So here's the deal moron, the hallmark of mankind is his uncanny ability to exploit his fellow man. Karl Marx's vision completely ignores that fact, well it assumes that because you work in a car factory or on a farm that somehow you're morally superior to everybody else and wouldn't take advantage of someone else.
Marx's socialist world revolution obviously didn't happen. However, the man was also an influential philosopher, and showing that he was wrong about one thing (Einstein, Newton, and Aristotle had plenty of wrong ideas too, man) doesn't mean that nothing he says holds value.
You see, just as you often see posts out here on slashdot, kuro5hin or other internet message boards by western internet users showing their rage and frustration with Islam.
You think *Slashdot* and *Kuro5hin* has rage and frusteration with Islam? These are fairly socially liberal forums compared to most of the US.
If you want to understand the neocon mindset (I read rightnation.us for a while, which had many people advocating the nuclear destruction of Mecca to "teach those Muslims a lesson"), you have to watch something like the Dirty Harry series. Dirty Harry pretty much *exactly* epitomizes the thought process I've seen from neocon postings (even to the extent of having the potentially gay peace-symbol wearing guy be the villan). The thought process goes something like this: Politicians are corrupt and they and judges and other high-ranking authority are crippled by "civil rights" and their lack of manliness. As a result, they won't do anything. The whole problem could be solved with our powerful military hardware -- after all, look how powerful it is -- if only someone would have the balls to apply it without being held back by stupid things like civil rights. What is necessary is for people with lousy jobs who don't have much influence to just stand up and show that they have a pair of balls and are willing to extreme force, and they'll protect their women and children. Then they'll be heroes, and the authorities that refuse to do anything will be demonstrated to be clearly wrong. Oh, and it won't matter that they're xenophobic.
Do not think that this is not an influential mindset. It ties very well into machisimo, dislike of the system, and lack of understanding of civil rights. For uneducated males, this is a significant driving force. "Respecting weaker cultures/countries" is seen as weak, womanish, and so forth.
If you go somewhere like West Virginia, you'll find that there are very few minorities present in the state. Very few people have experience with non-whites, there is *still* a social barrier to hiring blacks, and the Christian churches (mostly very conservative Baptist) have far more impact than the occasional news story about the plight of some half-imaginary Arabs -- besides, Fox News is the primary source of news. The main impact of minorities has been immigrants that take low-paying jobs that the local inhabitants could otherwise have. That results in a lot of hard feelings towards Mexicans, blacks, and so forth. Slashdot's irritation over Indian competition for jobs is very, very mild compared to what you'll see in a place like this.
If you want a somewhat less applicable example of a movie with this mindset (really more oriented towards people that are a result of growing up bombarded with anticommunist propaganda), I'd suggest watching Red Dawn.
First, in China, white is a color of mourning. Wedding dresses are normally red, which is a "good" color in China. In the United States, this would have a connotation of prostitution.
Second, physical attractiveness has shifted. In medieval times, an attractive woman was pale white and definitely plumper than one is today; it showed that she was wealthy and did not need to leave the house to work in the sun. Today, in the US, a somewhat darker skin tone is generally considered attractive, and women pay to expose their skin to UV light in tanning devices to darken it; darker skin and a light build shows that they are healthy and exercising and are wealthy enough to do so instead of having to work in a cubicle all the time.
I think that lighter skin in Japan being more attractive is a result of the amount of Western media becoming popular in Japan, but I could easily be wrong.
Voice of America was established in 1942, and, as far as I know, has operated since then. It's not like their webpages go down half the time.
Of course, it may be not be obvious that it's a government mouthpiece; like the Department of War effectively becoming the Department of Defense after World War II, the United States Information Agency (the US propaganda division) was renamed to the Bureau of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 1999.
See, that's a really good example of why patents are broken. The only reason nobody had made a nuclear-powered aircraft before was because nuclear power didn't exist yet. There's no benefit to society in granting a monopoly over nuclear-powered aircraft to the first people who happen to start filing patents on something.
If I'm an engineer and I'm building an airplane and I have, say, five different types of power sources that I can use, and one's characteristics fit my needs well, then of course I'm going to use that power source.
Feynman was perfectly justified in suggesting these things as applications of a technology. What should *not* be done is taking obvious *applications* of a technology and patenting them.
I have no problem with people getting a patent on an "idea" or software concept as long as the person can.
I do have a problem.
The issue is that patents do not address the case of obvious ideas that have not been done before because they simply make no sense in the environment -- but now do make sense because the environment has changed. Obviously, if flash memory has always been expensive in the past, you can't make a flash-memory based MP3 player. That doesn't mean that there's any benefit to society in allowing that idea to be patented. That *takes away* the ability of anyone else to make something like it.
A good patent is for something that represents a large jump forward (not something that's a trivial or obvious-to-any-expert-in-the-field idea), required a large amount of funding to produce (the reason for the patent is to subsidize the necessary research to produce valuable ideas), and is narrow enough that it does not affect a broad swath of products.
Frankly, I haven't seen anything like this.
Software patents have a huge array of fundamental problems. Software is a fast-moving field, but the term of patents means that they hugely slow down adoption. Right now, patents granted in the 80s are still valid. That's an eternity in the computer world. Yes, of course people come up with new ideas constantly; that's simply a characteristic of the field. Doing so is already funded through the production of software.
Software expands to fill markets very quickly, but is very slow to reverse-engineer and reimplement. This holds compared to almost any other patentable product (a new yo-yo, a pencil sharpener design, etc). This makes it very easy to make back the development investment by simply selling the software -- no patents are required.
Because the marginal cost of production of software approaches zero, open source can exist. Because of the inherent costs associated with use of patents, software patents are highly incompatible with open source. The value that open source software provides to today's computing world is immense. Windows' TCP stack (unless they've rewritten it) came from BSD, most webpages that are served to you come from open source software, etc. I argue that the value of open source software is significant enough that the damage presented it by software patents far exceeds the benefits of any sfotware patents.
The bulk of software patents has reached the point that it is simply impossible to write software without infringing on patents any more (at least in the US). Your only hope is that nobody tries enforcing those patents.
Actually, "small" and "futuristic" are not necessarily mentally intertwined as you might think.
I remember looking at old futuristic art from, oh, the 30s through the 50s. The future was big. Big buildings, bridges, ships, and later big airplanes and spaceships. Big cars, big roads. I suspect that for the typical person from that period, "futuristic" would be more closely associated with "big" than "small".
Computer users may or may not understand what they are consenting to when they click "OK" to the lengthy, legalistic disclosures that accompany these games or videos. But those notices are legal contracts that essentially absolve the adware companies from any liability associated with the use or misuse of their programs.
I'm thinking that the Washington Post's web team needs to add a policy regarding stripping out metadata before posting content.
The *really* scary thing is when people post Word files to the web. PDF is *designed* for posting, and I remember a couple instances where "censored" PDFs were recovered. Word files store all sorts of data that you may not want to spread around.
I'm not familiar with how police stations handle this sort of thing.
This is kind of Nowhere, Kansas-looking. How likely is it that you'd be able to contact them and say "well, this resident of your village is attacking and controlling computers over the Internet"? You don't have a list of who is affected. You don't have names or contact information for any companies who want to push for prosecution and can explain what damages they suffered.
They're probably more interested in things like petty theft and vandalism in a place like that. Nobody in their community is complaining about anything.
Maybe if someone at the state level got pissy about computer crime. [shrug]
I never thought that journalists might leave metadata in their images -- I thought that they'd have some sort of automated content management system that would take in a TIFF or whatever and spit out a JPEG of the appropriate size for the current design of the web page.
I'm now wondering how many other news stories might have very much unintended data leaks through metadata tags in images. Possibly quite a hell of a lot.
It's a cop out for the companies whose software is being installed to say, "Hey! Look, guys, honestly, we don't know anything about it!" They don't really care.
This is a whole industry.
Spam and sleazy marketing won't be done by a company with a reputation to protect. They'll have someone else do it and let them take the heat. That company doesn't care at all about their reputation (at least in the eyes of consumers).
I've read about some of the exploits of Wozniak and similar wild-and-crazy types. It seems like a lot of times, there's some real technical wizard who just is happy poking through stuff that he shouldn't have access to. Yes, that's bad, but his main interest is probably learning, aside from some pranks. He's into this sort of thing, and he wants to play with it. Granted, that alone can cause damage, but I don't think that it's the bulk of the problem. I can't help but feel a certain degree of sympathy for the "it's just kids playing around" argument.
The issue comes in when easy-to-use tools enter the picture (which said technical wiz produces because he gets approval from his friends, be they IRC or otherwise) and you have a much larger number of people using these tools...and for them, the main appeal may not be learning interesting things about the system involved.
Then you run into problems.
I mean, I sit and think "Would the world be a better place if the Woz or Captain Crunch had gotten ten year sentences?" and I can't get myself to believe that that would be the case.
On the other hand, with networks the size they are and with the ease with which cracking tools spread, it seems impossible to keep that one first person from handing out tools to everyone else.
I kind of miss the days when copyright infringement was a little bit more underground, and not automated and en masse. The RIAA didn't really care what.01% of the people out there are doing in some IRC channel -- they just don't want half of their market trading audio around.
Well, I guess that's the down side of Metcalfe's Law.
On the other hand, consider that it costs a lot to prosecute people too.
If he makes, I dunno, $60K off of this, but he's a pain to prosecute (proving that John Doe was responsible for the invasion of a particular computer isn't easy), he may easily not be prosecuted.
Touche. But I *like* OS advocacy, and while I agree that that article may have been miscategorized, there are sufficient categories that one never needs to see if one doesn't want to.
The thing that people should be worried about is whether or not they learn something. That matters a lot more than what school you go to.
I'm sure that nobody in high school will believe this, but what college you go to will affect your life post-gradutation in a very small handful of ways:
(1) How frequently you get requests for money from your alma mater.
(2) How easy it is to get your first job. Whether or not you're obviously competent matters a lot more. It's also only the first job -- nobody, thirty years down the road, is going to give a damn what school you went to.
(3) You may run into other people at college that will give you some immediate contacts when starting out.
(4) If you're interested in a PhD, it can be somewhat easier to go to a well-known research school, simply because there will be more research money available there and thus easier to get into a research project and get research experience.
There may be some indirect psychological benefits. Maybe someone at an expensive school feels really driven to do their best and learns more than someone else...but the name of the professor reading off the lecture notes just doesn't matter that much.
Far more important is what you learn yourself. If you like history, read history -- who needs a professor to assign it to you? If you like computer science, there are more excellent works on the Internet than you can *possibly* read. It's like being in a candy store. Just grab something and start reading -- every book you read puts you one book more knowledgeable than you otherwise would be, and the more you know about a subject, the more entertaining it is to learn more about it.
The only reason the professor is there is to force you to a schedule, so that you don't wind up playing video games or drinking or whatever all the time, and there's little enough that they can do in this direction.
Besides, learning something on someone else's schedule sucks. I remember getting some dusty Steinback books from my dad's shelves and reading them. I loved them. In high school, I had to read Grapes of Wrath, which is probably considered Steinback's best work. I hated it. Why? I didn't have to read the earlier books on a schedule. I was doing it because I wanted to read them. I think a lot of people wind up learning to *dislike* learning because they are learning in an environment that makes them unhappy, which is really sad.
What college will do is give you a certificate that enforces some very minimal bound on your ability to stick to a subject. It doesn't take brilliance to get a college degree, and you can get a degree without learning that much. That doesn't mean that I think that you should *skip* a college degree, but going to Podunk U just plain does not mean that you can't be one of the most knowledgeable in your field.
Frankly, I'd say the most useful external thing that you can get to help you along is someone to encourage you. Parents to be interested in what you're doing, or friends that you can impress. Maybe a significant other. It's just someone to give you a little positive feedback, which helps a bundle.
The problem is that the social norm of no privacy being available in public came into existence before we had computers and digital video cameras that can literally log your behavior 24 hours day within a city. The reality of how far you can push "no privacy in public" is a lot more extreme today than it was back then.
It's hard to know exactly how acceptable we can make this -- maybe we just have cold feet about being constantly monitored. However, I think a good test case is celebrities. They are *constantly* monitored and photographed, and a huge number of them show up in news sources that I read being angry and upset over it.
It doesn't seem to me that people much *like* being monitored 24/7 in public.
Now, celebs are kind of screwed, because they are a very small chunk of the population. However, I think that if you subject everyone to the same kind of treatment, you're going to have people deciding that maybe laws against public monitoring (maybe anything that monitors someone for more than, say, 1% of their public time without their acceptance) is illegal.
Why do I think that if the Mayor and his hired flunky the Police Chief were Republicans, that'd be highlighted in the story and we'd have a quote from the ACLU already?
Because the GOP has been doing more to violate civil rights than the Democratic Party has been recently?
Darn, I thought I was the only one that would think of this.
The idea, for those not familiar with it, comes from the Williamette Week. Apparently, police had been sifting through Portland residents' garbage after it had been left out without a warrant. The city administration decided to take the policy that this was perfectly acceptable and that said residents did not have grounds for complaint. The Williamette Week had its reporters dumpster dive the garbage of the Portland police chief, district attorney, and mayor for a week and report on their findings to demonstrate that this was actually an intrusive practice.
Google *really* needs to add a mechanism that lets a site say "this is not freely-accessable content", and then index it, but allow the user to not see it. Maybe a robots.txt extension. Then Google can give registration-only sites an option other than providing a different page to Google to try to suck in users or to be totally unindexed.
That way, registration sites can allow Google to index their sites without forcing all of us to keep hitting these damned registration pages that most of us hate.
(It would also allow useful site: searches for those with subscriptions.)
Not trying to say that you're wrong, but the Nazis did, in fact, come for the homosexuals, as well as a few other undesireable groups (like the insane and mentally retarded, who were executed as a group even before the Jews).
Jews were just the largest and wealthiest group targetted.
A lot of articles on games wind up being simply trolling where one console or another is bashed. I really hate the unending stream of those.
However, I don't want to filter out games.slashdot.org, because there are often interesting articles from game developers or on the game industry.
What we need is consoleadvocacy.slashdot.org, like the.advocacy newsgroups on Usenet, where people who want to flame people who like console A or console B can flame to their hearts' content without bothering people who aren't interested in console advocacy.
Interesting. Not to troll or be offensive, but when was this?
Linux on the desktop is the worst incident in the last few years -- there was lots of people deingrating KDE or GNOME as "just playing catch-up". Every time Mac OS got a new feature (memory protection, etc) feature from about System 8.x on that Windows had, I heard about how it was "just playing catch-up" (and the same went for Mac OS applications that lagged their Windows equivalents).
It doesn't *mean* much. I don't have a problem with good ideas spreading. It's just satisfying to see Redmond indisputably treading water.
Slashdot Mirror
So here's the deal moron, the hallmark of mankind is his uncanny ability to exploit his fellow man. Karl Marx's vision completely ignores that fact, well it assumes that because you work in a car factory or on a farm that somehow you're morally superior to everybody else and wouldn't take advantage of someone else.
Marx's socialist world revolution obviously didn't happen. However, the man was also an influential philosopher, and showing that he was wrong about one thing (Einstein, Newton, and Aristotle had plenty of wrong ideas too, man) doesn't mean that nothing he says holds value.
You see, just as you often see posts out here on slashdot, kuro5hin or other internet message boards by western internet users showing their rage and frustration with Islam.
You think *Slashdot* and *Kuro5hin* has rage and frusteration with Islam? These are fairly socially liberal forums compared to most of the US.
If you want to understand the neocon mindset (I read rightnation.us for a while, which had many people advocating the nuclear destruction of Mecca to "teach those Muslims a lesson"), you have to watch something like the Dirty Harry series. Dirty Harry pretty much *exactly* epitomizes the thought process I've seen from neocon postings (even to the extent of having the potentially gay peace-symbol wearing guy be the villan). The thought process goes something like this: Politicians are corrupt and they and judges and other high-ranking authority are crippled by "civil rights" and their lack of manliness. As a result, they won't do anything. The whole problem could be solved with our powerful military hardware -- after all, look how powerful it is -- if only someone would have the balls to apply it without being held back by stupid things like civil rights. What is necessary is for people with lousy jobs who don't have much influence to just stand up and show that they have a pair of balls and are willing to extreme force, and they'll protect their women and children. Then they'll be heroes, and the authorities that refuse to do anything will be demonstrated to be clearly wrong. Oh, and it won't matter that they're xenophobic.
Do not think that this is not an influential mindset. It ties very well into machisimo, dislike of the system, and lack of understanding of civil rights. For uneducated males, this is a significant driving force. "Respecting weaker cultures/countries" is seen as weak, womanish, and so forth.
If you go somewhere like West Virginia, you'll find that there are very few minorities present in the state. Very few people have experience with non-whites, there is *still* a social barrier to hiring blacks, and the Christian churches (mostly very conservative Baptist) have far more impact than the occasional news story about the plight of some half-imaginary Arabs -- besides, Fox News is the primary source of news. The main impact of minorities has been immigrants that take low-paying jobs that the local inhabitants could otherwise have. That results in a lot of hard feelings towards Mexicans, blacks, and so forth. Slashdot's irritation over Indian competition for jobs is very, very mild compared to what you'll see in a place like this.
If you want a somewhat less applicable example of a movie with this mindset (really more oriented towards people that are a result of growing up bombarded with anticommunist propaganda), I'd suggest watching Red Dawn.
Two points:
First, in China, white is a color of mourning. Wedding dresses are normally red, which is a "good" color in China. In the United States, this would have a connotation of prostitution.
Second, physical attractiveness has shifted. In medieval times, an attractive woman was pale white and definitely plumper than one is today; it showed that she was wealthy and did not need to leave the house to work in the sun. Today, in the US, a somewhat darker skin tone is generally considered attractive, and women pay to expose their skin to UV light in tanning devices to darken it; darker skin and a light build shows that they are healthy and exercising and are wealthy enough to do so instead of having to work in a cubicle all the time.
I think that lighter skin in Japan being more attractive is a result of the amount of Western media becoming popular in Japan, but I could easily be wrong.
Voice of America was established in 1942, and, as far as I know, has operated since then. It's not like their webpages go down half the time.
Of course, it may be not be obvious that it's a government mouthpiece; like the Department of War effectively becoming the Department of Defense after World War II, the United States Information Agency (the US propaganda division) was renamed to the Bureau of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 1999.
See, that's a really good example of why patents are broken. The only reason nobody had made a nuclear-powered aircraft before was because nuclear power didn't exist yet. There's no benefit to society in granting a monopoly over nuclear-powered aircraft to the first people who happen to start filing patents on something.
If I'm an engineer and I'm building an airplane and I have, say, five different types of power sources that I can use, and one's characteristics fit my needs well, then of course I'm going to use that power source.
Feynman was perfectly justified in suggesting these things as applications of a technology. What should *not* be done is taking obvious *applications* of a technology and patenting them.
I have no problem with people getting a patent on an "idea" or software concept as long as the person can.
I do have a problem.
The issue is that patents do not address the case of obvious ideas that have not been done before because they simply make no sense in the environment -- but now do make sense because the environment has changed. Obviously, if flash memory has always been expensive in the past, you can't make a flash-memory based MP3 player. That doesn't mean that there's any benefit to society in allowing that idea to be patented. That *takes away* the ability of anyone else to make something like it.
A good patent is for something that represents a large jump forward (not something that's a trivial or obvious-to-any-expert-in-the-field idea), required a large amount of funding to produce (the reason for the patent is to subsidize the necessary research to produce valuable ideas), and is narrow enough that it does not affect a broad swath of products.
Frankly, I haven't seen anything like this.
Software patents have a huge array of fundamental problems. Software is a fast-moving field, but the term of patents means that they hugely slow down adoption. Right now, patents granted in the 80s are still valid. That's an eternity in the computer world. Yes, of course people come up with new ideas constantly; that's simply a characteristic of the field. Doing so is already funded through the production of software.
Software expands to fill markets very quickly, but is very slow to reverse-engineer and reimplement. This holds compared to almost any other patentable product (a new yo-yo, a pencil sharpener design, etc). This makes it very easy to make back the development investment by simply selling the software -- no patents are required.
Because the marginal cost of production of software approaches zero, open source can exist. Because of the inherent costs associated with use of patents, software patents are highly incompatible with open source. The value that open source software provides to today's computing world is immense. Windows' TCP stack (unless they've rewritten it) came from BSD, most webpages that are served to you come from open source software, etc. I argue that the value of open source software is significant enough that the damage presented it by software patents far exceeds the benefits of any sfotware patents.
The bulk of software patents has reached the point that it is simply impossible to write software without infringing on patents any more (at least in the US). Your only hope is that nobody tries enforcing those patents.
No, I really don't like software patents at all.
Actually, "small" and "futuristic" are not necessarily mentally intertwined as you might think.
I remember looking at old futuristic art from, oh, the 30s through the 50s. The future was big. Big buildings, bridges, ships, and later big airplanes and spaceships. Big cars, big roads. I suspect that for the typical person from that period, "futuristic" would be more closely associated with "big" than "small".
Computer users may or may not understand what they are consenting to when they click "OK" to the lengthy, legalistic disclosures that accompany these games or videos. But those notices are legal contracts that essentially absolve the adware companies from any liability associated with the use or misuse of their programs.
*Wait* a minute!
(...looks back at the Linux kernel license...)
Damn you, RMS! Damn you!
I'm thinking that the Washington Post's web team needs to add a policy regarding stripping out metadata before posting content.
The *really* scary thing is when people post Word files to the web. PDF is *designed* for posting, and I remember a couple instances where "censored" PDFs were recovered. Word files store all sorts of data that you may not want to spread around.
I'm not familiar with how police stations handle this sort of thing.
This is kind of Nowhere, Kansas-looking. How likely is it that you'd be able to contact them and say "well, this resident of your village is attacking and controlling computers over the Internet"? You don't have a list of who is affected. You don't have names or contact information for any companies who want to push for prosecution and can explain what damages they suffered.
They're probably more interested in things like petty theft and vandalism in a place like that. Nobody in their community is complaining about anything.
Maybe if someone at the state level got pissy about computer crime. [shrug]
I never thought that journalists might leave metadata in their images -- I thought that they'd have some sort of automated content management system that would take in a TIFF or whatever and spit out a JPEG of the appropriate size for the current design of the web page.
I'm now wondering how many other news stories might have very much unintended data leaks through metadata tags in images. Possibly quite a hell of a lot.
It's a cop out for the companies whose software is being installed to say, "Hey! Look, guys, honestly, we don't know anything about it!" They don't really care.
This is a whole industry.
Spam and sleazy marketing won't be done by a company with a reputation to protect. They'll have someone else do it and let them take the heat. That company doesn't care at all about their reputation (at least in the eyes of consumers).
You know...it's hard to say.
.01% of the people out there are doing in some IRC channel -- they just don't want half of their market trading audio around.
I've read about some of the exploits of Wozniak and similar wild-and-crazy types. It seems like a lot of times, there's some real technical wizard who just is happy poking through stuff that he shouldn't have access to. Yes, that's bad, but his main interest is probably learning, aside from some pranks. He's into this sort of thing, and he wants to play with it. Granted, that alone can cause damage, but I don't think that it's the bulk of the problem. I can't help but feel a certain degree of sympathy for the "it's just kids playing around" argument.
The issue comes in when easy-to-use tools enter the picture (which said technical wiz produces because he gets approval from his friends, be they IRC or otherwise) and you have a much larger number of people using these tools...and for them, the main appeal may not be learning interesting things about the system involved.
Then you run into problems.
I mean, I sit and think "Would the world be a better place if the Woz or Captain Crunch had gotten ten year sentences?" and I can't get myself to believe that that would be the case.
On the other hand, with networks the size they are and with the ease with which cracking tools spread, it seems impossible to keep that one first person from handing out tools to everyone else.
I kind of miss the days when copyright infringement was a little bit more underground, and not automated and en masse. The RIAA didn't really care what
Well, I guess that's the down side of Metcalfe's Law.
On the other hand, consider that it costs a lot to prosecute people too.
If he makes, I dunno, $60K off of this, but he's a pain to prosecute (proving that John Doe was responsible for the invasion of a particular computer isn't easy), he may easily not be prosecuted.
Touche. But I *like* OS advocacy, and while I agree that that article may have been miscategorized, there are sufficient categories that one never needs to see if one doesn't want to.
With games, the division is not very granular.
The thing that people should be worried about is whether or not they learn something. That matters a lot more than what school you go to.
I'm sure that nobody in high school will believe this, but what college you go to will affect your life post-gradutation in a very small handful of ways:
(1) How frequently you get requests for money from your alma mater.
(2) How easy it is to get your first job. Whether or not you're obviously competent matters a lot more. It's also only the first job -- nobody, thirty years down the road, is going to give a damn what school you went to.
(3) You may run into other people at college that will give you some immediate contacts when starting out.
(4) If you're interested in a PhD, it can be somewhat easier to go to a well-known research school, simply because there will be more research money available there and thus easier to get into a research project and get research experience.
There may be some indirect psychological benefits. Maybe someone at an expensive school feels really driven to do their best and learns more than someone else...but the name of the professor reading off the lecture notes just doesn't matter that much.
Far more important is what you learn yourself. If you like history, read history -- who needs a professor to assign it to you? If you like computer science, there are more excellent works on the Internet than you can *possibly* read. It's like being in a candy store. Just grab something and start reading -- every book you read puts you one book more knowledgeable than you otherwise would be, and the more you know about a subject, the more entertaining it is to learn more about it.
The only reason the professor is there is to force you to a schedule, so that you don't wind up playing video games or drinking or whatever all the time, and there's little enough that they can do in this direction.
Besides, learning something on someone else's schedule sucks. I remember getting some dusty Steinback books from my dad's shelves and reading them. I loved them. In high school, I had to read Grapes of Wrath, which is probably considered Steinback's best work. I hated it. Why? I didn't have to read the earlier books on a schedule. I was doing it because I wanted to read them. I think a lot of people wind up learning to *dislike* learning because they are learning in an environment that makes them unhappy, which is really sad.
What college will do is give you a certificate that enforces some very minimal bound on your ability to stick to a subject. It doesn't take brilliance to get a college degree, and you can get a degree without learning that much. That doesn't mean that I think that you should *skip* a college degree, but going to Podunk U just plain does not mean that you can't be one of the most knowledgeable in your field.
Frankly, I'd say the most useful external thing that you can get to help you along is someone to encourage you. Parents to be interested in what you're doing, or friends that you can impress. Maybe a significant other. It's just someone to give you a little positive feedback, which helps a bundle.
That reads like the flyleaf of a thriller.
I'm still a lot more scared of getting hit by a car.
And, frankly, I'd say that Africa should worry a lot more about AIDS than about Ebola.
If you're caught in a fatal car accident, there's a 100% chance that you'll die.
No -- that's what the guy next to you is for.
The problem is that the social norm of no privacy being available in public came into existence before we had computers and digital video cameras that can literally log your behavior 24 hours day within a city. The reality of how far you can push "no privacy in public" is a lot more extreme today than it was back then.
It's hard to know exactly how acceptable we can make this -- maybe we just have cold feet about being constantly monitored. However, I think a good test case is celebrities. They are *constantly* monitored and photographed, and a huge number of them show up in news sources that I read being angry and upset over it.
It doesn't seem to me that people much *like* being monitored 24/7 in public.
Now, celebs are kind of screwed, because they are a very small chunk of the population. However, I think that if you subject everyone to the same kind of treatment, you're going to have people deciding that maybe laws against public monitoring (maybe anything that monitors someone for more than, say, 1% of their public time without their acceptance) is illegal.
Why do I think that if the Mayor and his hired flunky the Police Chief were Republicans, that'd be highlighted in the story and we'd have a quote from the ACLU already?
Because the GOP has been doing more to violate civil rights than the Democratic Party has been recently?
Darn, I thought I was the only one that would think of this.
The idea, for those not familiar with it, comes from the Williamette Week. Apparently, police had been sifting through Portland residents' garbage after it had been left out without a warrant. The city administration decided to take the policy that this was perfectly acceptable and that said residents did not have grounds for complaint. The Williamette Week had its reporters dumpster dive the garbage of the Portland police chief, district attorney, and mayor for a week and report on their findings to demonstrate that this was actually an intrusive practice.
Google *really* needs to add a mechanism that lets a site say "this is not freely-accessable content", and then index it, but allow the user to not see it. Maybe a robots.txt extension. Then Google can give registration-only sites an option other than providing a different page to Google to try to suck in users or to be totally unindexed.
That way, registration sites can allow Google to index their sites without forcing all of us to keep hitting these damned registration pages that most of us hate.
(It would also allow useful site: searches for those with subscriptions.)
Not trying to say that you're wrong, but the Nazis did, in fact, come for the homosexuals, as well as a few other undesireable groups (like the insane and mentally retarded, who were executed as a group even before the Jews).
Jews were just the largest and wealthiest group targetted.
A lot of articles on games wind up being simply trolling where one console or another is bashed. I really hate the unending stream of those.
.advocacy newsgroups on Usenet, where people who want to flame people who like console A or console B can flame to their hearts' content without bothering people who aren't interested in console advocacy.
However, I don't want to filter out games.slashdot.org, because there are often interesting articles from game developers or on the game industry.
What we need is consoleadvocacy.slashdot.org, like the
Interesting. Not to troll or be offensive, but when was this?
Linux on the desktop is the worst incident in the last few years -- there was lots of people deingrating KDE or GNOME as "just playing catch-up". Every time Mac OS got a new feature (memory protection, etc) feature from about System 8.x on that Windows had, I heard about how it was "just playing catch-up" (and the same went for Mac OS applications that lagged their Windows equivalents).
It doesn't *mean* much. I don't have a problem with good ideas spreading. It's just satisfying to see Redmond indisputably treading water.