Why do you need to encourage anybody into a particular field in high school? Shouldn't they decide for themselves what they want to do?
I think the logic behind all this is that people should decide for themselves. Girls are pushed away from IT careers by pressures of various sorts, and we need to remind them that if they want to go into IT, then they can.
That's the logic, I say. I didn't say I agreed with it. After all, in my experience, those most successful in computing in the long run, are already heavily into it by the start of high school.
So whether we ought to be pushing girls in this direction or not, high school is far too late.
In any case, as many posters have noted, there are too many IT people around, at least in the U.S. If we want to change the gender balance in IT, we should not encourage women from going into the field; we should discourage men.
The meter is already defined in terms of the speed of light (the distance light travels in the vacuum in a certain number of seconds), so your question comes a little late.
The real question is how they express changes in the speed of light, now that it has been fixed in terms of meters per second.
... 70% said that firms were not doing enough to keep their data secure.
So what? What did you expect them to say?
No one wants to sound like an idiot when the friendly neighborhood pollster comes by.
What really matters is not how concerned people say they are about security, but whether they put their money where their mouth is. Do they actually give info to companies and make actual purchases?
Plenty of people do.
Does this poll indicate real reasons why online commerce is not more popular, or does it just let people say things that make them feel intelligent?
So maybe people aren't shopping at Amazon because they are concerned about security, or maybe they like the feel of books, or maybe it's just habit, or maybe Amazon has pretty well saturated the market.
From the BBC article: The challenge for banks is to provide the customer with something that improves security but balances that with usability."
Sadly, if the poll actually does represent reality, then the real challenge is for banks to provide the customer with something that makes them feel secure but balances with usability.
I'm not liable for any $$ amount on my credit card or my debit.
Ladies and gentlemen: this is why you shouldn't trust any legal advice obtained from Slashdot.
I assume the writer meant "any fraudulent $$ amount". Of course, this wasn't actually advice. Regardless, it often works anyway.
In particular, U.S. law limits liability for credit card fraud to $50 if reported quickly.
Many banks (like mine) limit it to $0. In any case, regardless of the stated policy, I have never run across a bank that required me to actually pay that $50. If they did, then I would pay it, and never do business with them again. They know that, and they can generally be trusted to act in their own best interest. If not, well, I'm out $50. Once.
There is a serious falacy here, but people are not catching what it is.
Consider the statement "Classical music is better than modern [name your genre] music."
To "prove" this, people go to a music store, grab some random stuff from two categories and compare. And you know what? The classical turns out to be better. Almost always. Why? Because it's the best music selected from centuries of composing. While the modern stuff is whatever some bozo recorded last week.
In reality, there were plenty of worthless classical composers, and many fine composers still had their off days. But no one records and sells the bad stuff from the old days.
Now replace "modern music" with "blogs".
To do a fair comparison with the content of a random blog with a book (say), compare it with the content of a random book submitted to a publisher for consideration. Not a random published book,
certainly not a random book from a library, and absolutely not your favorite books.
Now notice that
no one makes you read bad blogs, and
plenty of people go to a lot of work to point out good blogs.
So you don't have to waste your time with the
trash... and the whole argument falls apart.
Quoting from "The Internet Is Shit" (emphasis mine):
All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite hole of data, unfiltered and over-appreciated. In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written.... We need to start again. We need to stop saying how wonderful things are. We need to openly, truthfully and respectfully admit that the internet itself, in almost all of what's been done with it, is shit.
Indeed.
But the key word here is "unfiltered".
From the earliest days of the web, people have posted pages of links. Why?
To point others to the good stuff.
In short, to filter.
Usenet is in such a mess because it has poor filtering mechanisms.
People love Google because it is a very good filter.
People hate Spam because it is hard to filter.
People love good blogs because they recursively filter each other.
And the whole point of Slashdot is a new way of filtering.
So, yes, 99.999% of the internet is shit, but that doesn't matter if you are only looking at the good 0.001%. We don't need to start over; we need to filter better. And we are doing so. It is much easier to find things on the net than in was 10 years ago. There is more crap on the net, though, so, although our ability to filter is greater, the need for filtering is also greater.
So look for better filters.
Create them.
Use them.
Share them with others.
Because, contrary to what "The Internet is Shit" says, we can accept freedom of speech, and hide from its consequences at the same time.
Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_.
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.
Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.
As a EU citizen I'm allowed to buy anything from any EU country paying sales tax in the country from which I purchase the goods. It's a key part of the "free movement of goods and services" idea upon which the EU is founded.
To me, it seems as though trade between US states are more restricted than between EU countries. Is this correct?
[Hey, how about someone actually answering this guy's question?]
No, this is one area in which we're doing pretty well. In general, states can regulate trade within their own borders, and the federal govt. regulates interstate trade. With a couple of exceptions, like the restrictions on bringing fruit into California, trade in the U.S. is pretty darned free. And, as others have noted, alcohol and tobacco fall under different rules.
What is being dealt with here is tax evasion. There was a legitimate tax on cigarette sales, which was not paid. So the people owe taxes, the same as if they had bought something without paying the proper tax in the EU.
In short, the aricle is not really about free trade.
Sam Greenblatt, a member of the OSDL board, was quoted as saying something very unclear: "Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL...".
EULAs have gotten out of hand. Many of them have language in there that doesn't pertain to anything related with the product at all. It is in there because no one wants to pay the lawyer another couple hours of billing time to review any modifications.
My favorite example of this comes from Apple. For years, the license for Apple operating systems explicitly stated that after a program was terminated, "Apple Software shall not be used by any other program."
A quick Google suggests that the phrase is still there.
So it has been illegal to use a Macintosh since, what, System 7.0? 1991 or so?
MCI is currently the largest ISP allowing (and some consider supporting) spammers to use their bandwidth.
This is just part of MCI's ongoing plan of treating people badly.
They were serious spammers even before there was such a thing as spam (phone spam).
Their phone sales people bullied, pressured, and sometimes (I have records of this) flat-out lied.
Their customer service people were rude and unhelpful.
Their executives lied over and over and over and over.
Never, never, NEVER do business with MCI. Not for phone service, not for internet service, not for calling cards. Never.
And if Verizon buys MCI, then watch them carefully. Are they going to keep MCI liars and criminals around? Are they going to continue unethical MCI policies? If they do, then Verizon has effectively become MCI, and they should be avoided like the plague.
I hereby officially release the following original musical compositions:
Composition #1: Play middle C. Rest 1 second. Play middle C.
Composition #2: Play middle C. Rest 2 seconds. Play middle C.
Composition #3: Play middle C. Rest 3 seconds. Play middle C.
Generally, for each positive integer n,
Composition #n: Play middle C. Rest n seconds. Play middle C.
I don't know how many terrabytes of released music exist in the world, but I imagine it's a finite number.
Another significant point to consider is this: a truly random sequence is by definition infinite and it contains all possible subsequences of finite length.
Let's not confuse a mathematical definition with the common usage of a word. Further, there is more than one mathematical definition in use.
To the man on the street, "random" would mean chosen according to no rule whatsoever, and there fore completely unpredicable. Related to this is Knuth's approach, relying on (possibly unspecified) statistical tests. Others call a finite sequence "random" if it is its own shortest description, with variations on this idea being used for infinite sequences.
In practice, none of these is achievable by deterministic algorithmic methods. Thus, when we are being precise, we call sequences generated in this way "pseudorandom", if they are intended to mimic random sequences.
In any case, one must specify a definition before getting as precise as you have in your message.
Opensource is a licenceing method, not a way for people to work together.
People do talk about the "open source development model" (Google that string if you don't believe me). Plenty of open source software is not developed in accordance with that model, so strictly speaking, "open source development" is a misnomer. However, the terminology is still used that way.
What does it mean in that context? An important feature is that anyone can contribute, although there may be some overall organization (reviews, moderation, whatever).
Now apply these ideas to news and the spread of information more generally. Compare your favorite open source development project with MS Word.
Now compare your favorite blog, with all its feedback, to ABC News. The relationships are similar.
I think it's clear that blogging is not quite there yet. Plenty of open-source projects have no single clear leader. Just about every blog does. But we're getting there.
I have noticed this myself.... most blogs are turning in to spamblogs [....]
Blogs were originally meant to be diaries and driven by either pseudo journalism for fun or just a way to rant about topics the owner loved to talk about.
Well, who cares what something was "meant to be". We can do whatever we want with the net. That's called "freedom".
In particular, bloggers have the freedom to write crap for money.
And we have the freedom not to waste time reading crap.
The challenge now is not to get rid of spamblogs. That is trampling on others' freedom, and, in any case, it's a lost cause.
The real challenge is to find ways to find quality information quickly and easily.
Let's face it, sticking people or anything else on top of a big firecracker is always going to be really dangerous and really expensive. The space elevator will be cheap (over the long haul) and very safe in comparison.
That "safe" part is the problem. Yes, trips on a space elevator should be very safe. But what about the elevator itself? The thing would be in an incredible amount of tension. Cut it is just the right place (with a bomb, or a collision with a well placed orbiting object) and the bottom part falls. Due to Coriolis force, it does not fall straight down.
If it breaks up, then BIG pieces could hit just about anywhere near the equator. If it stays in one piece, it could still wrap all the way around the earth.
We're talking about the mega-disaster to end all mega-disasters here. Any proposal that does not deal with this up-front is worthless.
Believe me, if the auto industry wanted to make bullet proof firmware, the tools are out there (think Mars Rover and VxWorks for example).
You're right; firmware is the problem.
But I don't know if space exploration is the best example to back up your claim about how things can be done better. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter, and its Death By Firmware Bug back in '99?
I've got a real problem with this entire concept. It encourages actions based on an evaluation of past patterns, which in turn discourages uniques and inovation. Also, people trusting their intuition and gut is a lot of what is wrong about people in the first place.
So because it's harmful, that means the human brain doesn't work this way?
Let's try to distinguish between questions of truth (Does the brain actually work this way?) and questions of desirability (If so, it this a positive human trait?).
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely. Those posters who have disagreed should compare IT with sales, management, medicine, acting, sports, teaching, etc., etc., etc.
I think the logic behind all this is that people should decide for themselves. Girls are pushed away from IT careers by pressures of various sorts, and we need to remind them that if they want to go into IT, then they can.
That's the logic, I say. I didn't say I agreed with it. After all, in my experience, those most successful in computing in the long run, are already heavily into it by the start of high school. So whether we ought to be pushing girls in this direction or not, high school is far too late.
In any case, as many posters have noted, there are too many IT people around, at least in the U.S. If we want to change the gender balance in IT, we should not encourage women from going into the field; we should discourage men.
The meter is already defined in terms of the speed of light (the distance light travels in the vacuum in a certain number of seconds), so your question comes a little late.
The real question is how they express changes in the speed of light, now that it has been fixed in terms of meters per second.
Actually, Hannum (not Barnum) said, "There are 1440 suckers born every day."
So what? What did you expect them to say? No one wants to sound like an idiot when the friendly neighborhood pollster comes by. What really matters is not how concerned people say they are about security, but whether they put their money where their mouth is. Do they actually give info to companies and make actual purchases? Plenty of people do. Does this poll indicate real reasons why online commerce is not more popular, or does it just let people say things that make them feel intelligent?
So maybe people aren't shopping at Amazon because they are concerned about security, or maybe they like the feel of books, or maybe it's just habit, or maybe Amazon has pretty well saturated the market.
From the BBC article: The challenge for banks is to provide the customer with something that improves security but balances that with usability."
Sadly, if the poll actually does represent reality, then the real challenge is for banks to provide the customer with something that makes them feel secure but balances with usability.
Ladies and gentlemen: this is why you shouldn't trust any legal advice obtained from Slashdot.
I assume the writer meant "any fraudulent $$ amount". Of course, this wasn't actually advice. Regardless, it often works anyway.
In particular, U.S. law limits liability for credit card fraud to $50 if reported quickly. Many banks (like mine) limit it to $0. In any case, regardless of the stated policy, I have never run across a bank that required me to actually pay that $50. If they did, then I would pay it, and never do business with them again. They know that, and they can generally be trusted to act in their own best interest. If not, well, I'm out $50. Once.
So, yes, who cares?
Consider the statement "Classical music is better than modern [name your genre] music."
To "prove" this, people go to a music store, grab some random stuff from two categories and compare. And you know what? The classical turns out to be better. Almost always. Why? Because it's the best music selected from centuries of composing. While the modern stuff is whatever some bozo recorded last week.
In reality, there were plenty of worthless classical composers, and many fine composers still had their off days. But no one records and sells the bad stuff from the old days.
Now replace "modern music" with "blogs".
To do a fair comparison with the content of a random blog with a book (say), compare it with the content of a random book submitted to a publisher for consideration. Not a random published book, certainly not a random book from a library, and absolutely not your favorite books.
Now notice that
- no one makes you read bad blogs, and
- plenty of people go to a lot of work to point out good blogs.
So you don't have to waste your time with the trashPerhaps you'll get flamed by people whose brains aren't big enough to disentangle the concepts of "politics" and "professionalism".
You mean a "cSe and dSist" letter?
All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite hole of data, unfiltered and over-appreciated. In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written. ... We need to start again. We need to stop saying how wonderful things are. We need to openly, truthfully and respectfully admit that the internet itself, in almost all of what's been done with it, is shit.
Indeed. But the key word here is "unfiltered".
From the earliest days of the web, people have posted pages of links. Why? To point others to the good stuff. In short, to filter.
Usenet is in such a mess because it has poor filtering mechanisms. People love Google because it is a very good filter. People hate Spam because it is hard to filter. People love good blogs because they recursively filter each other. And the whole point of Slashdot is a new way of filtering.
So, yes, 99.999% of the internet is shit, but that doesn't matter if you are only looking at the good 0.001%. We don't need to start over; we need to filter better. And we are doing so. It is much easier to find things on the net than in was 10 years ago. There is more crap on the net, though, so, although our ability to filter is greater, the need for filtering is also greater.
So look for better filters. Create them. Use them. Share them with others. Because, contrary to what "The Internet is Shit" says, we can accept freedom of speech, and hide from its consequences at the same time.
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.
Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.
To me, it seems as though trade between US states are more restricted than between EU countries. Is this correct?
[Hey, how about someone actually answering this guy's question?]
No, this is one area in which we're doing pretty well. In general, states can regulate trade within their own borders, and the federal govt. regulates interstate trade. With a couple of exceptions, like the restrictions on bringing fruit into California, trade in the U.S. is pretty darned free. And, as others have noted, alcohol and tobacco fall under different rules.
What is being dealt with here is tax evasion. There was a legitimate tax on cigarette sales, which was not paid. So the people owe taxes, the same as if they had bought something without paying the proper tax in the EU.
In short, the aricle is not really about free trade.
Maybe he meant something like the LGPL?
On the other hand, maybe this is what was meant.
My favorite example of this comes from Apple. For years, the license for Apple operating systems explicitly stated that after a program was terminated, "Apple Software shall not be used by any other program."
A quick Google suggests that the phrase is still there. So it has been illegal to use a Macintosh since, what, System 7.0? 1991 or so?
This is just part of MCI's ongoing plan of treating people badly.
Never, never, NEVER do business with MCI. Not for phone service, not for internet service, not for calling cards. Never.
And if Verizon buys MCI, then watch them carefully. Are they going to keep MCI liars and criminals around? Are they going to continue unethical MCI policies? If they do, then Verizon has effectively become MCI, and they should be avoided like the plague.
Composition #1: Play middle C. Rest 1 second. Play middle C.
Composition #2: Play middle C. Rest 2 seconds. Play middle C.
Composition #3: Play middle C. Rest 3 seconds. Play middle C.
Generally, for each positive integer n,
Composition #n: Play middle C. Rest n seconds. Play middle C.
I don't know how many terrabytes of released music exist in the world, but I imagine it's a finite number.
Not any more.
Let's not confuse a mathematical definition with the common usage of a word. Further, there is more than one mathematical definition in use.
To the man on the street, "random" would mean chosen according to no rule whatsoever, and there fore completely unpredicable. Related to this is Knuth's approach, relying on (possibly unspecified) statistical tests. Others call a finite sequence "random" if it is its own shortest description, with variations on this idea being used for infinite sequences.
In practice, none of these is achievable by deterministic algorithmic methods. Thus, when we are being precise, we call sequences generated in this way "pseudorandom", if they are intended to mimic random sequences. In any case, one must specify a definition before getting as precise as you have in your message.
People do talk about the "open source development model" (Google that string if you don't believe me). Plenty of open source software is not developed in accordance with that model, so strictly speaking, "open source development" is a misnomer. However, the terminology is still used that way.
What does it mean in that context? An important feature is that anyone can contribute, although there may be some overall organization (reviews, moderation, whatever).
Now apply these ideas to news and the spread of information more generally. Compare your favorite open source development project with MS Word. Now compare your favorite blog, with all its feedback, to ABC News. The relationships are similar.
I think it's clear that blogging is not quite there yet. Plenty of open-source projects have no single clear leader. Just about every blog does. But we're getting there.
Well, who cares what something was "meant to be". We can do whatever we want with the net. That's called "freedom". In particular, bloggers have the freedom to write crap for money. And we have the freedom not to waste time reading crap.
The challenge now is not to get rid of spamblogs. That is trampling on others' freedom, and, in any case, it's a lost cause. The real challenge is to find ways to find quality information quickly and easily.
That "safe" part is the problem. Yes, trips on a space elevator should be very safe. But what about the elevator itself? The thing would be in an incredible amount of tension. Cut it is just the right place (with a bomb, or a collision with a well placed orbiting object) and the bottom part falls. Due to Coriolis force, it does not fall straight down. If it breaks up, then BIG pieces could hit just about anywhere near the equator. If it stays in one piece, it could still wrap all the way around the earth.
We're talking about the mega-disaster to end all mega-disasters here. Any proposal that does not deal with this up-front is worthless.
How pointless. I've never run across any products with that problem.
</sarcasm>
You're right; firmware is the problem. But I don't know if space exploration is the best example to back up your claim about how things can be done better. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter, and its Death By Firmware Bug back in '99?
The option already is available. You don't have to wait for someone else to write it.
So because it's harmful, that means the human brain doesn't work this way?
Let's try to distinguish between questions of truth (Does the brain actually work this way?) and questions of desirability (If so, it this a positive human trait?).