Uh, no. I own neither iPhone nor iPad nor iPod nor iAnything else, and detest using my boss's button-less Apple mouse (which incidentally she has set up to scroll in an inverted way---just to fuck with me, I'm pretty sure).
My daughter was 2 (well, 23 months old, to be precise) when I set up her computer. I started her off with a typical, full-sized Microsoft laser mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. It was very confusing for her. I eventually ordered this mouse. It was a much better fit. FWIW, Amazon's reviewers overwhelmingly agree.
I'm sure she could handle a wheel-mouse now without trouble. But back then it made a big difference.
Qimo is great. It's a whole Linux distro geared toward young children, and includes Childsplay, GCompris, and TuxPaint.
I set it up an old P4 for my daughter when she turned 2. I remember sitting next to her and watching in awe as, over the course of 20 minutes of playing this "uncover the animal picture" game, she became proficient in using the mouse. Almost two years later, she is still playing very good, fun, appropriate, challenging games. She has always loved the painting program, which is really cool and has all kinds of fun things (e.g., draw with cats!). She opens programs by herself, chooses her own games, knows how to shut it down, etc.
Advice:
Get a one button mouse! You can find a small one geared towards a child's hand. It makes a world of difference when getting started to not have the confusion of two buttons and a scroll wheel.
Get some cheap speakers for it, since the games (and even the painting program) have lots of sounds.
And of course, make computer time a together activity. Sit next to her, actively watching, encouraging, explaining, and participating.
so what that means is that *regardless* of the fact that CISC instructions are translated into RISC ones, the main part of the CPU has to run at a *much* faster clock rate than an equivalent RISC processor, just to keep up with decode rate.
I don't understand this reasoning.
If the backend can't keep up with the decode rate, say because
each CISC instruction is turning into a few RISC-equivalent micro-instructions, and
CISC instructions have an edge w.r.t. memory density, so you can keep more of them in the icache and have fewer stalls waiting for the next instruction to come from RAM.
Then aren't you winning?
You aren't stalled out trying to figure out what to do next.
Your execution units are busy doing productive work.
You can turn off the frontend fetch/decode stuff to save some power.
Obviously there has to be some balance. An anemic backend with an overpowered frontend will slow you down. But if the backend is reasonably powerful, it seems like you want to have it working as fast as it can, rather than idly waiting for the frontend to tell it what to do next.
Whatever folks think is gained from open source here is a lie. Why? Like it or not, you have no way to verify the open source code is what the machine is running.
Using computers for voting is just a disaster, open source or not.
Scantron-style forms can be processed very quickly, can't be subverted en masse, and can be verified by actual people. Using anything else just reeks of corruption.
Your counterpoint (if girls think this way then why don't boys) is so obvious that I'm surprised I hadn't considered it before.
I guess, well---when I was in high school, I was a socially-inept nerd who liked science-fiction and computer games. So, in my case, no, this perception of the field wouldn't have been any deterrent, as the dream of being popular had been fully crushed by the reality of American high-school education.:)
So maybe the real question, why aren't more high-school girls into... uh... whatever passes for star wars, chess club, dungeons and dragons, etc., these days. Maybe the answer to that question is the root cause we're looking for.
I wonder to what degree (if any) the cause might be related to the female perception of the males that inhabit the field.
In much of popular culture, the programmer seems to be that socially-inept, overweight nerd who lives in his parents' basement, covered in cheeto-dust, drinking mountain dew and playing computer games all day.
Should we be surprised if high-school- and college-aged girls, who presumably want to be popular and accepted by their peers, are not, on the average, eager to be associated with a profession/calling that is perceived in this way?
Emacs and firefox together do an awful lot of this:
- Emacs is hard to beat for Lisp development
- Emacs (and Lisp's REPL, for that matter) are good calculators
- Emacs shell mode is wonderful and replaces terminals
- Firefox does my email
- Most docs I work with are embedded in code, or are HTML or LaTeX, so they're easy to edit in Emacs
You're right that two buttons was an exaggeration. I do have some other buttons for XChat, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, and our cluster-monitoring GUI.
I probably think the window manager just isn't that important because the window managers I've used (gnome, kde, and xfce) always seem to be just fine.
For most of us, almost any window manager is good enough, and it's very hard to compete with good enough.
Even if some window manager X is really awesome and much better than all competitors, it takes at least *some* effort to switch to it, and it's a multiplicative cost (your work computer, home computer, laptop, blah blah blah). Why spend the effort for something possibly better, when what you have is working?
The terminal is fine for lots of things, but when it comes to things like developing, email, browsing, etc. it does not cut it
Right. Really you need two buttons: one for Emacs and another one for Firefox. Given these and virtual desktops, I'm pretty happy to use any window manager.
First off, many libraries surely *are* adult book stores, if you go to the right aisle.
But your response is more thoughtful than I expected, so I too will tone it down a notch.
AFAICT the guy in the article was watching porn in a library but was not in fact trying to "ram a five year old in the ass." You seem to believe that the two are essentially equivalent. I don't agree, but for the sake of argument assume you are right.
You propose to kill him, on the spot, in front of your daughter, even. You point out that animals will do extraordinary things to protect their young. But we aren't animals. We have cell phones to call for help, police who respond quickly, and a justice system to protect our values.
Your proposed approach is obviously (1) not within the bounds of justice, and (2) leaves your daughter traumatized and without a father for the rest of her childhood. My pithy reply was meant to highlight these observations. The proper response is obviously to instead call 911 and have the police come arrest him; if he tries to flee, then by all means make a citizen's arrest until the police arrive. You "protect" your daughter to an equal degree, and at worst expose yourself to a truly minor civil lawsuit compared to a criminal murder trial.
If children were being illegally exposed to porn, the responsible people who noticed this should have went to the police instead of the librarians; this is a matter of law, not of library policy. Otherwise, he committed no crime and did nothing wrong; telling him what he can and cannot view is cut and dry censorship, and the library is right to fight it.
But once you're all done murdering a guy in front of your daughter---to... uh... protect her from seeing naked people----and you're sitting in jail, content that defending her honor was worth it... Well, then you'll be locked up!
So who will be with her to kill the hobo in the park to protect her from seeing alcohol being consumed? And who will be with her to kill the video store clerk to protect her from the inappropriate lyrics on his hip-hop cd? And who will be with her to kill the oil-change guy to protect her from his sailor-like swearing after he burns his hand?
And who will give her love and guidance and, well, you know... keep her safe from actually harmful things?
Oh well, at least you got to sound pretty fierce on Slashdot.
Think about why you would need a warning label. Oh yeah, because you want to put something into your body that you haven't taken the time to first research and learn about.
Seriously, what the hell.
When the doctor prescribes an antibiotic for my infant son, I remind him that he's also taking Prilosec for reflux and doesn't tolerate milk/soy, and ask if it's still the right thing to prescribe. When I pick up the prescription, I double check this with the pharmacist, and ask him whether I should give the medicines together or at different times, etc. When I get home, I read the labels and papers to see what I need to do for storing the medicine, what the right dosage is, etc.
You want to make this harder... so that "stupid" people will accidentally kill themselves and their children?
I'm good at math and programming. Do I deserve to die because I don't know foobarzacil + bazidrol = heart attack? For anyone who isn't a doctor/pharmacist/expert who has been trained about all of this stuff, having these discussions with experts and reading the labels is doing the research.
After using ANTLR for a class long ago and being so impressed with it, I just returned to ANTLR today. I was shocked at the lack of documentation on the web site.
I eventually typed "antlr reference" into google and found the following PDF:
http://www.antlr.org/share/1084743321127/ANTLR_Reference_Manual.pdf
It's outdated and had many no-longer-supported constructs, but paired with the changes from 2.x to 3.0 it was adequate for what I needed to do.
I can see nothing comparable linked from the ANTLR homepage. It seems like an obvious attempt to get you to buy the book. Oh well.
I always cringe when someone tries to relate a computer-security concept to physical-security. Yes, they both have the word "security" in their names, and admittedly there's a physical-security component to computer-security insofar as that someone might invade your data center. But other than that, the two are completely different.
An example helps. Consider the difference in:
defending a power plant, versus
safeguarding computerized plans of a nuclear weapon.
You could lock the door of the power-plant, but what if they knock it down? You can reinforce the door, but what if they bring a tank? You could add tanks of your own, but what if they bring a plane? You could add an anti-plane system, but what if they bring an army? It never ends. And so the question of physical security is one of risk management -- there's no way to make it completely secure, you can only raise the bar higher and higher.
But for the weapon design, you can unplug the network cable, and no hacker can do anything about it unless they can gain physical access to the machine. In the computer world, your attacker can only access what you let him see, and you can always choose to let him see nothing.
We know that "security through obscurity" is no security at all in the computer world. We can tell our attacker exactly how we have protected our weapon plans (by leaving them on a disconnected computer) and that knowledge does him no good.
But in the physical world, the very uncertainty about what he will face when he goes up against the power plant helps to raise the bar higher. If he doesn't know whether he needs a sledgehammer, a tank, an airplane, or an army, he will have a harder time planning his attack.
I think this is a good thing. As bandwidth becomes ever cheaper, there is less reason to worry about conserving it, and we can use it for more interesting things. Yes it's sad that some people can't get anything better than a slow modem, but that doesn't mean we should be writing pages like it's 1999.
Formal logics (which mechanical provers use) only establish syntactic rules for manipulating symbols. If you believe your axioms are "true" and your manipulations are "truth preserving," then you may apply the rules in a clever way to conclude some formula is also true.
I agree that figuring out how to apply the rules is a very inventive process. Yet, the fruit of your invention is, I think, fairly called a discovery: you have discovered that your formula is provable. But this is a fact which follows from your choice of axioms and rules. That is, the formulas has been provable all along. Your invention has not changed this fact, it has only made you aware of it.
Unrelated ACL2 nitpicking about quantifiers: encapsulate doesn't have anything to do with quantification since you have to provide witnesses to show your constraints can be met, but the infrequently-used "defchoose" command can be used when you want a quantifier. Of course, there are other theorem provers (like Coq and Nuprl) which are purely constructive.
20 years ago, these laws probably made sense. When pornography was distributed as videos or magazines controlled by companies with their names on the box, the responsibility for age-verification and record-keeping could be easily assigned to the publisher. If they could find "young-looking" 18-year olds and there was a market for that, then power to them -- the magazine consumer still had a reasonable expectation that they weren't breaking any laws by their purchase. There wasn't much of an alternative market to worry about.
But today, most people have no idea where their porn comes from. If images.google.com is good enough to get you off (or supplements whatever sites you actually pay for) then your porn is coming in from an incredibly diverse collection of sources which you can't even name. This list potentially includes particularly untrustworthy sources such as scammers from other countries who will do anything for clicks and misguided high-schoolers posting explicit photos of themselves. You don't control the pictures you see. You just ask for "young ass" and you get whatever comes up.
Unfortunately, age-verification is far more difficult for consumers than producers. First off, a producer can ask to see a driver's license while she's still wearing her clothes. The consumer has much less to go on. Could you reliably sort a mixed stack of photos where half the girls are 17 and the other half are 18? Admittedly there are some clear cut cases -- it shouldn't be hard to identify pictures of children as opposed to teenagers. But even then, it's already too late! You already have a copy of the picture on your computer. And you can now be charged with a serious crime, the mere allegation of which is enough to ruin your career in many professions.
And for what? Where was the harm? What makes this a crime?
Even suppose you actively sought out pictures like these, saved all the ones you found, and wanked off to them every night. Who have you harmed? As far as I can tell, nobody.
I agree these actions seem suspicious. On the other hand, I imagine many of us would be tempted to trash our disks if we had advanced warning that the FBI were coming to our houses to raid our computers. After all, you can be severely fined or even imprisoned for having all manner of "merely illegal" content (music, movies, software,...) other than child pornography.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. I own neither iPhone nor iPad nor iPod nor iAnything else, and detest using my boss's button-less Apple mouse (which incidentally she has set up to scroll in an inverted way---just to fuck with me, I'm pretty sure).
My daughter was 2 (well, 23 months old, to be precise) when I set up her computer. I started her off with a typical, full-sized Microsoft laser mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. It was very confusing for her. I eventually ordered this mouse. It was a much better fit. FWIW, Amazon's reviewers overwhelmingly agree.
I'm sure she could handle a wheel-mouse now without trouble. But back then it made a big difference.
Mod parent up!
Qimo is great. It's a whole Linux distro geared toward young children, and includes Childsplay, GCompris, and TuxPaint.
I set it up an old P4 for my daughter when she turned 2. I remember sitting next to her and watching in awe as, over the course of 20 minutes of playing this "uncover the animal picture" game, she became proficient in using the mouse. Almost two years later, she is still playing very good, fun, appropriate, challenging games. She has always loved the painting program, which is really cool and has all kinds of fun things (e.g., draw with cats!). She opens programs by herself, chooses her own games, knows how to shut it down, etc.
Advice:
And of course, make computer time a together activity. Sit next to her, actively watching, encouraging, explaining, and participating.
so what that means is that *regardless* of the fact that CISC instructions are translated into RISC ones, the main part of the CPU has to run at a *much* faster clock rate than an equivalent RISC processor, just to keep up with decode rate.
I don't understand this reasoning.
If the backend can't keep up with the decode rate, say because
Then aren't you winning?
Obviously there has to be some balance. An anemic backend with an overpowered frontend will slow you down. But if the backend is reasonably powerful, it seems like you want to have it working as fast as it can, rather than idly waiting for the frontend to tell it what to do next.
Indeed.
Whatever folks think is gained from open source here is a lie. Why? Like it or not, you have no way to verify the open source code is what the machine is running.
Using computers for voting is just a disaster, open source or not.
Scantron-style forms can be processed very quickly, can't be subverted en masse, and can be verified by actual people. Using anything else just reeks of corruption.
I agree that blame doesn't lay with the schools.
Your counterpoint (if girls think this way then why don't boys) is so obvious that I'm surprised I hadn't considered it before.
I guess, well---when I was in high school, I was a socially-inept nerd who liked science-fiction and computer games. So, in my case, no, this perception of the field wouldn't have been any deterrent, as the dream of being popular had been fully crushed by the reality of American high-school education. :)
So maybe the real question, why aren't more high-school girls into... uh... whatever passes for star wars, chess club, dungeons and dragons, etc., these days. Maybe the answer to that question is the root cause we're looking for.
I wonder to what degree (if any) the cause might be related to the female perception of the males that inhabit the field.
In much of popular culture, the programmer seems to be that socially-inept, overweight nerd who lives in his parents' basement, covered in cheeto-dust, drinking mountain dew and playing computer games all day.
Should we be surprised if high-school- and college-aged girls, who presumably want to be popular and accepted by their peers, are not, on the average, eager to be associated with a profession/calling that is perceived in this way?
You clearly aren't married.
We're still measuring performance in GHz? But... but... oh fuck it.
Emacs and firefox together do an awful lot of this:
- Emacs is hard to beat for Lisp development
- Emacs (and Lisp's REPL, for that matter) are good calculators
- Emacs shell mode is wonderful and replaces terminals
- Firefox does my email
- Most docs I work with are embedded in code, or are HTML or LaTeX, so they're easy to edit in Emacs
You're right that two buttons was an exaggeration. I do have some other buttons for XChat, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, and our cluster-monitoring GUI.
I probably think the window manager just isn't that important because the window managers I've used (gnome, kde, and xfce) always seem to be just fine.
Because it's really very legitimate.
For most of us, almost any window manager is good enough, and it's very hard to compete with good enough.
Even if some window manager X is really awesome and much better than all competitors, it takes at least *some* effort to switch to it, and it's a multiplicative cost (your work computer, home computer, laptop, blah blah blah). Why spend the effort for something possibly better, when what you have is working?
Right. Really you need two buttons: one for Emacs and another one for Firefox. Given these and virtual desktops, I'm pretty happy to use any window manager.
accept... :(
First off, many libraries surely *are* adult book stores, if you go to the right aisle.
But your response is more thoughtful than I expected, so I too will tone it down a notch.
AFAICT the guy in the article was watching porn in a library but was not in fact trying to "ram a five year old in the ass." You seem to believe that the two are essentially equivalent. I don't agree, but for the sake of argument assume you are right.
You propose to kill him, on the spot, in front of your daughter, even. You point out that animals will do extraordinary things to protect their young. But we aren't animals. We have cell phones to call for help, police who respond quickly, and a justice system to protect our values.
Your proposed approach is obviously (1) not within the bounds of justice, and (2) leaves your daughter traumatized and without a father for the rest of her childhood. My pithy reply was meant to highlight these observations. The proper response is obviously to instead call 911 and have the police come arrest him; if he tries to flee, then by all means make a citizen's arrest until the police arrive. You "protect" your daughter to an equal degree, and at worst expose yourself to a truly minor civil lawsuit compared to a criminal murder trial.
If children were being illegally exposed to porn, the responsible people who noticed this should have went to the police instead of the librarians; this is a matter of law, not of library policy. Otherwise, he committed no crime and did nothing wrong; telling him what he can and cannot view is cut and dry censorship, and the library is right to fight it.
Your plan sounds pretty good, daddy-o.
But once you're all done murdering a guy in front of your daughter---to... uh... protect her from seeing naked people----and you're sitting in jail, content that defending her honor was worth it... Well, then you'll be locked up!
So who will be with her to kill the hobo in the park to protect her from seeing alcohol being consumed?
And who will be with her to kill the video store clerk to protect her from the inappropriate lyrics on his hip-hop cd?
And who will be with her to kill the oil-change guy to protect her from his sailor-like swearing after he burns his hand?
And who will give her love and guidance and, well, you know... keep her safe from actually harmful things?
Oh well, at least you got to sound pretty fierce on Slashdot.
Seriously, what the hell.
When the doctor prescribes an antibiotic for my infant son, I remind him that he's also taking Prilosec for reflux and doesn't tolerate milk/soy, and ask if it's still the right thing to prescribe. When I pick up the prescription, I double check this with the pharmacist, and ask him whether I should give the medicines together or at different times, etc. When I get home, I read the labels and papers to see what I need to do for storing the medicine, what the right dosage is, etc.
You want to make this harder... so that "stupid" people will accidentally kill themselves and their children?
I'm good at math and programming. Do I deserve to die because I don't know foobarzacil + bazidrol = heart attack? For anyone who isn't a doctor/pharmacist/expert who has been trained about all of this stuff, having these discussions with experts and reading the labels is doing the research.
99% of the population would have little to no idea about whether any particular government official can legally do what they do.
That's sort of their own fault, eh?
What about Bevier's 1987 dissertation, "A Verified Operating System Kernel." ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/boyer/diss/bevier.pdf
After using ANTLR for a class long ago and being so impressed with it, I just returned to ANTLR today. I was shocked at the lack of documentation on the web site. I eventually typed "antlr reference" into google and found the following PDF: http://www.antlr.org/share/1084743321127/ANTLR_Reference_Manual.pdf It's outdated and had many no-longer-supported constructs, but paired with the changes from 2.x to 3.0 it was adequate for what I needed to do. I can see nothing comparable linked from the ANTLR homepage. It seems like an obvious attempt to get you to buy the book. Oh well.
I always cringe when someone tries to relate a computer-security concept to physical-security. Yes, they both have the word "security" in their names, and admittedly there's a physical-security component to computer-security insofar as that someone might invade your data center. But other than that, the two are completely different.
An example helps. Consider the difference in:
You could lock the door of the power-plant, but what if they knock it down? You can reinforce the door, but what if they bring a tank? You could add tanks of your own, but what if they bring a plane? You could add an anti-plane system, but what if they bring an army? It never ends. And so the question of physical security is one of risk management -- there's no way to make it completely secure, you can only raise the bar higher and higher.
But for the weapon design, you can unplug the network cable, and no hacker can do anything about it unless they can gain physical access to the machine. In the computer world, your attacker can only access what you let him see, and you can always choose to let him see nothing.
We know that "security through obscurity" is no security at all in the computer world. We can tell our attacker exactly how we have protected our weapon plans (by leaving them on a disconnected computer) and that knowledge does him no good.
But in the physical world, the very uncertainty about what he will face when he goes up against the power plant helps to raise the bar higher. If he doesn't know whether he needs a sledgehammer, a tank, an airplane, or an army, he will have a harder time planning his attack.
I think this is a good thing. As bandwidth becomes ever cheaper, there is less reason to worry about conserving it, and we can use it for more interesting things. Yes it's sad that some people can't get anything better than a slow modem, but that doesn't mean we should be writing pages like it's 1999.
I'm pretty sure that by invoking Godel in this thread, you lose.
Formal logics (which mechanical provers use) only establish syntactic rules for manipulating symbols. If you believe your axioms are "true" and your manipulations are "truth preserving," then you may apply the rules in a clever way to conclude some formula is also true.
I agree that figuring out how to apply the rules is a very inventive process. Yet, the fruit of your invention is, I think, fairly called a discovery: you have discovered that your formula is provable. But this is a fact which follows from your choice of axioms and rules. That is, the formulas has been provable all along. Your invention has not changed this fact, it has only made you aware of it.
Unrelated ACL2 nitpicking about quantifiers: encapsulate doesn't have anything to do with quantification since you have to provide witnesses to show your constraints can be met, but the infrequently-used "defchoose" command can be used when you want a quantifier. Of course, there are other theorem provers (like Coq and Nuprl) which are purely constructive.
20 years ago, these laws probably made sense. When pornography was distributed as videos or magazines controlled by companies with their names on the box, the responsibility for age-verification and record-keeping could be easily assigned to the publisher. If they could find "young-looking" 18-year olds and there was a market for that, then power to them -- the magazine consumer still had a reasonable expectation that they weren't breaking any laws by their purchase. There wasn't much of an alternative market to worry about.
But today, most people have no idea where their porn comes from. If images.google.com is good enough to get you off (or supplements whatever sites you actually pay for) then your porn is coming in from an incredibly diverse collection of sources which you can't even name. This list potentially includes particularly untrustworthy sources such as scammers from other countries who will do anything for clicks and misguided high-schoolers posting explicit photos of themselves. You don't control the pictures you see. You just ask for "young ass" and you get whatever comes up.
Unfortunately, age-verification is far more difficult for consumers than producers. First off, a producer can ask to see a driver's license while she's still wearing her clothes. The consumer has much less to go on. Could you reliably sort a mixed stack of photos where half the girls are 17 and the other half are 18? Admittedly there are some clear cut cases -- it shouldn't be hard to identify pictures of children as opposed to teenagers. But even then, it's already too late! You already have a copy of the picture on your computer. And you can now be charged with a serious crime, the mere allegation of which is enough to ruin your career in many professions.
And for what? Where was the harm? What makes this a crime?
Even suppose you actively sought out pictures like these, saved all the ones you found, and wanked off to them every night. Who have you harmed? As far as I can tell, nobody.
I agree these actions seem suspicious. On the other hand, I imagine many of us would be tempted to trash our disks if we had advanced warning that the FBI were coming to our houses to raid our computers. After all, you can be severely fined or even imprisoned for having all manner of "merely illegal" content (music, movies, software, ...) other than child pornography.
Modern trains are apparently quite fast, and they can't be flown into buildings.