Is there something wrong with the word 'Women'? Why is it that in any discussion of womens' issues, women are referred to (by men and women) as 'Females'. This is like nails on a chalkboard to me. The only acceptable use of females as a noun is in biology. Female what? Penguins?
Did you actually read Solove's essay? Bruce Schneier, author of the Wired article, similarly challenges the "Got nothing to hide" argument on its implicit assumptions, but, unlike Solove, asserts that "Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect".
While this kind of declaration is fine when its inked on 200 year old vellum, it simply cannot be the basis of a sound argument because it is an assumption in itself and contains the same implicit assumption as the 'Nothing to Hide' argument. Solove exposes the fact that we only think we know what 'Privacy' means.
How about this to throw a spanner in the works: My university requires CS grads to have a minor in a physical science and to complete the same core as Information Technology students. Presumably, they see computer scientists as scientists in their field who are equipped with auxilliary computational skills and knowledge.
IT students study the core subjects along with project management or other business related areas. They also may study things like crypto, compilers, or formal methods as electives.
Software Engineers study embedded systems and learn to work with engineers from other fields in interdisciplinary teams.
If you are going to develop scientific and engineering based applications you need a strong understanding of mathematics
Yes, but not an engineers understanding or a scientist's understanding
If you are going to design business applications, do systems integration, web applications, etc... then you do not need a strong background in mathematics, but you would stand to benefit from a management, accounting, finance
Actuarial accounting is not maths then? Finance?
background; because you more than anyone else are going to be working with the end user
This seems to be a very emotional point for many of you, but I think you miss the point of the agument in your knee-jerk defence of mathematics. Fant appears (I haven't read the book, just the review) to be arguing against the centrality of mathematics in computer science.
I think that some level of mathematics will always be required in computer science because computer scientists will always need to work with mathematicians, as well as people from a good many other fields.
Leave the deep mathematics to the mathematicians and concentrate on processes, is what I see as the crux of his argument. The formalisms which brought us to this point are details that burden the field with complexity that ought to be abstractions.
BTW, it is a manager's duty to retain some level of professional distance from their employees.
Just how much distance is a matter of cultural significance. It's what cultural theorists refer to as Power Distance and it varies greatly from culture to culture. Australia has a very low power distance, Japan has very high power distance and the USA is somewhere in between. Managers from the US who work in Aus often find this out the hard way.
These people weren't worried about storing data - they were interesting in transmitting it.
First sensible comment I've read so far on this story. Who says 'they' want our bloody technology or that 'they' would use it for the same purposes?
One of the strengths of the $100 laptop is the potential for ad-hoc networking. Without a large infrastructure linking individual homes to the internet, as is the case in most developed nations, an individual user in a third world city (lets ignore the difficulties of remote areas for now) would have Buckley's chance of getting on-line. If there were several of these machines in every city block, an entire neighbourhood, or several, could be serviced by a single uplink. Yes it would be slow but at least it would grant access.
The communication aspect is important but, even more important and more fundamental to that is access to information. Its difficult to imagine the revelation of the kind experienced by a child who has never been to a library before, or seen an encyclopaedia, browsing topics on Wikipedia, for instance. Imagine the waste of human potential that goes on every day, the African Einsteins and the Guianan Curies who never have their day in the sun because they don't have access to the information they need to satisfy their curiosity about the world. That is what this dream is about, not telling mum when you'll be home for tea.
Gates lives in a jar, insulated by his billions. He surely has no real idea of the daily experience of a person living in the first world, let alone the third world. I think its safe to ignore his criticism altogether. Of course he can't see a market for Office products or Age of Mythology if the machines don't conform to his software.
On another note, why is it such a good idea to show the third world how be as wasteful and profligate as the 'developed' world?
I think that we as a race, we are hooked on communication
> Erm, this is news for nerds. You ought to know what Snort is.
I think your view of nerds might be a tad narrow. Have you seen the amount of ground that slashdot covers or are you stuck on it.slashdot?
This article is certainly not up to the usual informative standard that I have come to expect from slashdot. I do know what snort is but it is not even clear that the Snort IDS is the subject being discussed, nor is it clear what Dubai ports and the Israelis have to do with it.
Copyright invokes the right to copy. It does not (or rather should not, the word has become so corrupted in recent years) protect ideas but the expression of those ideas. If the idea constitutes an invention or design, they can be protected by other parts of law like patents and design patents.
Thus, someone writing a book on a new rocket engine does not prevent another person from building and capitalising on the rocket engine. It does protect the author's expression of the idea and right to dictate the terms under which it may be copied.
This gets a little murkier when dealing with the adaptation of a work from one form to another (eg. a movie adaptation of a game). In practice, an author is also said to have control over "derivative" works as well but this does not hold in all cases.
It seems clear from this that Dan Brown is safe so long as he did not copy and profit from copying any part of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and providing "The DaVinci Code" is not found to be a derivative work. It looks like a bit of gold digging to me.
Perhaps I am speaking about ten minutes too early, but, having just shoehorned Fedora into my laptop, I was looking for a wireless solution. I did a search for my intel 2200BG card and, lo and behold, the href=http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/ cs-006408.htmintel site comes up lucky. (Ten minutes too early because I haven't installed or tested yet.) They have resourced a sourceforge project that has turned out a reasonably complete solution.
I certainly can't complain about vendor disinterest, in fact, considering the small (but growing) interest in linux, this seems to me to be going beyond the call of duty for any bottom line oriented manufacturer.
I got lucky but I didn't buy the laptop with the intention of using linux and assumed I'd be stuck with the umbilicus.
I want to introduce a new definition for "new technology" that comes closer to capturing what we mean by this term in the commodity world than something on someone-or-other's "roadmap". That is that you can say this technology now works most of the time in a fairly consistent and reliable manner. My university, one of the best funded in the country, only really ironed out the wrinkles in it's wireless network in the last 6 months.
My advice: Be thankful for what is there and don't expect too much from new technology - its new. Or you could just buy whatever hardware you want and hope to get lucky!
As for linux itself, yes its clunky sometimes, but all linux users have good reason for using it.
CO2 is heavier than air. That sounds a bit strange but if this lquid CO2 (which is only liquid because of the pressure of earth above it) escapes, it will spread a blanket of CO2 over the ground until natural air movements stir it all up. In fact this happens in some natural volcanic events like the one at lake Nyos. Photographs and description hereOn August 21,1986, a cloud of carbon dioxide gas was released from the lake. Because carbon dioxide is more dense than air it hugged the ground and flowed down valleys. The cloud traveled as far as 15 miles (25 km) from the lake. It was moving fast enough to flatten vegetation, including a few trees. 1,700 deaths were caused by suffocation. 845 people were hospitalized.
Not so simple...
Recording a television show without permission from the copyright holder is an offence under current US statutes. This act of copying, however, is governed by a statutory licence, meaning that the permission is automatically granted. You pay for this privelege in the purchase price of blank media such as blank cassettes and CDs. The companies who control the content get a cut from every sale of blank media in the US, none of which actually goes into residuals for the artist. I am not sure if this is the case in Australia - can anyone answer this for me?
As for loans, once you actually have the physical medium, you have the right of first sale which means that you can do as you like with the actual object. Copyright does, as the name suggests, only governs rights over copying.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there something wrong with the word 'Women'? Why is it that in any discussion of womens' issues, women are referred to (by men and women) as 'Females'. This is like nails on a chalkboard to me. The only acceptable use of females as a noun is in biology. Female what? Penguins?
Did you actually read Solove's essay? Bruce Schneier, author of the Wired article, similarly challenges the "Got nothing to hide" argument on its implicit assumptions, but, unlike Solove, asserts that "Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect".
While this kind of declaration is fine when its inked on 200 year old vellum, it simply cannot be the basis of a sound argument because it is an assumption in itself and contains the same implicit assumption as the 'Nothing to Hide' argument. Solove exposes the fact that we only think we know what 'Privacy' means.
How about this to throw a spanner in the works: My university requires CS grads to have a minor in a physical science and to complete the same core as Information Technology students. Presumably, they see computer scientists as scientists in their field who are equipped with auxilliary computational skills and knowledge.
IT students study the core subjects along with project management or other business related areas. They also may study things like crypto, compilers, or formal methods as electives.
Software Engineers study embedded systems and learn to work with engineers from other fields in interdisciplinary teams.
Yes, but not an engineers understanding or a scientist's understanding
If you are going to design business applications, do systems integration, web applications, etc... then you do not need a strong background in mathematics, but you would stand to benefit from a management, accounting, financeActuarial accounting is not maths then? Finance?
background; because you more than anyone else are going to be working with the end userDon't systems engineers have end users in mind?
But this IS maths, not computer science. Algorithms is a mathematical field. Can someone please define the terms of the debate!
This seems to be a very emotional point for many of you, but I think you miss the point of the agument in your knee-jerk defence of mathematics. Fant appears (I haven't read the book, just the review) to be arguing against the centrality of mathematics in computer science.
I think that some level of mathematics will always be required in computer science because computer scientists will always need to work with mathematicians, as well as people from a good many other fields.
Leave the deep mathematics to the mathematicians and concentrate on processes, is what I see as the crux of his argument. The formalisms which brought us to this point are details that burden the field with complexity that ought to be abstractions.
First sensible comment I've read so far on this story. Who says 'they' want our bloody technology or that 'they' would use it for the same purposes?
One of the strengths of the $100 laptop is the potential for ad-hoc networking. Without a large infrastructure linking individual homes to the internet, as is the case in most developed nations, an individual user in a third world city (lets ignore the difficulties of remote areas for now) would have Buckley's chance of getting on-line. If there were several of these machines in every city block, an entire neighbourhood, or several, could be serviced by a single uplink. Yes it would be slow but at least it would grant access.
The communication aspect is important but, even more important and more fundamental to that is access to information. Its difficult to imagine the revelation of the kind experienced by a child who has never been to a library before, or seen an encyclopaedia, browsing topics on Wikipedia, for instance. Imagine the waste of human potential that goes on every day, the African Einsteins and the Guianan Curies who never have their day in the sun because they don't have access to the information they need to satisfy their curiosity about the world. That is what this dream is about, not telling mum when you'll be home for tea.
Gates lives in a jar, insulated by his billions. He surely has no real idea of the daily experience of a person living in the first world, let alone the third world. I think its safe to ignore his criticism altogether. Of course he can't see a market for Office products or Age of Mythology if the machines don't conform to his software.
On another note, why is it such a good idea to show the third world how be as wasteful and profligate as the 'developed' world?I think you mean 'species'.
> Erm, this is news for nerds. You ought to know what Snort is.
I think your view of nerds might be a tad narrow.
Have you seen the amount of ground that slashdot covers or are you stuck on it.slashdot?
This article is certainly not up to the usual informative standard that I have come to expect from slashdot. I do know what snort is but it is not even clear that the Snort IDS is the subject being discussed, nor is it clear what Dubai ports and the Israelis have to do with it.
Copyright invokes the right to copy. It does not (or rather should not, the word has become so corrupted in recent years) protect ideas but the expression of those ideas. If the idea constitutes an invention or design, they can be protected by other parts of law like patents and design patents. Thus, someone writing a book on a new rocket engine does not prevent another person from building and capitalising on the rocket engine. It does protect the author's expression of the idea and right to dictate the terms under which it may be copied.
This gets a little murkier when dealing with the adaptation of a work from one form to another (eg. a movie adaptation of a game). In practice, an author is also said to have control over "derivative" works as well but this does not hold in all cases.
It seems clear from this that Dan Brown is safe so long as he did not copy and profit from copying any part of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and providing "The DaVinci Code" is not found to be a derivative work. It looks like a bit of gold digging to me.
Perhaps I am speaking about ten minutes too early, but, having just shoehorned Fedora into my laptop, I was looking for a wireless solution. I did a search for my intel 2200BG card and, lo and behold, the href=http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/ cs-006408.htmintel site comes up lucky. (Ten minutes too early because I haven't installed or tested yet.) They have resourced a sourceforge project that has turned out a reasonably complete solution.
I certainly can't complain about vendor disinterest, in fact, considering the small (but growing) interest in linux, this seems to me to be going beyond the call of duty for any bottom line oriented manufacturer.
I got lucky but I didn't buy the laptop with the intention of using linux and assumed I'd be stuck with the umbilicus.
I want to introduce a new definition for "new technology" that comes closer to capturing what we mean by this term in the commodity world than something on someone-or-other's "roadmap". That is that you can say this technology now works most of the time in a fairly consistent and reliable manner. My university, one of the best funded in the country, only really ironed out the wrinkles in it's wireless network in the last 6 months.
My advice: Be thankful for what is there and don't expect too much from new technology - its new. Or you could just buy whatever hardware you want and hope to get lucky!
As for linux itself, yes its clunky sometimes, but all linux users have good reason for using it.
CO2 is heavier than air. That sounds a bit strange but if this lquid CO2 (which is only liquid because of the pressure of earth above it) escapes, it will spread a blanket of CO2 over the ground until natural air movements stir it all up. In fact this happens in some natural volcanic events like the one at lake Nyos. Photographs and description here On August 21,1986, a cloud of carbon dioxide gas was released from the lake. Because carbon dioxide is more dense than air it hugged the ground and flowed down valleys. The cloud traveled as far as 15 miles (25 km) from the lake. It was moving fast enough to flatten vegetation, including a few trees. 1,700 deaths were caused by suffocation. 845 people were hospitalized.
Not so simple... Recording a television show without permission from the copyright holder is an offence under current US statutes. This act of copying, however, is governed by a statutory licence, meaning that the permission is automatically granted. You pay for this privelege in the purchase price of blank media such as blank cassettes and CDs. The companies who control the content get a cut from every sale of blank media in the US, none of which actually goes into residuals for the artist. I am not sure if this is the case in Australia - can anyone answer this for me? As for loans, once you actually have the physical medium, you have the right of first sale which means that you can do as you like with the actual object. Copyright does, as the name suggests, only governs rights over copying.