Actually what you propose would be completely unethical.
Example - If science some day proves that people with blue eyes have faster reaction times than people with brown eyes, and we don't factor that into hiring decisions where reaction times can mean the difference between life and death simply because it would be politically incorrect to do so, then you are making all of society suffer an injustice just because you don't want to make people uncomfortable.
As the husband of a teacher I can tell you I would VASTLY PREFER my wife having 2 weeks off a season instead of one bulk summer break. It would make family trips in the spring or winter so much simpler.
People often forget that while teachers do get the whole summer off, they get ZERO flexible vacation days. This can be painful when you want to take say a random long weekend away.
The problem with having lots of devices that do less instead of smaller numbers of devices that do more is the power use. On average every little wall-wart product you plug into your house costs you between $5 - $15 a month to run. The more of them you run the more they cost you a year. If you have one little device that does multiple jobs, it saves you money.
Sure of course there will always be a small subset of jobs in industry that need this. But the idea that it provides inherent value to all CS is wrong. Calculus has nothing to do with CS at all in reality.
There are also lots of jobs in industry that need high levels of security domain knowledge or networking domain knowledge, but the stuff we need is not even taught in university let alone required for a degree so your example really has no meaning.
I don't know what you consider "high level math", but if it is the same thing I am thinking of, I totally disagree with you.
I've been in the industry for over a decade, and have used the calculus and statistics required for my CS degree precisely never. And honestly there are hardly any professions that need either of these disciplines. Yes you should know some VERY BASIC statistics but the idea that everyone needs a university-level course in it is flawed.
IMO in CS degrees, the time spent on these courses would be much better spent on more algorithms courses and courses on actual development practice, both of which are VERY lacking with people coming out of university nowadays.. theyre' all hot-shot python hackers but have no idea what the difference between a linked list and an array list is.
Actually, Firefox has one huge advantage over Chrome - their continued support of NPAPI. Chrome dropped NPAPI as of May, and along with it support for Java plugins. Like them or not, Java plugins are used in HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of huge enterprises for internal applications. By dropping NPAPI support, Chrome basically gave a big middle finger to all these enterprises.
I work for one of these huge companies. A bunch of our internal systems requires the use of Java plugins via NPAPI - and there is no way they are going to spend hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars to replace all of these internal applications, when Chrome was never an officially supported browser in the first place.
Since Chrome dropped NPAPI, I can no longer use any of these applications in it, so I am now back to Firefox for them. And if I am going to run Firefox for some things, I am going to run it for everything, because I frankly don't have the time or patience to run deal with two web browsers every day.
First of all this article is nothing more than a giant slashvertisement.
Second of all, essentially every SSD on the market self-encrypts, because it is how the secure wipe feature of SSDs functions. Any SSD that is locked with a password is encrypted and unreadable. This is not a new or novel feature at all, and whoever decided this was newsworthy should not be posting articles to slashdot.
This guy is ignoring two very important factors here involved in purchasing of IT hardware in any enterprise.
- Hardware is a capital cost whose depreciation can be written off every year on your corporate income tax. After 4 years or so, your hardware actually now has near zero actual capital value to the company. Thus, as long as a company believes they will be around to see the depreciation of the asset fully written down, it is of little advantage to sacrifice performance in order to save some inconsequential amount on the hardware. This is why companies always buy the latest and greatest.
- The money you spend on the system is just the one-time capital cost. The on-going costs - the electricity used, the maintenance costs, the costs of extending the warranty - these will all be substantially higher per unit computed with older systems than newer systems.
The idea that economic policy and social policy are tied at the hip in the two mainstream parties is ridiculous. Someone who supports conservative economic policy but liberal social policies, in any other country, has a mainstream party to get behind. In the US, they're essentially an outcast who has to decide which is more important to them, their personal values or what they think is the best direction for the economy, because voting for third parties is viewed as a lost vote.
Politics in the US needs drastic reform away from the two party system.
The model B has a lot more thought into the board layout. Having the power, and HDMI all on the same side of the board and the optional I/O also all on one other side, makes so much more sense and will allow much cleaner looking enclosures. Although.. I still wish they had done even MORE thought and out the I/O on the OPPOSITE side of the board where they have all the GPIO pins.
When Arthur came up here (Atlantic Canada), it took out the power for a few days.. heck some were without power for a week. While without power, all the big box stores were closed. However, small mom & pop shops stayed open, using a hand ledger and accepting cash. I was actually in one store buying supplies that was operating by candlelight.
Pretty sure (and the laws of physics would agree with me) that induction cooking methods will heat your pot far faster and more efficiently than gas, no matter what clever designs are achieved.
- It sits high on a wall in some common area, far from the cubicle of anyone who would want to use the thing for actual testing
- Many of devices are mounted so high you wouldn't even see them without a stepstool let alone be able to interact with them (see hilarious video http://tv.slashdot.org/video/?...)
- Almost all the devices are Google Play edition devices or Nexus devices and they're all using Chrome for testing, none using stock Browser or Firefox or Dolphin or any other browser. Hardly a good cross-section of devices or browsers for compatibility testing! It seems more like a PR stunt to increase Google device visibility. In fact they even say this outright! "We picked our devices mostly from Google Play Edition devices, and picked a few other fun and shiney net devices that would look cool on the wall"
I am sorry, I am not going to bother engaging in this line of discourse anymore. If you think any of this stuff is anything other than trivial, you have obviously been brainwashed by the security theatre proponents.
"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."
"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."
If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.
Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.
Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phone / tablet, it is the same story.
* Oh, other than XRay the damn thing, which is what the TSA does anyway do they not? I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.
At first I assumed that the people were stuck n a room for hours upon hours with nothing to do. Then I read...
"The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.
Is it just me or is it a very poor reflection on today's society if people can not just sit and think for 15 minutes?
For the record I would have ZERO problem doing this at all... in fact I could think for hours... although having a pencil and paper to keep track of ideas and plans would be helpful.
No matter what issue you want progress on, you can't advance that issue if there is a superPAC fighting you. Thus, all issues come secondary to the issue of eliminating the superPAC.
Slashdot Mirror
I mis-read and thought this said "A Thousand Killbots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes..."
Now THAT would be interesting!
www.reddit.com/r/floridaman is one of my favorite reddits.
'nuff said.
Actually what you propose would be completely unethical.
Example - If science some day proves that people with blue eyes have faster reaction times than people with brown eyes, and we don't factor that into hiring decisions where reaction times can mean the difference between life and death simply because it would be politically incorrect to do so, then you are making all of society suffer an injustice just because you don't want to make people uncomfortable.
It's not about giving the teachers time off, it is about giving students time off to, you know, have a childhood.
As the husband of a teacher I can tell you I would VASTLY PREFER my wife having 2 weeks off a season instead of one bulk summer break. It would make family trips in the spring or winter so much simpler.
People often forget that while teachers do get the whole summer off, they get ZERO flexible vacation days. This can be painful when you want to take say a random long weekend away.
The problem with having lots of devices that do less instead of smaller numbers of devices that do more is the power use. On average every little wall-wart product you plug into your house costs you between $5 - $15 a month to run. The more of them you run the more they cost you a year. If you have one little device that does multiple jobs, it saves you money.
Sure of course there will always be a small subset of jobs in industry that need this. But the idea that it provides inherent value to all CS is wrong. Calculus has nothing to do with CS at all in reality.
There are also lots of jobs in industry that need high levels of security domain knowledge or networking domain knowledge, but the stuff we need is not even taught in university let alone required for a degree so your example really has no meaning.
I don't know what you consider "high level math", but if it is the same thing I am thinking of, I totally disagree with you.
I've been in the industry for over a decade, and have used the calculus and statistics required for my CS degree precisely never. And honestly there are hardly any professions that need either of these disciplines. Yes you should know some VERY BASIC statistics but the idea that everyone needs a university-level course in it is flawed.
IMO in CS degrees, the time spent on these courses would be much better spent on more algorithms courses and courses on actual development practice, both of which are VERY lacking with people coming out of university nowadays.. theyre' all hot-shot python hackers but have no idea what the difference between a linked list and an array list is.
Actually, Firefox has one huge advantage over Chrome - their continued support of NPAPI. Chrome dropped NPAPI as of May, and along with it support for Java plugins. Like them or not, Java plugins are used in HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of huge enterprises for internal applications. By dropping NPAPI support, Chrome basically gave a big middle finger to all these enterprises.
I work for one of these huge companies. A bunch of our internal systems requires the use of Java plugins via NPAPI - and there is no way they are going to spend hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars to replace all of these internal applications, when Chrome was never an officially supported browser in the first place.
Since Chrome dropped NPAPI, I can no longer use any of these applications in it, so I am now back to Firefox for them. And if I am going to run Firefox for some things, I am going to run it for everything, because I frankly don't have the time or patience to run deal with two web browsers every day.
First of all this article is nothing more than a giant slashvertisement.
Second of all, essentially every SSD on the market self-encrypts, because it is how the secure wipe feature of SSDs functions. Any SSD that is locked with a password is encrypted and unreadable. This is not a new or novel feature at all, and whoever decided this was newsworthy should not be posting articles to slashdot.
This guy is ignoring two very important factors here involved in purchasing of IT hardware in any enterprise.
- Hardware is a capital cost whose depreciation can be written off every year on your corporate income tax. After 4 years or so, your hardware actually now has near zero actual capital value to the company. Thus, as long as a company believes they will be around to see the depreciation of the asset fully written down, it is of little advantage to sacrifice performance in order to save some inconsequential amount on the hardware. This is why companies always buy the latest and greatest.
- The money you spend on the system is just the one-time capital cost. The on-going costs - the electricity used, the maintenance costs, the costs of extending the warranty - these will all be substantially higher per unit computed with older systems than newer systems.
If this means I have to switch to an iPhone for my work phone, I am against this.
If this means I can ditch this giant Lenovo brick for a Powerbook during my next upgrade cycle, then I am all for this
Not sure which of the two would win, they are battling in my head...
The idea that economic policy and social policy are tied at the hip in the two mainstream parties is ridiculous. Someone who supports conservative economic policy but liberal social policies, in any other country, has a mainstream party to get behind. In the US, they're essentially an outcast who has to decide which is more important to them, their personal values or what they think is the best direction for the economy, because voting for third parties is viewed as a lost vote.
Politics in the US needs drastic reform away from the two party system.
The model B has a lot more thought into the board layout. Having the power, and HDMI all on the same side of the board and the optional I/O also all on one other side, makes so much more sense and will allow much cleaner looking enclosures. Although.. I still wish they had done even MORE thought and out the I/O on the OPPOSITE side of the board where they have all the GPIO pins.
When Arthur came up here (Atlantic Canada), it took out the power for a few days.. heck some were without power for a week. While without power, all the big box stores were closed. However, small mom & pop shops stayed open, using a hand ledger and accepting cash. I was actually in one store buying supplies that was operating by candlelight.
I am pretty sure that in Canada > 75% of transactions are made with plastic, easily. It may be more in the 85% range.
Pretty sure (and the laws of physics would agree with me) that induction cooking methods will heat your pot far faster and more efficiently than gas, no matter what clever designs are achieved.
- It sits high on a wall in some common area, far from the cubicle of anyone who would want to use the thing for actual testing
- Many of devices are mounted so high you wouldn't even see them without a stepstool let alone be able to interact with them (see hilarious video http://tv.slashdot.org/video/?...)
- Almost all the devices are Google Play edition devices or Nexus devices and they're all using Chrome for testing, none using stock Browser or Firefox or Dolphin or any other browser. Hardly a good cross-section of devices or browsers for compatibility testing! It seems more like a PR stunt to increase Google device visibility. In fact they even say this outright! "We picked our devices mostly from Google Play Edition devices, and picked a few other fun and shiney net devices that would look cool on the wall"
I am sorry, I am not going to bother engaging in this line of discourse anymore. If you think any of this stuff is anything other than trivial, you have obviously been brainwashed by the security theatre proponents.
Relevant. Must-read short story if you haven't.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."
"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."
If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.
Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.
Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phone / tablet, it is the same story.
* Oh, other than XRay the damn thing, which is what the TSA does anyway do they not? I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.
At first I assumed that the people were stuck n a room for hours upon hours with nothing to do. Then I read...
"The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.
Is it just me or is it a very poor reflection on today's society if people can not just sit and think for 15 minutes?
For the record I would have ZERO problem doing this at all... in fact I could think for hours... although having a pencil and paper to keep track of ideas and plans would be helpful.
Or you, you know, saw the film Enemy of the State 16 years ago and knew even then it wasn't far off the mark.
Yes it did you just weren't paying attention.
No matter what issue you want progress on, you can't advance that issue if there is a superPAC fighting you. Thus, all issues come secondary to the issue of eliminating the superPAC.