In the beginning was the West Coast Computer Faire, then for, oh, the last 20 years or so there's been some sort of "MacWorld Expo" and a perfectly parallel - but usually bigger - "PC Expo". The sort of people who go to these kind of things know about them.
The next one will be held June 25-27 2002 at the Javits Convention Center in New York.
Is the power supply really in the base?
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
It's got a G4, a SuperDrive, a GeForce2 MX, and the power supply, all inside that base...
Apple has been known to fudge on this in the past. The Cube had an external power supply, a brick at the end of the power cord. I'll bet this thing does too.
[regarding the information hidden by color copiers to prevent forgeries]
Supposedly its a different dither pattern on the yellow ink. Very subtle when on white paper.
Okay, that's useful information, but the question is, what does the encoded information say? And is it possible to defeat it? If stegdetect can recover the string and it's unencrypted or badly encrypted, it would be a good start to copy the same image on multiple color copiers at the same Kinko's, see what bits change in the resulting signature.
According to many links in an earlier/. story, color Xerox copy machines currently embed a serial number in every copy they make. So has anybody tried making a color copy of something, scanning it, and using stegdetect on the result?
It uses the Newton font and button designs
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Apple PDA?
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The font shown in the text-entry examples is one called "casual" that was designed by Marge Boots for the Newton. The relocatable icon dock also appears to be a copy of the Newton MessagePad 2000. My guess is they took screen shots of an MP2K to make some of the bitmaps that went into putting this hoax together.
I really miss Newton's handwriting recognition and the Newton Notepad application. If this were a real product I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
for me a gun is still a gun: something that can only be used to kill or harm another being. That's its only purpose, and saying that it's not is only demagogy.
The other use of a gun is to defend oneself or others against being killed or harmed. That's why we issue guns to police officers. Not because we want the police to kill people, because we want the police to protect people. Private citizens need legal access to guns for the exact same reasons the bodyguards protecting the president or, heck, Britney Spears need access to them.
And since you don't need to fire a gun for its presence to be a useful deterrent, the presence of guns can actually act to reduce harm to humans. I'm not saying guns always reduce death and violence and harm, but they sometimes do, and that's all the pro-gun side really needs for the guns/nmap analogy to hold up.
A way to harmlessly paralyze people by shooting them with a laser light is under development by HSV Technologies. Currently the equipment is about as big as a suitcase, but most of that is battery; as the tech improves we'll surely have hand-held phasers soon enough. The suitcase-sized ones are expected to be sold to military and law enforcement agencies sometime next year.
According to the manufacturer's site:
HSV Technologies Inc., of San Diego, California is developing a non-lethal weapon that uses ultraviolet laser beams to harmlessly immobilize people and animals at a distance. The Phaser-like device uses two beams of UV radiation to ionize paths in the air along which electrical current is conducted to and from the target. In effect, the beams create wires through the atmosphere wherever they are pointed.
The current within these beams is a close replication of the neuro-electric impulses that control skeletal muscles. It is imperceptible to the target person because it differs from his own neural impulses only in that its repetition rate is sufficiently rapid to tetanize muscle tissue. (Tetanization is the stimulation of muscle fibers at a frequency which merges their individual contractions into a single sustained contraction.)
The bottom line is that in order to improve your cardio or muscle performance, you have to actually EXERCISE. That means you're not playing a video game
I got hooked on Dance Dance Revolution in the arcades of Hong Kong, and probably lost over ten pounds from that source alone. (I was doing it about an hour a day, several days a week). Now I have a high-end DDR pad at home and regularly exercise myself to near-exhaustion with it; this is a big part of how I stay in shape.
The arcades are full of exercise games these days. The Sunnyvale Golfland arcade has three DDR-influenced foot-movement games, two DDR-influenced arm-movement games (Para Para Paradise is one), and "Mo-Cap Boxing" which can be seriously exhausting if you're not in good shape. In other arcades I've seen several good bicycle games including PropCycle (a bike-powered hanglider), a whitewater rapids game where you paddle, and a martial arts game where you actually punch and kick to operate the characters on the screen.
A lot of these games are both good exercise and good fun. DDR in particular has worked for me now for about two years running.
It's high time more of these arcade amusements started to invade the home.
[Brett Glass is] outspoken against open source, but that's because he doesn't truly understand it.
Okay, I looked up Brett Glass. In response to a recent question , he said the best way to use old PC hardware as a web server is to install FreeBSD. The last paragraph of his answer:
"I sometimes use Windows 95 and NT on client machines, but don't find either OS to be mature or stable enough for mission-critical servers. Walnut Creek CD-ROM runs the busiest software library on the Internet on a FreeBSD Pentium machine, and it just doesn't go down. That's got to be the best testimonial anyone could ask for.
Brett also seems to have authored a paper called "Stopping Spam and Malware with Open Source", and presented it at this year's O'Reilly conference. Perhaps your info is out of date?
Many people have compared Wesley Crusher to Adric on the Dr. Who. In both cases, the character was reviled because of the way the writers handled him. What are your thoughts on this? How would you recommend an actor handle this sort of situation in the future?
A relative of a friend of mine was a writer for ST:TNG. According to her, Wesley Crusher was a victim of the writers' strike. The writers would have regular meetings to discuss what's going on in the show, what worked or didn't work, what sort of overall direction they are trying for, what kind of scripts were needed right then. Then everybody would go home and pump out a script. In one of these idea meetings Wesley was a primary topic of conversation. There was a general consensus that "Gee, we've got this character here who could be interesting and we haven't really _done anything_ with him. What do we really know about Wesley?" Then all the writers went home and thought about scripts where the audience would get to know Wesley better. And what's the easiest way to develop a character on Star Trek? Have him save the ship! So the following week all the writers submitted scripts in which Wesley saves the ship.
This wouldn't normally be a problem. Normally they'd pick the best script or two to film, send back others for rework or postpone them for later in the season.
But then the writer's strike hit and there were no new scripts coming in. They had to film what they had, and what they had was an excess of "Wesley Saves the Ship!" So Wesley saved the ship again and again, and the audience got sick of it.
I don't see that there's really anything Wil could have done about this, but it still might be interesting to hear his thoughts on it.
The common presumption is that by default you are referring to the Judeo-Christian diety and the attendant belief that there is an afterlife where where people who follow this diety's rules will be rewarded and those who don't will be punished.
See, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. You just referred to a "Judeo-Christian deity". But traditional Judaism doesn't include belief in an afterlife or belief that one will necessarily be rewarded for obeying god's rules. Heaven and hell are a Christian thing, and I'm not even sure all Christian denominations believe in it.
So the "he presides over an afterlife" characteristic is only relevant to the question of whether you believe in one sort of Christian god.
Many definitions of god are internally inconsistent, but there are a few that aren't. For instance, Baruch Spinoza's "god as Universe" exists by definition. If god is defined as "everything in the universe", then the question of "does god exist" is reduced to the question of "does the universe exist." I feel a lot more confident answering yes to the latter question than the former one.
The oft forgotten (and more modern category) are the non-cognitivists, whose position is, essentially: "the claims for (this) god are so unintelligible that even if I wanted to "believe" I couldn't, because I have no idea what sort of thing I would even be "believing" in."
That's a pretty good approximation of my own position, but I don't think "non-cognitivist" is the right term for it. Here's a pretty good essay on non-cognitivism, which is the view that ethical statements have no meaning other than as a description of how we feel or what we want others to do.
My view is that the term "god" lacks coherence; it is not well enough defined that one can meaningfully say much about it. In a pluralistic society, the question "Does god exist?" makes no sense without some clarification as to which God the question is about and what its characteristics are alleged to be.
BUT, the airlines have a right and a duty to know who their customers are
When you get a sandwich, does Togo's have a right and duty to know who you are? Airlines are providing a service of transportation to paying customers. They need to figure out how to provide that service safely without endangering innocents, but it's certainly not obvious that forcing people to show a government-approved ID is a necessary or even particularly useful requirement to that goal.
Anyway, under the rules that were in effect before last week, airlines were not required to verify the identity of their customers, they were simply required to take extra-special care checking the baggage of passengers who don't show ID. Amusingly enough, merely asking what the rules are about ID is likely to get your carry-ons searched just as thoroughly as not having ID at all.
A. The FAA does not prohibit the airline from transporting any passenger who does not present a photo ID. Airlines have available to them alternate procedures that allow them to transport passengers without ID. However, some airlines choose not to use such procedures, which is their prerogative. However, for international travel, a passport is usually required and an entry or transit Visa may also be required. If the airlines were to allow you onto a plane without proper paperwork, including a Visa - the may be assessed a penalty of up to $10,000 by the country of entry. Airlines will deny boarding if your Passport is not in order (and usually valid for 6 months past date of travel) and your visa is stamped inside if required.
Q. Why didn't the airline ask for my ID?
A. The FAA does not require all passengers to present ID. The FAA requires that airlines apply additional security measures to passengers who are unable to produce ID upon request.
Q. Can an airline exceed minimum FAA requirements?
A. Yes. The FAA sets minimum requirements for airlines to follow. Should airlines wish to exceed these requirements, the FAA cannot prohibit them from doing so.
You need to present identification at an airport; you have no right to travel by air anonymously, airports are public places and noone has any right to expect not to be exposed to surveillance in this context.
Actually, you do NOT need to present identification at the airport. There's an FAA directive requiring them to ask for indentification, but you aren't legally required to give it and they can't stop you from boarding the plane if you don't have ID. There are some people who simply don't have a picture ID for whatever reason, and others who choose not to show it, but they are still able to travel.
If you want to travel without ID, allow plenty of extra time to argue with the airline employees. Note that your carry-on bags are likely to be searched by hand - removing everything and putting it back - and your checked luggage will be set aside and passenger-matched, meaning they will wait to make sure you are getting on the plane before they put your bags on it.
Foreign aid is rarely a good thing
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More WTC News
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I've seen ordinary Egyptians asked on the street, and most of them said US had this coming and they thank bin-laden for this.
Go figure, egypt gets billions of dollars of support from US.
What makes you think our aid to Egypt benefits ordinary Egyptians?
We give aid to foreign governments that helps those governments stay in power by letting them reward friends and buy tools of repression. This is rarely to the benefit of the average citizen.
It's time...to get serious about figuring out why the USA is so thoroughly hated and then figuring out how to gain, if not friendly terms, neutral terms with other nations/cultures/peoples.
One reason other cultures hate us is that we are a bully. We are willing to bomb other countries on the flimsiest of pretexts. When it turns out we've made a mistake, we rarely admit error but instead search around for excuses to justify our policy or ignore it and hope the problem goes away.
Key case in point: Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmeceutical factory in 1998. We initially claimed it was connected to Osama bin Laden and used to fabricate nerve gas, but there doesn't seem to have been any evidence to support that theory. So the upshot is that we bombed another country with which we were not at war, destroying an important part of their infrastructure. We did not apologize or try to mitigate the damage done in any way.
If any other country did that, we'd call that a terrorist act.
We have blood on our hands. We have often trained terrorists, supported repressive regimes, killed civilians, and bombed civilian targets. The Arab world notices such things and doesn't give us credit for having good intentions. That's why we are hated. If we want to stop being hated, we need to stop stationing troops in countries around the world and doling out "foreign aid" to countries around the world. "Free trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none," a wise man once said. A defense policy that focused merely on defending Americans in America would make us a whole lot safer.
To put it another way: there's a reason that nobody ever rhetorically calls Switzerland "the Great White Satan."
There are multiple "black boxes" found on aircraft that are used as data recorders. These are typically manufactured from stainless steel. The boxes are no longer black but painted high visibility orange or red to aid in their recovery in the event of an accident.
Incidentally, most of what the "black boxes" measure has to do with figuring out what the plane was doing rather than what the pilots are doing and saying.
Last time I've been to the arcades, all there was fit into three categories: 1) 3D fighting games, 2) 3D racing games, 3) 3D shooting games.
Take another look! In addition to the categories you cite, the latest imports include: (1) dancing games like Dance Dance Revolution (jump around on a big grid of buttons) and Para Para Paradise (wave your arms in the air). (2) Distance motion-capture games like Mocap Boxing and that Police Trainer game where you duck to avoid being shot. (3) Music games like Guitar Freak and Drum Freak where you play simplified instrumentals to impress your friends. (4) simulations of sports such as skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, and beach volleyball.
Most of these games rely on expensive, sophisticated controllers and produce a much better arcade experience than is practical to reproduce at home.
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out the Sunnyvale Golfland Arcade as a preview of good things to come. They are on top of this trend to the point of importing the Korean version of games when the US versions are slow to arrive.
programmers in XP projects are capable of writing ugly software.
Yes, and XP works anyway.
At a previous job at a company which shall remain nameless, we tried to adopt XP. Hired a couple guys who were into it. Sent all the programmers to official XP seminars. The plan was to do our next-generation server using Smalltalk, replacing an existing system written in C.
It didn't work. After many delays and much miscommunication it became clear it was going to take too long to produce a product solid enough to replace what we had, if that ever happened at all. Eventually the company abandoned the whole project and went back to the old ways of doing things, fired all the XP guys.
What was the literacy rate in this country before public schools?
In several states it was higher than it is today and in all states it was rapidly improving. There's no reason to think that government-run schools did anything to improve the rate at which literacy was improving.
The modern common school was introduced in the US around 1840; compulsory schooling legislation was first introduced around 1890. Prior to 1840 in some of the northern states the literacy rate was 99% prior to the introduction of the modern government-run common school, and in all states it was already trending in that direction.
A brief google search on terms such as "literacy 1840" found a relevant partisan essay on the subject by Sheldon Richman and David B. Kopel called "End Compulsory Schooling". Here's the relevant part:
-=-=-=-
What Things Were Like before Compulsory Attendance
The defenders of public education have led us to believe that
compulsory attendance is necessary to a literate, educated
citizenry. They imply that before the state governments
established school system, only the elite were educated and that
poverty or parental neglect caused many children to be
illiterate. It is not so.
The public schools were not established to make up for any
deficiency in people's ability to learn to read, write, do
arithmetic, and acquire knowledge of other subjects. Educator
Robert A. Peterson has noted that from the middle of the 17th
century to the middle of the 19th century "public schools as
we know them were virtually non-existent. "In these two
centuries," however, "America produced several
generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid
the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of
freedom and self-government."(5)
As Jacob Duche put it in 1772,"Almost every man is a
reader."(6)
The proponents of public schools seem to believe that without
government compulsion, many parents would not look at after the
education of their children. But Jack High and Jerome Ellig found
that
Private education was widely demanded in the late 18th and
19th centuries in Great Britain and America. The private supply
of education was highly responsive to that demand, with the
consequence that large numbers of children from all classes of
society received several years of education.(7)
Contemporary observers tell the same story. After researching
education among the working-class, the British economist James
Mill, in an 1813 article in the Edinburgh Review, wrote:
We can ourselves speak decidedly as to the rapid progress
which the love of education is making among the lower orders in
England. Even around London, in a circle of fifty miles radius,
which is far from the most instructed and virtuous part of the
kingdom, there is hardly a village that has not something of a
school; and not many children of either sex who are not taught
more or less, reading and writing. We have met with families in
which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but
potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum
was provided to send them to school.(8)
That was written well before England, in 1880, adopted
universal compulsory elementary schooling.
High and Ellig also show that government involvement in
education "displaced private education, sometimes
deliberately stifling it [and] altered the kind of education that
was offered, mainly to the detriment of the poorer working
classes."(9)
Historian Robert Seybolt has written that private education
was dynamic and responsive to families, as one would expect when
parents control the spending:
In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded
rapidly. Their schools were commercial ventures, and,
consequently, competition was keen.... Popular demands, and the
element of competition, forced them not only to add new courses
of instruction, but constantly to improve their methods and
technique of instruction.(10)
Schooling in that early period was plentiful, innovative, and
well within the reach of the common people. What effect did it
have? High and Ellig note that 80 percent of New Yorkers leaving
wills could sign their names. Other data show that from 1650 to
1795, male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent; female
literacy went from 30 to 45 percent. Between 1800 and 1840,
literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97
percent. And in the South during the same span, the rate grew
from 50-60 percent to 81 percent.(11)
According to historian Carl F. Kaestle, "Literacy was
quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The
best generalization possible is that New York, like other
American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy
rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did
not depend primarily upon the schools."(12)
Indeed, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office reported that
before Massachusetts became the first state to force children to
go to school, literacy was at 98 percent; in 1990, the rate was
91 percent.(13)
Other indicators of the high rate of literacy are book sales
and the booming publishing trade in the colonies and young
nation. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold
120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting
the 20 percent who were slaves)--the equivalent of 10 million
copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of
under 20 million, Noah Webster's Spelling Book sold over
5 million copies. Novelist Walter Scott sold that many books
between 1813 and 1823, the equivalent of selling 60 million
copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper sold in the millions. And as former
teacher John Taylor Gatto notes, Scott's and Cooper's books are
not easy reading. Nor are TheFederalist Papers,
which were originally published in a newspaper for the common
people. European visitors to early nineteenth-century
America--such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de
Nemours--marveled at how well educated the people were.(14)
In the late 18th century, du Pont de Nemours wrote:
The United States are more advanced in their educational
facilities than most countries. They have a large number of
primary schools; and as their paternal affection protects young
children from working in the fields, it is possible to send them
to the school-master--a condition that does not prevail in
Europe.
Most young people, therefore, can read, write, and cipher....
In America, a great number of people read the Bible, and all the
people read a newspaper.(15)
High and Ellig sum up the experience of the 18th and 19th
centuries by noting that "the available evidence strongly
indicates that Americans of the period took an active interest in
education.... The private supply was extensive, not only in the
number of children served but in the spectrum of social classes
involved."(16)
Did attendance increase when governments began passing
compulsory-attendance laws? Professor West replies:
The laws that were actually established did not in fact secure
in the nineteenth century an education that was universal in the
sense of 100 per cent school attendance by all children of school
age. If, on the other hand, the term "universal" is
intended more loosely to mean something like, "most,"
"nearly everybody," or "over 90 per cent"
then we lack firm evidence to show that education was not
already universal prior to the establishment of laws to provide
schooling that was both compulsory and free.(17)
In other words, without command of the law, children went to
school.
Thus, the rise of public, or government, schools was not a
response to an inability on the part of society to provide for
the education of its children but rather a manifestation of what
later came to be called the "Progressive" mindset, the
belief that life increasingly needed to be subject to control by
experts and central government planning. As education historian
Joel Spring has written, "The primary result of common
school reform in the middle of the nineteenth century was not the
education of increasing percentages of children, but the creation
of new forms of school organization."(18)
The 'unschooling' method works when you have kids who are motivated to actually learn something, which just happens not to be the majority of kids.
The claim of the unschooling advocates is that all kids are naturally motivated to learn, they simply aren't motivated to learn exactly the topics you want them to on the exact timescale you want them to. But let them learn at their own pace, and they will learn what they need.
Traditional schools try to cram knowledge into kids' heads whether they like it or not. This is not terribly efficient or pleasant. It's like force-feeding a kid food rather than letting him eat at his own pace. Kids start out curious, and we train them to shut up and sit still and believe that learning is supposed to be hard work that is good for them rather than a form of play and source of useful information.
Others have said this better than I'm likely to. Here's Cedarwood Sudbury's Why Families Choose Us page:
Why Families Choose Us
In this section two parents tell why their children attend the school the school.
David Friedman, parent:
I went to a good private school run by a university, my wife to a good suburban public school. What we most remember is sitting
in class being bored. My most exciting in-school intellectual experience was arguing political philosophy with my best friend
--when we were supposed to be studying. My wife remembers spending her time drawing the world's most elaborate mazes for the girl
next to her to solve.
One fundamental mistake embedded in the schools we went to--and the schools most children still go to--was the idea that the way to
teach children is to sit them down and talk at them. The result is a classroom where a third of the students are behind and lost,
a third are ahead and bored, and at most a third are actually listening. I learned more about using the English language going through
Christie, Kipling, and whatever else the library offered at a rate of a book a day during summer vacation than in four years of English
class.
Six years ago I returned to my school for a class reunion and was brought up to date. What they seemed proudest of was how busy the
students were. The people running that school, like those running many elite schools today, seemed to subscribe to the "devil finds
work for idle hands" theory of education. Give the children enough homework, get them involved in enough activities, and they won1t
have time to do drugs or get pregnant. I doubt it works. The real consequence is to absorb the free time in which the children might
actually have learned something.
A second mistake is the idea of segregating children by age. When I was fourteen, intellectually precocious and socially retarded,
I should have been talking to eighteen-year-olds and playing with twelve-year-olds. The school provided few opportunities to do either.
Our children will not have to waste large parts of their childhood sitting down pretending to listen. Our daughter is, and our son
soon will be, going to a different kind of school.
Cedarwood Sudbury School differs from conventional schools in three important ways:
The school consists of rooms, books, computers, students, and staff. The books, computers, and staff are resources, available
to help the students learn what they want when they want. There are few classes, and those are voluntary. No student is required to sit and
listen, no student is told what he must learn.
Students currently range in age from five to fifteen. There is no attempt to segregate them by age. My seven-year-old daughter talks and plays
with other children of widely varying ages.
The school is run and its rules made by a School Meeting in which students and staff have one vote each. If one member of the school community
is accused by another of violating the rules, the case is tried before a disciplinary committee consisting of one staff member and three students.
Much of what happens in the school is done by groups, such as the Pet Corporation and the Art Corporation, created by students who want something
done--and do it.
How well does it work? Coming into the school, it feels more than anything else like a very large family. Big kids play with small kids carefully. At
one point my daughter told me about an outside game that one of the big kids had invented; with rules that allowed small kids to chase and catch
big kids, but not the other way around. People run around inside and out, argue with each other, play computer games and watch computer games, lie
around reading books.
Our school is too new to know how its students will turn out in the long term. But it is modeled on a successful experiment--the Sudbury Valley School,
which has been running in Framingham, Massachusetts for thirty years. Judging by the performance of Sudbury graduates, our children and their classmates
are at least as likely to go to college as if they went to a more conventional school--and a good deal more likely to start their own businesses.
If you think that might be how you want your child to grow up, call and come visit.
-David Friedman
Jean Williams-Ley, parent:
My son, seven-year-old Scott, has attended Cedarwood for three years. One day last year at home, I handed him a page of first-grade math
schoolwork. (I got it from volunteering at a local public school.) Scott was interested in doing the equations with me, so we did. Scott laughed out loud
when he said the equation of a number plus zero. He knew the answer and thought it was pretty silly to add nothing. I loved seeing his enthusiasm!
The structure of a conventional classroom suppresses this joy about ideas. Instead it pressures children to learn, and to show they are
learning by writing the correct answers. We at Sudbury schools believe that this pressure interferes with students' ability to learn. Instead, learning
at Sudbury schools is self-motivated, which is quicker, longer-lasting and more rewarding. Think of your own best learning experiences.
Cedarwood allows Scott to grow in all aspects of his life. He does not fit into the "age-appropriate" level in reading, writing, the
ability to express ideas, or social skills. Cedarwood lets him progress in each area at his own rate. He happens to be "ahead of grade level" in some
areas and ''behind" in others. But Cedarwood doesn't evaluate its students. It doesn't need to. Scott is completely capable of self-evaluation and,
like all normal children, knows his strengths, abilities, and where he needs work.
Does Cedarwood's freedom mean that the school allows the students to "run wild?" Well, Scott is held accountable for anti-social behavior
(if it happens) on a daily basis through the school's judicial system. Such behavior might include violating cleanliness standards or violating another
student's or staff member's rights. The school teaches responsibility in a way that conventional schools do not.
The idea of giving one adult complete power over my child for nine months is one I question. Children have the experience of adults making
plenty of decisions for them, as oftentimes we must. But adult taskmasters interfere with the process of learning. Only in the familiar hierarchical and
herding structure we all know as school, is the learning process so very restrictive of children. Much learning doesn't require this kind of structure
My child reads at school without being told to, for example, and he is not unique. In addition, Scott learns to deal with real-life situations such as
interpersonal negotiations and conflict. Many such situations arise during play, which is one reason experts consider child-directed play such a
valuable learning experience.
Sudbury schools are really schools of natural curiosity. In conventional schools, teachers sometimes do not have time to answer a student's
questions. All day long, Cedarwood students are free to find answers to their questions. I can't think of a better educational setting than one where
students interact with people of all ages who treat them as equals, where students can concentrate on things that interest them, and where there are people
available to help them and to discuss things with them.
-Jean Williams-Ley
Quite true. The experiment of throwing money at schools to make them better has been tried; it didn't work.
Summary from the above link:
"For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down."
It's a fascinating story; if you like the popular summary article I highly recommend reading the full Cato study too; you can find that here.
(regarding the ishmael essay): the guy is a troll. He questions the education system and the need for an education system but his idea that we should all piss off back to the Stone Age is moronic
Did you read the whole essay? The Stone Age idea was a brief tangential thought-experiment, not a serious proposal. His proposal is "unschooling": that you let kids learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it rather than forcing them to sit at a small desk in a large room and be talked at for 6 hours a day according to a fixed curriculum. Unschooling is a valid method; it works.
If you're interested in these ideas you might also want to look at the Sudbury Method, which is basically Unschooling in a school setting .
You want to make schools better, give each teacher access to a support staff. One full time, to help guide the kids, grade, photocopy, prepare... Throw out the rule that principals have to have been teachers. Let any good leader come and run a school.
Why not throw out the rule that kids can't teach other kids? Then the teachers would have all the support staff they need. In a good Karate school the teacher teaches ten students who themselves teach ten students and so on down the line; you can have a student-teacher ratio of a thousand-to-one with more individualized attention than in a typical school setting. We shouldn't consider a kid competent in a subject until he has taught it to a younger kid.
The trouble is, the teachers unions wouldn't go for any of these radical changes.
To clarify, birds and insects do make use of stalls, yes, but they never crash as a result of stalling. They do not unintentionally stall.
How, exactly, do you know this? I find your assertion dubious. Are you sure that no sick or tired or hurt bird, perhaps flying in unexpectedly bad weather, has ever accidentally stalled?
I was simply making a point that it is foolish to assume that engineers are going to do "better" than nature, almost inspite of nature.
And I was making the point that the example you used doesn't work. In the case of flight, engineers did do "better" than nature, much better. Compared to birds, planes can travel farther without stopping, they can travel higher, they can travel faster, they can travel safely through more extreme weather conditions, and they can carry more. All of those constitute "better".
What's more, planes probably crash less often than birds do, although that's not really a fair comparison because birds are trying to do harder things than planes attempt. Birds often crash into plate-glass windows; planes rarely do that outside of the occasional Airplane movie. Birds sometimes crash into other things while trying to catch prey or avoid predators. Baby birds often fall out of nests whereas young planes rarely fall off of runways.:-)
Yes, it's useful to study nature. But it's foolish to assume we can't better meet our needs by improving on nature given that our purposes are different than those natural selection was trying to optimize for when it came up with whatever local maximums we see around us.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year's PC Expo is summarized here.
The next one will be held June 25-27 2002 at the Javits Convention Center in New York.
Apple has been known to fudge on this in the past. The Cube had an external power supply, a brick at the end of the power cord. I'll bet this thing does too.
Okay, that's useful information, but the question is, what does the encoded information say? And is it possible to defeat it? If stegdetect can recover the string and it's unencrypted or badly encrypted, it would be a good start to copy the same image on multiple color copiers at the same Kinko's, see what bits change in the resulting signature.
According to many links in an earlier /. story, color Xerox copy machines currently embed a serial number in every copy they make. So has anybody tried making a color copy of something, scanning it, and using stegdetect on the result?
I really miss Newton's handwriting recognition and the Newton Notepad application. If this were a real product I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Alas... -Glen Raphael (author of NewtPaint)
The other use of a gun is to defend oneself or others against being killed or harmed. That's why we issue guns to police officers. Not because we want the police to kill people, because we want the police to protect people. Private citizens need legal access to guns for the exact same reasons the bodyguards protecting the president or, heck, Britney Spears need access to them.
And since you don't need to fire a gun for its presence to be a useful deterrent, the presence of guns can actually act to reduce harm to humans. I'm not saying guns always reduce death and violence and harm, but they sometimes do, and that's all the pro-gun side really needs for the guns/nmap analogy to hold up.
According to the manufacturer's site:
They have an FAQ, and the tech is covered by US Patent #5,675,103.I got hooked on Dance Dance Revolution in the arcades of Hong Kong, and probably lost over ten pounds from that source alone. (I was doing it about an hour a day, several days a week). Now I have a high-end DDR pad at home and regularly exercise myself to near-exhaustion with it; this is a big part of how I stay in shape.
The arcades are full of exercise games these days. The Sunnyvale Golfland arcade has three DDR-influenced foot-movement games, two DDR-influenced arm-movement games (Para Para Paradise is one), and "Mo-Cap Boxing" which can be seriously exhausting if you're not in good shape. In other arcades I've seen several good bicycle games including PropCycle (a bike-powered hanglider), a whitewater rapids game where you paddle, and a martial arts game where you actually punch and kick to operate the characters on the screen.
A lot of these games are both good exercise and good fun. DDR in particular has worked for me now for about two years running.
It's high time more of these arcade amusements started to invade the home.
Okay, I looked up Brett Glass. In response to a recent question , he said the best way to use old PC hardware as a web server is to install FreeBSD. The last paragraph of his answer:
Brett also seems to have authored a paper called "Stopping Spam and Malware with Open Source", and presented it at this year's O'Reilly conference. Perhaps your info is out of date?
A relative of a friend of mine was a writer for ST:TNG. According to her, Wesley Crusher was a victim of the writers' strike. The writers would have regular meetings to discuss what's going on in the show, what worked or didn't work, what sort of overall direction they are trying for, what kind of scripts were needed right then. Then everybody would go home and pump out a script. In one of these idea meetings Wesley was a primary topic of conversation. There was a general consensus that "Gee, we've got this character here who could be interesting and we haven't really _done anything_ with him. What do we really know about Wesley?" Then all the writers went home and thought about scripts where the audience would get to know Wesley better. And what's the easiest way to develop a character on Star Trek? Have him save the ship! So the following week all the writers submitted scripts in which Wesley saves the ship.
This wouldn't normally be a problem. Normally they'd pick the best script or two to film, send back others for rework or postpone them for later in the season.
But then the writer's strike hit and there were no new scripts coming in. They had to film what they had, and what they had was an excess of "Wesley Saves the Ship!" So Wesley saved the ship again and again, and the audience got sick of it.
I don't see that there's really anything Wil could have done about this, but it still might be interesting to hear his thoughts on it.
See, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. You just referred to a "Judeo-Christian deity". But traditional Judaism doesn't include belief in an afterlife or belief that one will necessarily be rewarded for obeying god's rules. Heaven and hell are a Christian thing, and I'm not even sure all Christian denominations believe in it.
So the "he presides over an afterlife" characteristic is only relevant to the question of whether you believe in one sort of Christian god.
Many definitions of god are internally inconsistent, but there are a few that aren't. For instance, Baruch Spinoza's "god as Universe" exists by definition. If god is defined as "everything in the universe", then the question of "does god exist" is reduced to the question of "does the universe exist." I feel a lot more confident answering yes to the latter question than the former one.
That's a pretty good approximation of my own position, but I don't think "non-cognitivist" is the right term for it. Here's a pretty good essay on non-cognitivism, which is the view that ethical statements have no meaning other than as a description of how we feel or what we want others to do.
My view is that the term "god" lacks coherence; it is not well enough defined that one can meaningfully say much about it. In a pluralistic society, the question "Does god exist?" makes no sense without some clarification as to which God the question is about and what its characteristics are alleged to be.
When you get a sandwich, does Togo's have a right and duty to know who you are? Airlines are providing a service of transportation to paying customers. They need to figure out how to provide that service safely without endangering innocents, but it's certainly not obvious that forcing people to show a government-approved ID is a necessary or even particularly useful requirement to that goal.
Anyway, under the rules that were in effect before last week, airlines were not required to verify the identity of their customers, they were simply required to take extra-special care checking the baggage of passengers who don't show ID. Amusingly enough, merely asking what the rules are about ID is likely to get your carry-ons searched just as thoroughly as not having ID at all.
According to this page on FAA rules
Q. Do I have to have a photo ID to fly?
A. The FAA does not prohibit the airline from transporting any passenger who does not present a photo ID. Airlines have available to them alternate procedures that allow them to transport passengers without ID. However, some airlines choose not to use such procedures, which is their prerogative. However, for international travel, a passport is usually required and an entry or transit Visa may also be required. If the airlines were to allow you onto a plane without proper paperwork, including a Visa - the may be assessed a penalty of up to $10,000 by the country of entry. Airlines will deny boarding if your Passport is not in order (and usually valid for 6 months past date of travel) and your visa is stamped inside if required.
Q. Why didn't the airline ask for my ID?
A. The FAA does not require all passengers to present ID. The FAA requires that airlines apply additional security measures to passengers who are unable to produce ID upon request.
Q. Can an airline exceed minimum FAA requirements?
A. Yes. The FAA sets minimum requirements for airlines to follow. Should airlines wish to exceed these requirements, the FAA cannot prohibit them from doing so.
Actually, you do NOT need to present identification at the airport. There's an FAA directive requiring them to ask for indentification, but you aren't legally required to give it and they can't stop you from boarding the plane if you don't have ID. There are some people who simply don't have a picture ID for whatever reason, and others who choose not to show it, but they are still able to travel.
Here's a decent summary of how to travel without ID from somebody who has done it many times.
If you want to travel without ID, allow plenty of extra time to argue with the airline employees. Note that your carry-on bags are likely to be searched by hand - removing everything and putting it back - and your checked luggage will be set aside and passenger-matched, meaning they will wait to make sure you are getting on the plane before they put your bags on it.
What makes you think our aid to Egypt benefits ordinary Egyptians?
We give aid to foreign governments that helps those governments stay in power by letting them reward friends and buy tools of repression. This is rarely to the benefit of the average citizen.
I strongly recommend the book The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. The fact that we toss around "foreign aid" to every country in that region is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
One reason other cultures hate us is that we are a bully. We are willing to bomb other countries on the flimsiest of pretexts. When it turns out we've made a mistake, we rarely admit error but instead search around for excuses to justify our policy or ignore it and hope the problem goes away.
Key case in point: Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmeceutical factory in 1998. We initially claimed it was connected to Osama bin Laden and used to fabricate nerve gas, but there doesn't seem to have been any evidence to support that theory. So the upshot is that we bombed another country with which we were not at war, destroying an important part of their infrastructure. We did not apologize or try to mitigate the damage done in any way.
If any other country did that, we'd call that a terrorist act.
We have blood on our hands. We have often trained terrorists, supported repressive regimes, killed civilians, and bombed civilian targets. The Arab world notices such things and doesn't give us credit for having good intentions. That's why we are hated. If we want to stop being hated, we need to stop stationing troops in countries around the world and doling out "foreign aid" to countries around the world. "Free trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none," a wise man once said. A defense policy that focused merely on defending Americans in America would make us a whole lot safer.
To put it another way: there's a reason that nobody ever rhetorically calls Switzerland "the Great White Satan."
There are multiple "black boxes" found on aircraft that are used as data recorders. These are typically manufactured from stainless steel. The boxes are no longer black but painted high visibility orange or red to aid in their recovery in the event of an accident.
Incidentally, most of what the "black boxes" measure has to do with figuring out what the plane was doing rather than what the pilots are doing and saying.
Take another look! In addition to the categories you cite, the latest imports include: (1) dancing games like Dance Dance Revolution (jump around on a big grid of buttons) and Para Para Paradise (wave your arms in the air). (2) Distance motion-capture games like Mocap Boxing and that Police Trainer game where you duck to avoid being shot. (3) Music games like Guitar Freak and Drum Freak where you play simplified instrumentals to impress your friends. (4) simulations of sports such as skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, and beach volleyball.
Most of these games rely on expensive, sophisticated controllers and produce a much better arcade experience than is practical to reproduce at home.
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out the Sunnyvale Golfland Arcade as a preview of good things to come. They are on top of this trend to the point of importing the Korean version of games when the US versions are slow to arrive.
It didn't work. After many delays and much miscommunication it became clear it was going to take too long to produce a product solid enough to replace what we had, if that ever happened at all. Eventually the company abandoned the whole project and went back to the old ways of doing things, fired all the XP guys.
XP is not a panacea. It, too, can fail.
In several states it was higher than it is today and in all states it was rapidly improving. There's no reason to think that government-run schools did anything to improve the rate at which literacy was improving. The modern common school was introduced in the US around 1840; compulsory schooling legislation was first introduced around 1890. Prior to 1840 in some of the northern states the literacy rate was 99% prior to the introduction of the modern government-run common school, and in all states it was already trending in that direction.
A brief google search on terms such as "literacy 1840" found a relevant partisan essay on the subject by Sheldon Richman and David B. Kopel called "End Compulsory Schooling". Here's the relevant part:
The claim of the unschooling advocates is that all kids are naturally motivated to learn, they simply aren't motivated to learn exactly the topics you want them to on the exact timescale you want them to. But let them learn at their own pace, and they will learn what they need.
Traditional schools try to cram knowledge into kids' heads whether they like it or not. This is not terribly efficient or pleasant. It's like force-feeding a kid food rather than letting him eat at his own pace. Kids start out curious, and we train them to shut up and sit still and believe that learning is supposed to be hard work that is good for them rather than a form of play and source of useful information.
Others have said this better than I'm likely to. Here's Cedarwood Sudbury's Why Families Choose Us page:
Why Families Choose Us
In this section two parents tell why their children attend the school the school.
David Friedman, parent: I went to a good private school run by a university, my wife to a good suburban public school. What we most remember is sitting in class being bored. My most exciting in-school intellectual experience was arguing political philosophy with my best friend --when we were supposed to be studying. My wife remembers spending her time drawing the world's most elaborate mazes for the girl next to her to solve. One fundamental mistake embedded in the schools we went to--and the schools most children still go to--was the idea that the way to teach children is to sit them down and talk at them. The result is a classroom where a third of the students are behind and lost, a third are ahead and bored, and at most a third are actually listening. I learned more about using the English language going through Christie, Kipling, and whatever else the library offered at a rate of a book a day during summer vacation than in four years of English class. Six years ago I returned to my school for a class reunion and was brought up to date. What they seemed proudest of was how busy the students were. The people running that school, like those running many elite schools today, seemed to subscribe to the "devil finds work for idle hands" theory of education. Give the children enough homework, get them involved in enough activities, and they won1t have time to do drugs or get pregnant. I doubt it works. The real consequence is to absorb the free time in which the children might actually have learned something. A second mistake is the idea of segregating children by age. When I was fourteen, intellectually precocious and socially retarded, I should have been talking to eighteen-year-olds and playing with twelve-year-olds. The school provided few opportunities to do either. Our children will not have to waste large parts of their childhood sitting down pretending to listen. Our daughter is, and our son soon will be, going to a different kind of school. Cedarwood Sudbury School differs from conventional schools in three important ways: The school consists of rooms, books, computers, students, and staff. The books, computers, and staff are resources, available to help the students learn what they want when they want. There are few classes, and those are voluntary. No student is required to sit and listen, no student is told what he must learn. Students currently range in age from five to fifteen. There is no attempt to segregate them by age. My seven-year-old daughter talks and plays with other children of widely varying ages. The school is run and its rules made by a School Meeting in which students and staff have one vote each. If one member of the school community is accused by another of violating the rules, the case is tried before a disciplinary committee consisting of one staff member and three students. Much of what happens in the school is done by groups, such as the Pet Corporation and the Art Corporation, created by students who want something done--and do it. How well does it work? Coming into the school, it feels more than anything else like a very large family. Big kids play with small kids carefully. At one point my daughter told me about an outside game that one of the big kids had invented; with rules that allowed small kids to chase and catch big kids, but not the other way around. People run around inside and out, argue with each other, play computer games and watch computer games, lie around reading books. Our school is too new to know how its students will turn out in the long term. But it is modeled on a successful experiment--the Sudbury Valley School, which has been running in Framingham, Massachusetts for thirty years. Judging by the performance of Sudbury graduates, our children and their classmates are at least as likely to go to college as if they went to a more conventional school--and a good deal more likely to start their own businesses.If you think that might be how you want your child to grow up, call and come visit.
-David Friedman Jean Williams-Ley, parent: My son, seven-year-old Scott, has attended Cedarwood for three years. One day last year at home, I handed him a page of first-grade math schoolwork. (I got it from volunteering at a local public school.) Scott was interested in doing the equations with me, so we did. Scott laughed out loud when he said the equation of a number plus zero. He knew the answer and thought it was pretty silly to add nothing. I loved seeing his enthusiasm! The structure of a conventional classroom suppresses this joy about ideas. Instead it pressures children to learn, and to show they are learning by writing the correct answers. We at Sudbury schools believe that this pressure interferes with students' ability to learn. Instead, learning at Sudbury schools is self-motivated, which is quicker, longer-lasting and more rewarding. Think of your own best learning experiences. Cedarwood allows Scott to grow in all aspects of his life. He does not fit into the "age-appropriate" level in reading, writing, the ability to express ideas, or social skills. Cedarwood lets him progress in each area at his own rate. He happens to be "ahead of grade level" in some areas and ''behind" in others. But Cedarwood doesn't evaluate its students. It doesn't need to. Scott is completely capable of self-evaluation and, like all normal children, knows his strengths, abilities, and where he needs work. Does Cedarwood's freedom mean that the school allows the students to "run wild?" Well, Scott is held accountable for anti-social behavior (if it happens) on a daily basis through the school's judicial system. Such behavior might include violating cleanliness standards or violating another student's or staff member's rights. The school teaches responsibility in a way that conventional schools do not. The idea of giving one adult complete power over my child for nine months is one I question. Children have the experience of adults making plenty of decisions for them, as oftentimes we must. But adult taskmasters interfere with the process of learning. Only in the familiar hierarchical and herding structure we all know as school, is the learning process so very restrictive of children. Much learning doesn't require this kind of structure My child reads at school without being told to, for example, and he is not unique. In addition, Scott learns to deal with real-life situations such as interpersonal negotiations and conflict. Many such situations arise during play, which is one reason experts consider child-directed play such a valuable learning experience. Sudbury schools are really schools of natural curiosity. In conventional schools, teachers sometimes do not have time to answer a student's questions. All day long, Cedarwood students are free to find answers to their questions. I can't think of a better educational setting than one where students interact with people of all ages who treat them as equals, where students can concentrate on things that interest them, and where there are people available to help them and to discuss things with them. -Jean Williams-LeyQuite true. The experiment of throwing money at schools to make them better has been tried; it didn't work.
Summary from the above link:
"For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down." It's a fascinating story; if you like the popular summary article I highly recommend reading the full Cato study too; you can find that here.
the guy is a troll. He questions the education system and the need for an education system but his idea that we should all piss off back to the Stone Age is moronic
Did you read the whole essay? The Stone Age idea was a brief tangential thought-experiment, not a serious proposal. His proposal is "unschooling": that you let kids learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it rather than forcing them to sit at a small desk in a large room and be talked at for 6 hours a day according to a fixed curriculum. Unschooling is a valid method; it works.
If you're interested in these ideas you might also want to look at the Sudbury Method, which is basically Unschooling in a school setting .
Why not throw out the rule that kids can't teach other kids? Then the teachers would have all the support staff they need. In a good Karate school the teacher teaches ten students who themselves teach ten students and so on down the line; you can have a student-teacher ratio of a thousand-to-one with more individualized attention than in a typical school setting. We shouldn't consider a kid competent in a subject until he has taught it to a younger kid.
The trouble is, the teachers unions wouldn't go for any of these radical changes.
How, exactly, do you know this? I find your assertion dubious. Are you sure that no sick or tired or hurt bird, perhaps flying in unexpectedly bad weather, has ever accidentally stalled?
I was simply making a point that it is foolish to assume that engineers are going to do "better" than nature, almost inspite of nature.
And I was making the point that the example you used doesn't work. In the case of flight, engineers did do "better" than nature, much better. Compared to birds, planes can travel farther without stopping, they can travel higher, they can travel faster, they can travel safely through more extreme weather conditions, and they can carry more. All of those constitute "better".
What's more, planes probably crash less often than birds do, although that's not really a fair comparison because birds are trying to do harder things than planes attempt. Birds often crash into plate-glass windows; planes rarely do that outside of the occasional Airplane movie. Birds sometimes crash into other things while trying to catch prey or avoid predators. Baby birds often fall out of nests whereas young planes rarely fall off of runways. :-)
Yes, it's useful to study nature. But it's foolish to assume we can't better meet our needs by improving on nature given that our purposes are different than those natural selection was trying to optimize for when it came up with whatever local maximums we see around us.