Kids learning from an encyclopedia discussed pregnancy? Wow, remember the days before birth control, when the kid would have learned that from having younger siblings magically appear! Can't have that, and forget having farm animals around (except the newt that the kid turned the principal into.)
Calling another kid black? Depends on what happened.
- Referring to an African-American kid as "black" instead of "African-American" shouldn't get the kid sent home unless he's already been told that's not how the kid wants to be described.
- Calling an African-American kid black, using the N-word, should get him sent home for appropriate education by his parents, along with detention for some education about racism in case his parents thought that was ok.
- Calling another kid "black" as an insult (whether he's black, white, or other) has all kinds of layers of problems, just as kids using "gay" as an insult does.
Zero Tolerance is mostly a War on Drugs thing. (And don't believe the right-wingers when they say that political correctness is only a left-wing liberal liberal liberal Commie behaviour.)
The incident you're talking about was an outsider coming to the school; a zero-tolerance policy wouldn't have stopped it.
If there were no female applicants for your team, either your HR department isn't doing a good job of advertising the job to women, or else your team is doing a lousy job of looking like somewhere a women would feel comfortable working.
My company's not perfect, but they're a lot better at it than that - losing a big lawsuit 40 years ago got their attention. My current department doesn't have a lot of women in it; my previous department had women as more than half of the managers (varied over the years, as we kept reorganizing), and so did the sales department we did tech consulting for. The last time my group hired a contractor through the HR department, probably 1/3 of the applicants were women (the one we really wanted to hire had found a better job before HR got us her resume, sigh. We hired a guy who didn't work out, then hired an old friend who'd contracted with us years before and was willing to come back again.)
I read Books 1, 2, and 3 all pretty much around the same time. Five years later, when Book 4 came out, I'd forgotten who most of the characters were and found I didn't really care about them when I read it; I skipped Book 5.
The Hugo Award Nominees reading package last year includes the entire Wheel of Time series (which I thought was a classy move by the publisher, and a nice contrast to Orbit Books including only excerpts for their three nominees.) (If you're a member of the appropriate Worldcon, you're eligible to vote for the Hugos, and in recent years they've provided an electronic package of most of the written and graphical works that are nominated.) The bad part about this is that the tablet I use for reading has the bloody entire bloody Wheel of bloody Time series on it, and I'm about 90% of the way through:-)
I hadn't read it before Jordan died, and probably that wasn't my birthday anyway, so for me it wasn't the worst birthday present ever; for that one I'll have to thank my little brother for giving me chicken pox when I was 10. There wasn't a vaccine for it back then, but there is now, and if your parents didn't give you the vaccine and other kids didn't give you the disease, trust me, it's one of the vaccines you want to get. (I also got measles the hard way, but I was young enough I don't remember it very well. Got the polio vaccine, though, unlike a neighbor's kid who was a couple of years older and had to use crutches.)
@NeilHimself wrote a nice, sensitive blog post about the position writers are in with their stories and their lives, but the tl;dr punch line is (rot13 for spoiler) Trbetr E.E. Znegva vf abg lbhe ovgpu.
Yeah, I probably should have blamed a different one of the non-length-limited strXXXX() functions, but strcmp() will still do Bad Things if you hand it one or two non-null-terminated pointers.
And yes, stderr would have been the better choice, but the important thing is to replace the implementations of dangerous functions with something that fails safely, and if you can't do it at compile or link time, it's still safer to do it at run time than to run the unsafe version.
It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)
Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost much and the only problems will be data formats, not media formats.
void *strcpy() { printf("Don't use strcpy, idiot! We told you that years ago!\n"}; exit(-37); }
void *strcmp() { printf("Don't use strcmp either, idiot! We told you that years ago too!\n"}; exit(-37); }
Also, according to the articles I've read about this, the somewhat more official patch came out in 2013, but wasn't marked as a "security" patch so it only made it into the newer OS versions, but wasn't retrofitted into the older ones. So it'd be fixed in Ubuntu 14.04, but not in the 12.04 LTS version.
Moore's Law is only partly your friend here - storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly, but that also means that not only do devices become obsolete, but the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete. You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2. You might have something that can handle IDE / PATA, or an old laptop with PCMCIA, but even those are getting scarcer. If you can connect to that old disk disk drive, you can probably load a virtual machine running NetBSD that'll have drivers for the file system format, but maybe not; you certainly don't want to risk having Windows "update" the format. You might think that FAT 8.3 format will stick around for a long time (and maybe it will for reading, but it's rapidly getting replaced with FAT16, FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, etc.
Leave aside the question of whether you can read a 20-year-old version of WordStar or WordPerfect format file (unlike my late-70s nroff files, which would be readable if they weren't on a 9-track tape I've probably lost.) You can probably read that 4-year-old TurboTax file, but if you need to get tax data back from when you bought your house, you'd better have everything on paper.
Just for physical format alone, you need to copy stuff every couple of years.
Acid-free paper, otherwise you and your friends will just keep eating bits of your archives.
More seriously, paper's only good for some things, and only if you protect it well enough. Some years ago, my work hard drive crashed, and when I was driving to work a day or two later, my coffee cup bounced off the holder into my briefcase, taking out both the Palm Pilot and the dead-tree copies of my data. There were backups of some of my PC data, but my current calendar was gone.
It especially explains why many colleges (at least before the US drinking age was raised to 21) have bars called "The Rathskeller", pronounced "Rat Cellar".
This was back before the World Wide Web, when call centers were primarily toll-free numbers that you called to get information from companies, make airline reservations, etc. It was either people you wanted to talk to, or people you had to call anyway like the electric company.
95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, often I'll put the phone down and if somebody answers, I'll say "hello" and then put the phone down.)
Back when I used to design call center equipment, in the 80s, phone calls cost more per minute than operators. These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them if they don't have a spare operator within a few seconds; it's not like they're worried about losing repeat business.
My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either
- It's really a Russian scam, out of their jurisdiction, or
- They're a distributed scam, run by lots and lots of people who can buy a "Rachel from Cardholder Services" audio recording kit, hire work-at-home telemarketers, and run their own cottage industry, so if they do get caught, the scam keeps going, or (like old-fashioned spammers in trailer parks) maybe they don't make as much money as the folks selling the kit promised them, so they go out of business and other scammers take up the slack.
Cool. Our research folks at $DAYJOB have been building GPU-computing clouds, and have found that for many workloads, the GTX 750i was extremely cost-effective (that's the predecessor to this card, and costs include the server you plug it into and electricity as well as the graphics card), compared to much higher-end computation-focused systems. But they bought their lab hardware months ago; this looks to be about 50% faster, for a slightly higher price, so that's a win.
Friend of mine got to name streets in a lot of towns around Alaska. He was working for the Alascom phone company, and they got funded to put satellite dish phone access to a couple hundred small towns in remote parts of the state. Phone company offices need to have street addresses, and many of the towns hadn't bothered to name their streets (why, if you've only got one or two?)
Years earlier, I did some training at South Central Bell in Alabama. They were still converting their databases from paper cards to computers, and a lot of their rural customers had address descriptions like "take the third dirt road after you get to where the Jones place was before it burned down", because their official Post Office addresses were either just "Rural Route 6 Box 32" (which doesn't tell you anything about how to get there), or "P.O.Box 32, Podunk, Alabama" and they picked up their mail at the post office.
The installation instructions says that logging isn't one of the services included in Snappy Ubuntu Core by default; you have to install syslogd or equivalent if you want it. (Presumably it's not just because it saves space, but because the system can be more flexible about whether or where to have writable storage if it's not logging things, and because one of the typical behaviours of Internets of Things is that they're for consumers who aren't going to bother reading logs anyway.)
UPI Story on CIA and UFOs says half the UFO reports in the 50s and 60s were really sightings of their U2 aircraft, which were secret because they still hadn't found what they were looking for, and which flew enough higher and faster than normal airplanes that people didn't recognize them. (Remember that propeller planes were still common, though jets were starting to be common.)
Even in the late 80s / early 90s, supersonic planes weren't common - the Concorde only went that fast over the ocean, mainly due to sonic boom concerns, and the new wide-area air traffic control system that was being developed then wasn't spec'd for them; you'd typically get one blip and then they'd be off the radar screen.
Even Gjoni later admitted that didn't happen. But the *chan boards where he posted his long attack screed against his ex-girlfriend had been attacking Anita Sarkeesian for months, for the sin of showing totally made up clips of Grand Theft Auto and many other games being misogynist. (Oh, they weren't totally made up, they were right out of the game? Our bad, let's attack her for dissing Mario and Luigi, or harass Brianna Wu instead.)
Clock speed is 1.4 GHz, just over double the speed of RasPi. (That doesn't mean it's only 2x as fast, since it's probably a slightly newer ARM core, but it's unlikely to be 20x as fast, even if it's doing something like Odroid's quad-core ARM.)
It's definitely cute, but I'd think the Chromecast HDMI/USB-stick format, or something a bit larger but still pocket-sized, makes more sense.
First URL should be Core, and also in the second line of my post there's a missing quote mark after "of course you've got a huge disk drive even though you don't have much RAM or CPU .
Slashdot Mirror
Kids learning from an encyclopedia discussed pregnancy? Wow, remember the days before birth control, when the kid would have learned that from having younger siblings magically appear! Can't have that, and forget having farm animals around (except the newt that the kid turned the principal into.)
Calling another kid black? Depends on what happened.
After all, the kid did turn the teacher into a newt. (And because of Zero Tolerance, the fact that she got better just doesn't excuse it.)
Zero Tolerance is mostly a War on Drugs thing. (And don't believe the right-wingers when they say that political correctness is only a left-wing liberal liberal liberal Commie behaviour.)
The incident you're talking about was an outsider coming to the school; a zero-tolerance policy wouldn't have stopped it.
If there were no female applicants for your team, either your HR department isn't doing a good job of advertising the job to women, or else your team is doing a lousy job of looking like somewhere a women would feel comfortable working.
My company's not perfect, but they're a lot better at it than that - losing a big lawsuit 40 years ago got their attention. My current department doesn't have a lot of women in it; my previous department had women as more than half of the managers (varied over the years, as we kept reorganizing), and so did the sales department we did tech consulting for. The last time my group hired a contractor through the HR department, probably 1/3 of the applicants were women (the one we really wanted to hire had found a better job before HR got us her resume, sigh. We hired a guy who didn't work out, then hired an old friend who'd contracted with us years before and was willing to come back again.)
I read Books 1, 2, and 3 all pretty much around the same time. Five years later, when Book 4 came out, I'd forgotten who most of the characters were and found I didn't really care about them when I read it; I skipped Book 5.
The Hugo Award Nominees reading package last year includes the entire Wheel of Time series (which I thought was a classy move by the publisher, and a nice contrast to Orbit Books including only excerpts for their three nominees.) (If you're a member of the appropriate Worldcon, you're eligible to vote for the Hugos, and in recent years they've provided an electronic package of most of the written and graphical works that are nominated.) The bad part about this is that the tablet I use for reading has the bloody entire bloody Wheel of bloody Time series on it, and I'm about 90% of the way through :-)
I hadn't read it before Jordan died, and probably that wasn't my birthday anyway, so for me it wasn't the worst birthday present ever; for that one I'll have to thank my little brother for giving me chicken pox when I was 10. There wasn't a vaccine for it back then, but there is now, and if your parents didn't give you the vaccine and other kids didn't give you the disease, trust me, it's one of the vaccines you want to get. (I also got measles the hard way, but I was young enough I don't remember it very well. Got the polio vaccine, though, unlike a neighbor's kid who was a couple of years older and had to use crutches.)
@NeilHimself wrote a nice, sensitive blog post about the position writers are in with their stories and their lives, but the tl;dr punch line is (rot13 for spoiler) Trbetr E.E. Znegva vf abg lbhe ovgpu.
Yeah, I probably should have blamed a different one of the non-length-limited strXXXX() functions, but strcmp() will still do Bad Things if you hand it one or two non-null-terminated pointers.
And yes, stderr would have been the better choice, but the important thing is to replace the implementations of dangerous functions with something that fails safely, and if you can't do it at compile or link time, it's still safer to do it at run time than to run the unsafe version.
It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)
Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost much and the only problems will be data formats, not media formats.
void *strcpy() { printf("Don't use strcpy, idiot! We told you that years ago!\n"}; exit(-37); }
void *strcmp() { printf("Don't use strcmp either, idiot! We told you that years ago too!\n"}; exit(-37); }
Also, according to the articles I've read about this, the somewhat more official patch came out in 2013, but wasn't marked as a "security" patch so it only made it into the newer OS versions, but wasn't retrofitted into the older ones. So it'd be fixed in Ubuntu 14.04, but not in the 12.04 LTS version.
Moore's Law is only partly your friend here - storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly, but that also means that not only do devices become obsolete, but the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete. You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2. You might have something that can handle IDE / PATA, or an old laptop with PCMCIA, but even those are getting scarcer. If you can connect to that old disk disk drive, you can probably load a virtual machine running NetBSD that'll have drivers for the file system format, but maybe not; you certainly don't want to risk having Windows "update" the format. You might think that FAT 8.3 format will stick around for a long time (and maybe it will for reading, but it's rapidly getting replaced with FAT16, FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, etc.
Leave aside the question of whether you can read a 20-year-old version of WordStar or WordPerfect format file (unlike my late-70s nroff files, which would be readable if they weren't on a 9-track tape I've probably lost.) You can probably read that 4-year-old TurboTax file, but if you need to get tax data back from when you bought your house, you'd better have everything on paper.
Just for physical format alone, you need to copy stuff every couple of years.
Acid-free paper, otherwise you and your friends will just keep eating bits of your archives.
More seriously, paper's only good for some things, and only if you protect it well enough. Some years ago, my work hard drive crashed, and when I was driving to work a day or two later, my coffee cup bounced off the holder into my briefcase, taking out both the Palm Pilot and the dead-tree copies of my data. There were backups of some of my PC data, but my current calendar was gone.
It especially explains why many colleges (at least before the US drinking age was raised to 21) have bars called "The Rathskeller", pronounced "Rat Cellar".
This was back before the World Wide Web, when call centers were primarily toll-free numbers that you called to get information from companies, make airline reservations, etc. It was either people you wanted to talk to, or people you had to call anyway like the electric company.
95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, often I'll put the phone down and if somebody answers, I'll say "hello" and then put the phone down.)
Back when I used to design call center equipment, in the 80s, phone calls cost more per minute than operators. These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them if they don't have a spare operator within a few seconds; it's not like they're worried about losing repeat business.
My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either
Cool. Our research folks at $DAYJOB have been building GPU-computing clouds, and have found that for many workloads, the GTX 750i was extremely cost-effective (that's the predecessor to this card, and costs include the server you plug it into and electricity as well as the graphics card), compared to much higher-end computation-focused systems. But they bought their lab hardware months ago; this looks to be about 50% faster, for a slightly higher price, so that's a win.
Friend of mine got to name streets in a lot of towns around Alaska. He was working for the Alascom phone company, and they got funded to put satellite dish phone access to a couple hundred small towns in remote parts of the state. Phone company offices need to have street addresses, and many of the towns hadn't bothered to name their streets (why, if you've only got one or two?)
Years earlier, I did some training at South Central Bell in Alabama. They were still converting their databases from paper cards to computers, and a lot of their rural customers had address descriptions like "take the third dirt road after you get to where the Jones place was before it burned down", because their official Post Office addresses were either just "Rural Route 6 Box 32" (which doesn't tell you anything about how to get there), or "P.O.Box 32, Podunk, Alabama" and they picked up their mail at the post office.
The installation instructions says that logging isn't one of the services included in Snappy Ubuntu Core by default; you have to install syslogd or equivalent if you want it. (Presumably it's not just because it saves space, but because the system can be more flexible about whether or where to have writable storage if it's not logging things, and because one of the typical behaviours of Internets of Things is that they're for consumers who aren't going to bother reading logs anyway.)
UPI Story on CIA and UFOs says half the UFO reports in the 50s and 60s were really sightings of their U2 aircraft, which were secret because they still hadn't found what they were looking for, and which flew enough higher and faster than normal airplanes that people didn't recognize them. (Remember that propeller planes were still common, though jets were starting to be common.)
Even in the late 80s / early 90s, supersonic planes weren't common - the Concorde only went that fast over the ocean, mainly due to sonic boom concerns, and the new wide-area air traffic control system that was being developed then wasn't spec'd for them; you'd typically get one blip and then they'd be off the radar screen.
Even Gjoni later admitted that didn't happen. But the *chan boards where he posted his long attack screed against his ex-girlfriend had been attacking Anita Sarkeesian for months, for the sin of showing totally made up clips of Grand Theft Auto and many other games being misogynist. (Oh, they weren't totally made up, they were right out of the game? Our bad, let's attack her for dissing Mario and Luigi, or harass Brianna Wu instead.)
And did your post just make technology look like a more friendly place for half the population to work, or less friendly?
Why put that computer into a keyboard when you can put it into a joystick? (Jeri Ellsworth's C64-Direct-to-TV)
Clock speed is 1.4 GHz, just over double the speed of RasPi. (That doesn't mean it's only 2x as fast, since it's probably a slightly newer ARM core, but it's unlikely to be 20x as fast, even if it's doing something like Odroid's quad-core ARM.)
It's definitely cute, but I'd think the Chromecast HDMI/USB-stick format, or something a bit larger but still pocket-sized, makes more sense.
First URL should be Core, and also in the second line of my post there's a missing quote mark after "of course you've got a huge disk drive even though you don't have much RAM or CPU .