state with even a modest amount of money to spend on defense to have a nuclear program and you're going to have the bloodiest period of human history we've ever seen. It's only going to work differently if every culture on earth were to agree, at the same time, to change. This wont happen, we can agree on that at least. So your mind set does fit the (sad) reality of our current world, but damn it we HAVE to try for something better.PS. From the gist of your original post I'm guessing your(sic) either gay or infertile. Neither, actually.
I said Judeo-Christian tradition because that's what (most) Western society has in common. Doubtless it exists in most of the other religions of the world, including Buddhism and even children raised in Atheist households are taught that this is what's expected of them.
There are scarce few socio-economical problems you could talk about that would not be helped, and many that would be outright eliminated, by a decline and ultimate stabilization of the world population. If you could get the population down to say, 2B or less it would be possible for nearly everyone to live as well as middle class Westerners do today. And the notion that you are unable to make a free choice because of your heritage is laughable, you just don't want to. Pleas understand that I'm not attacking you for this, it's a normal thing to want, but it's only helpful as long as we're still trapped in the farcical rat race with the other cultures and nations of the world, where out producing your enemy with your genetic resources is the goal. I don't accept social Darwinism as an inevitability, and it's certainly not some sort of universal, perfect truth. We can do better. We have a responsibility to better as the only species in history that has had the capacity to.
You mentioned adoption and I'll comment briefly on that. Do you grok how difficult that process is for even stable, successful couples? Now imagine the difficulty for a single man trying to adopt. Hell, it was illegal in certain locals until relatively recently. I know there has been progress made in the last few decades, but it's still incredibly difficult.
I didn't "opt-out" of anything, it just sort of worked out that way. You might as well have a tax system based on height or skin color, makes about as much sense. I'm sure you could find studies saying tall white people do better, society should promote them to have more kids! It wouldn't make me as frustrated if the motivation really was a "greater good" altruism, but I'm suspicious that most of it comes from Judeo-Christian tradition and pure cultural momentum propagating down through the generations by way of self fulfilling laws and various shaping mechanisms such as stigmas and what's considerd "normal". There is a better way.
That's not far from the truth in the US already. It's in our tax structure, insurance, oh and all the wonderful benefits you'll get screwed out of when you're in the military and unmarried. You're pretty much punished for being single, which really sucks for people who aren't ever going to get married.
Strange, were you using 7.04? I remember, back before I reinstalled and went Linux only for this laptop, the default partitioning was setup to shrink my empty space of the windows partition and install Ubuntu on the freed space. Grub set up the dual booting (with Ubuntu as the default option) and both OSs booted and worked perfectly. I found myself booting into Windows less and less and about a month ago did a clean install selecting the second option, "Use entire hard disk."
Anything that takes away functionality like the alcohol detecting system or software locks that limit horsepower or top speed based on car model are bad in my opinion. It seems like a perfect example of (mis)applying technology to solve a social problem. The second system mentioned seems like a good idea because you're providing the driver with useful information, I would prefer maybe an audio alert to the potential strangulation by my seatbelt, but that's just me. And car makers better have the sense to make this easy to disable should it become common place.
:)
Maybe I should just get into restoring cars that were made before the integration of microprocessors
What does a Gnome icon theme have to do with Latin American dances or search engines? Now I'm thoroughly confused.
For me, it comes down to a simple question. Was, at any point, a child in danger? And the answer is no here. I don't have any children of my own, and probably never will, so I guess I'll never fully understand the thinkings of parents; but to me, it really seems like NBC and all the people they collaborated with are overstepping the law to make "good tv".