If a student receives a first DMCA violation notice he/she will lose network access for a minimum of
* 14 calendar days
* None of these
* All of these
* Until he/she passes the "Safe and Legal Computing" course Argh! All of these includes none of these. None of these includes none of these, which is a contradiction.
Let's give rich people the right of way at intersections and higher speed limits on the highways while we're at it. If you live in a country where the disincentive for breaking the speed limit or running a stop light is a fixed financial penalty, rather than a means-tested one, you are already doing this.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Quite right, The Player of Games was very good.
Excession has the least interesting back cover description I've ever seen. I don't have it to hand, so someone with it feel free to connect me, but if I recall, it went something like this "A million years ago, something appeared, it did nothing. Then it vanished. Now it's back".
But slippery slope arguments are not automatically fallacies. When the relationship between the steps is clear enough, it's a proof by induction. When the historical evidence is compelling enough, it's something you should pay attention to, or realise that you're going to be repeating the past.
There is no difference in tactics. In fact, what Microsoft is accused of is perfectly reasonable as long as you are not a monopoly. As soon as you are a monopoly you are held to higher standards of behaviour, because otherwise the market gets broken.
So, the difference is not in tactics, it's in the simple fact that MS is a monopoly and apple isn't.
Seems like whatever the current favourite language for teaching is always gets this kind of flak. I remember when it was "BASIC considered harmful", then a little bit later "Oh Noes! Pascal is damaging our children".
I assume that this argument has so much support here because of our natural sense of superiority. It is however a complete load of rubbish.
Programming is the art of abstraction. Software engineering is the art of compromise between functionality and elegance.
Neither of them are about memorizing sort algorithms or knowing the details of how a processor or a specific language work. These are the things you can look up.
Critizing the use of libraries is also crazy. Learning to use libraries well and not reinvent the wheel is one of the single most important thing you can learn as a programmer.
The whole point of computer science has been to create layers of abstraction and to enable you to work at the one that is appropriate for you. If a level of abstraction has been correctly designed, it is positively NOT required, and can often be harmful (leads to premature optimisation) to know how the one below works.
Some of the most talented and respected programmers around program in languages like Haskell or Scheme (both of which were the taught languages at my university), and never have to deal with the bizzare way that C likes to reference and dereference pointers. The idea that this is somehow a precondition to 'good programming' is laughable. It's more likely to encourage exceptionally poor programming.
That you can broaden your horizons and knowledge by mastering many different levels of abstraction, and by learning many different ways of doing things is not in doubt, but the idea that you can dismiss an education because of the language used has been around for too long and it's time it died.
Yes, yes, indeed there would be an outcry if anyone deliberately did this for males.
However, your imaginary math book for boys describes almost every math book that's ever been written, even if the authors weren't writing with that intent. Find me a mechanics text book that has examples of things more traditionally associated with girls, rather than boys. Mine (even recent ones) were all weaponry, death, warfare, go carts, snooker balls. Even the modern, politically correct ones show clear signs of this kind of bias towards males. We've done such a good job historically of making masculine the default gender, that it's hard for a male to even spot how biased the things he's reading are.
That's why it's not outrageous when someone tries to redress the balance.
If you are aware of an unambiguous phrase that could replace the correct use of "begs the question," I'm all ears.
Actually I am. The problem stems from the fact that you're using technical jargon that sounds like it's normal English. I suggest you use something that makes it clear that it is technical jargon. Calling it "petito principii" makes it very obvious what you mean, and makes clear that you are using this phrase in a techical way. After all, we still use "modus tollens", "modus ponens", "ad hominem", etc. "Begging the question" was always a poor translation, with obvious collision with the standard meaning of its constituent words.
If you want to use a phrase in a technical way, then you should make it clear that you're doing that.
There is one (as far as I know) legitimate reason for things to be tacked on to bills, and that is political quid-pro-quo. If you have a government that is struggling to get a bill through, they can make a deal with another voting bloc where they offer support for one of that voting blocs issues in exchange for support on the government bill. Although this can exaggerate the importance of marginal interests (like in a coalition government), it's a normal and relatively healthy aspect of the political process. It would be fairly natural for such an arrangement to get written into the same bill. It should be easy to spot such a situation though - it would only occur if the unmodified bill would have difficulty getting through without broader support. I suspect that this is not the case with military spending bills.
Re:Shell replacements?
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
I've been looking for a cool replacement shell for a while, thanks for the list.
What I'd really like is an IDE like shell - a tiled and tabbed window manager. Can't find any of the list that do that. Any suggestions?
absolutely. Am I the only person who connected this with the other recent news that development for the iPhone will be entirely through AJAX applications running on Safari?
Please, please have a look at 0install. I don't think centralised repositories are the answer, and I've been wanting something like 0install for windows apps for quite a while.
It's perfectly fair enough for them to say that they only support the biggest installed user base, we can't expect more. What we can expect, and should demand is that whatever they use on whatever platform is an open standard, free for others to implement.
So, they can provide support for IE on Windows XP for all I care, but the video should be in a free format and there should be nothing done to deliberately shut out others, connecting without support. In an ideal world, at least one completely free platform should be supported.
This is government we're talking about, and in a democracy, it's supposed to be participatory.
Only benefit of QCrypto over classical crypto: It stops evesdropping.
Problem: It doesn't stop some forms of man in the middle.
All this stuff you've said is true, but I don't think it really contradicts the parent. QCrypto is hyped as being unbeatable, which it clearly isn't. The massive effort you think it would take to hijack ALL communications channels between Alice and Bob, is really not that big a deal- you wouldn't man in the middle the QCrypto link unless you knew the other channel the message is going over and could MitM that too.
I'm still massively unimpressed with QCrypto. On top of that, there are other ways that may be just as effective at stopping evesdropping, see "hold the photons" by Bruce Scheier in wired.
Clicking back or forward should show you a cached copy of the page in the exact state you left it. If it came from a form load, you should get the yellow bar notifier at the top warning you that it's out of date and allowing you to reprocess it with the form data. Having a blank page is totally stupid - the default should be to do the useful thing.
History tree like in the Risc OS browser.
Best guess forward navigation - when I'm browsing an htmlized document that has an obvious 'next' link, the forward button should take me there.
If a page tries to load an extension, I don't want to have to add it to a whitelist for all eternity, I want the yellow bar with the option to install it just this once.
Speed.
Memory usage.
Text boxes should have the ability to pull up onscreen keyboards, as a way of optionally reducing the risk of keyloggers (I download and run portable firefox when I'm in internet cafes).
I want to be able to drag tabs out of a window to make a new window, or from one window to another. I want to be able to dock two tabs next to each other so I can refer to one while working on another. The ability to send all the tabs in one window to another window.
Bittorrent download.
Web page archive saving.
Closed tabs/windows (reopening shouldn't reload them, but open the cached version). Session saving and reload on startup.
Ability to freeze all activity on a page - stop animated gifs, javascript, etc.
Proxy profiles for when you're in different places on your laptop.
Optional listener so that you can send urls to friends which would open in a new tabgroup on their computer.
I'd really like fast PDF viewing built in without loading acrobad reader. Fast and integrated. I know this is possible, because I've seen it in other browsers.
Built in gestures that work (optionally) even on flash / java / pdf
What a lot of people aren't spotting is that we're talking about Switzerland. In Switzerland it's a relatively common assumption that people will obey the law.
prohibit authors et al from having copyrights if they use DRM at all
Thats actually a really good idea, and makes sense. Copyright is supposedly designed to allow the creator a limited time of monopoly with the trade off being that the works then go into the public domain. If the author uses DRM or any other technique that would protect their works past their time of limited monopoly, then this would interfere with the ability to put the work in the public domain, and in that case, why should the government grant them a monopoly at all?
"teleporting information from one place to another at the speed of light"
So what is it about people, rocks, or other tangible objects that cannot be described as information? You are information much more than you are something tangible - pretty much every atom in you will migrate out of you at some point, and you're almost completely different to what you were 5 years ago. It's the information that is important. Actually, quantum teleportation is a method for replicating matter in a remote place (because the only sensible definition of replication is reproducing every facet of the originals state). The only reason nobody has used it yet to teleport a human is because it currently only works on very simple and small structures over distances too small to be useful.
The advancement of quantum teleportation is that in the past, we could only enocode and then transfer information that we could measure (I mean you could transfer the information by walking but that's not the point). You can't measure quantum information without ruining it, so until quantum teleportation we could not transfer quantum information from one place to another. Whether or not you even need to transfer the quantum information to transfer a person is an entirely different question. Would it matter if you just made a classical copy of a human? Maybe not - maybe you would get the same person, but I think everyone would be more comfortable with the process if there was absolutely no information lost, no matter how nebulous.
This almost certainly will not replace optic fibre for long distance communication, because there is very little communication that requires the transmission of quantum information. We generally want to transfer classical information.
IP law should respect the fact that there are many different fields of endevour, and different terms are appropriate for each of them. It's perfectly reasonable that the copyright on a novel should last a pretty long time (I think the author should receive some compensation if it gets made into a film 10 years later for example), but patents on computer related things should last a very short time - the computer industry is changing much faster than the book writing industry, and if the entire industry is held up for 10 years because of one guys patent, that is a very serious detriment to the public good.
Regardless of what is decided, it seems very obvious to me that the current lengths of these things are far outside what is reasonable. I'd be much more in favour of 20 years for literary/artistic works, and 3 years for patents, with the posibility of a single extension for 5 more years for patents, requiring a large fee (so only patents that are being used get extended).
That's what I think for IT patents, but longer terms might be more appropriate for slower moving industries.
XBox: Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU, nVidia GeForce 3MX, 64 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard disk, a DVD drive and 10/100 Ethernet.
Cost new: $125
So there's already a 125$ pc that can run linux in the mass market here for $125. The specs aren't quite as good as the chinese one, but it is quite a few years old now, and has a well known intel processor and graphics accelerator.
If these machines are all that bad, it seems like it should be easy to find a way to sabotage them completely, and ideally untracably. You might not get an opportunity to have your vote counted, but it seems to me that it's better that you make the machine inoperable rather than vote and run the risk of having your vote counted for the wrong candidate, etc.
A group of people with dedication could destroy each of these machines very quickly after polls open, so minimising the number of lost ballots.
Slashdot Mirror
* 14 calendar days
* None of these
* All of these
* Until he/she passes the "Safe and Legal Computing" course Argh! All of these includes none of these. None of these includes none of these, which is a contradiction.
Quite right, The Player of Games was very good.
Excession has the least interesting back cover description I've ever seen. I don't have it to hand, so someone with it feel free to connect me, but if I recall, it went something like this "A million years ago, something appeared, it did nothing. Then it vanished. Now it's back".
But slippery slope arguments are not automatically fallacies. When the relationship between the steps is clear enough, it's a proof by induction. When the historical evidence is compelling enough, it's something you should pay attention to, or realise that you're going to be repeating the past.
So, the difference is not in tactics, it's in the simple fact that MS is a monopoly and apple isn't.
Seems like whatever the current favourite language for teaching is always gets this kind of flak. I remember when it was "BASIC considered harmful", then a little bit later "Oh Noes! Pascal is damaging our children".
I assume that this argument has so much support here because of our natural sense of superiority. It is however a complete load of rubbish.
Programming is the art of abstraction. Software engineering is the art of compromise between functionality and elegance.
Neither of them are about memorizing sort algorithms or knowing the details of how a processor or a specific language work. These are the things you can look up.
Critizing the use of libraries is also crazy. Learning to use libraries well and not reinvent the wheel is one of the single most important thing you can learn as a programmer.
The whole point of computer science has been to create layers of abstraction and to enable you to work at the one that is appropriate for you. If a level of abstraction has been correctly designed, it is positively NOT required, and can often be harmful (leads to premature optimisation) to know how the one below works.
Some of the most talented and respected programmers around program in languages like Haskell or Scheme (both of which were the taught languages at my university), and never have to deal with the bizzare way that C likes to reference and dereference pointers. The idea that this is somehow a precondition to 'good programming' is laughable. It's more likely to encourage exceptionally poor programming.
That you can broaden your horizons and knowledge by mastering many different levels of abstraction, and by learning many different ways of doing things is not in doubt, but the idea that you can dismiss an education because of the language used has been around for too long and it's time it died.
However, your imaginary math book for boys describes almost every math book that's ever been written, even if the authors weren't writing with that intent. Find me a mechanics text book that has examples of things more traditionally associated with girls, rather than boys. Mine (even recent ones) were all weaponry, death, warfare, go carts, snooker balls. Even the modern, politically correct ones show clear signs of this kind of bias towards males. We've done such a good job historically of making masculine the default gender, that it's hard for a male to even spot how biased the things he's reading are.
That's why it's not outrageous when someone tries to redress the balance.
Actually I am. The problem stems from the fact that you're using technical jargon that sounds like it's normal English. I suggest you use something that makes it clear that it is technical jargon. Calling it "petito principii" makes it very obvious what you mean, and makes clear that you are using this phrase in a techical way. After all, we still use "modus tollens", "modus ponens", "ad hominem", etc. "Begging the question" was always a poor translation, with obvious collision with the standard meaning of its constituent words.
If you want to use a phrase in a technical way, then you should make it clear that you're doing that.
There is one (as far as I know) legitimate reason for things to be tacked on to bills, and that is political quid-pro-quo. If you have a government that is struggling to get a bill through, they can make a deal with another voting bloc where they offer support for one of that voting blocs issues in exchange for support on the government bill. Although this can exaggerate the importance of marginal interests (like in a coalition government), it's a normal and relatively healthy aspect of the political process. It would be fairly natural for such an arrangement to get written into the same bill. It should be easy to spot such a situation though - it would only occur if the unmodified bill would have difficulty getting through without broader support. I suspect that this is not the case with military spending bills.
I've been looking for a cool replacement shell for a while, thanks for the list.
What I'd really like is an IDE like shell - a tiled and tabbed window manager. Can't find any of the list that do that. Any suggestions?
absolutely. Am I the only person who connected this with the other recent news that development for the iPhone will be entirely through AJAX applications running on Safari?
Please, please have a look at 0install. I don't think centralised repositories are the answer, and I've been wanting something like 0install for windows apps for quite a while.
True, but those guys needed loads of extra sync lines. Not very friendly.
It's perfectly fair enough for them to say that they only support the biggest installed user base, we can't expect more. What we can expect, and should demand is that whatever they use on whatever platform is an open standard, free for others to implement.
So, they can provide support for IE on Windows XP for all I care, but the video should be in a free format and there should be nothing done to deliberately shut out others, connecting without support. In an ideal world, at least one completely free platform should be supported.
This is government we're talking about, and in a democracy, it's supposed to be participatory.
Only benefit of QCrypto over classical crypto: It stops evesdropping. Problem: It doesn't stop some forms of man in the middle. All this stuff you've said is true, but I don't think it really contradicts the parent. QCrypto is hyped as being unbeatable, which it clearly isn't. The massive effort you think it would take to hijack ALL communications channels between Alice and Bob, is really not that big a deal- you wouldn't man in the middle the QCrypto link unless you knew the other channel the message is going over and could MitM that too. I'm still massively unimpressed with QCrypto. On top of that, there are other ways that may be just as effective at stopping evesdropping, see "hold the photons" by Bruce Scheier in wired.
What a lot of people aren't spotting is that we're talking about Switzerland. In Switzerland it's a relatively common assumption that people will obey the law.
Thats actually a really good idea, and makes sense. Copyright is supposedly designed to allow the creator a limited time of monopoly with the trade off being that the works then go into the public domain. If the author uses DRM or any other technique that would protect their works past their time of limited monopoly, then this would interfere with the ability to put the work in the public domain, and in that case, why should the government grant them a monopoly at all?
So what is it about people, rocks, or other tangible objects that cannot be described as information? You are information much more than you are something tangible - pretty much every atom in you will migrate out of you at some point, and you're almost completely different to what you were 5 years ago. It's the information that is important. Actually, quantum teleportation is a method for replicating matter in a remote place (because the only sensible definition of replication is reproducing every facet of the originals state). The only reason nobody has used it yet to teleport a human is because it currently only works on very simple and small structures over distances too small to be useful.
The advancement of quantum teleportation is that in the past, we could only enocode and then transfer information that we could measure (I mean you could transfer the information by walking but that's not the point). You can't measure quantum information without ruining it, so until quantum teleportation we could not transfer quantum information from one place to another. Whether or not you even need to transfer the quantum information to transfer a person is an entirely different question. Would it matter if you just made a classical copy of a human? Maybe not - maybe you would get the same person, but I think everyone would be more comfortable with the process if there was absolutely no information lost, no matter how nebulous.
This almost certainly will not replace optic fibre for long distance communication, because there is very little communication that requires the transmission of quantum information. We generally want to transfer classical information.
IP law should respect the fact that there are many different fields of endevour, and different terms are appropriate for each of them. It's perfectly reasonable that the copyright on a novel should last a pretty long time (I think the author should receive some compensation if it gets made into a film 10 years later for example), but patents on computer related things should last a very short time - the computer industry is changing much faster than the book writing industry, and if the entire industry is held up for 10 years because of one guys patent, that is a very serious detriment to the public good.
Regardless of what is decided, it seems very obvious to me that the current lengths of these things are far outside what is reasonable. I'd be much more in favour of 20 years for literary/artistic works, and 3 years for patents, with the posibility of a single extension for 5 more years for patents, requiring a large fee (so only patents that are being used get extended).
That's what I think for IT patents, but longer terms might be more appropriate for slower moving industries.
Shouldn't that be "I am LITERALLY not exaggerating".
Cost new: $125
So there's already a 125$ pc that can run linux in the mass market here for $125. The specs aren't quite as good as the chinese one, but it is quite a few years old now, and has a well known intel processor and graphics accelerator.
kybYou might want to have a look at this years project censored. In particular, check out #11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
A group of people with dedication could destroy each of these machines very quickly after polls open, so minimising the number of lost ballots.
But CO2 levels we are low on the million year scale, if you believe stuff in wikipedia...
Actually, I'm sure I read on there that the population of CO2 has doubled in the last 3 months.