There seems to be a slow, inexorable trend in Slashdot headlines to misrepresent their content. Whether that's because the editors prefer a 'shocking' headline to an accurate one, or because no-one Rs TFA anymore, I guess we'll never know.
Moreover, the survey compares countries, not students.
The actual article (ZOMG!) seems to say that in countries where the average student enjoys their maths lessons and thinks they have a good handle on the content, their actual proficiency is sub-par. Presumably because their lessons are focused on entertainment and not content.
Also, note that the article refers to grade 4 and grade 8. In most countries, maths education at this level still primarily consists of a lot of rote learning, in several disparate areas. I was a relatively competent maths-geek at school, and even for me maths only really stopped being a chore at about 10th grade.
"Sony announces X" is quite different from "Sony suddenly realizes that it seriously needs X, and will start work immediately". For all we know, they've been working on "PS3 Live" for as long as the PS3 itself, but only chose to announce it now.
... and remember, this is Sony. Apart from consumer electronics, they're well established in the content distribution market. For them "PS3 Live" won't just be a gaming matchup service, it'll be another distribution channel with built-in client-side DRM. Given that the PS3 is supposed to have CD-RW capabilities, it wouldn't suprise me if they offered a straight-to-CD iTunes clone... which could make things very interesting.
Re:How many java apps are you running?
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Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 1
I've been using Eclipse as my sole IDE for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the last 3 years. But yeah, aside from that, very little of my time is spent using Java apps.
I'm relatively sympathetic to Cory Doctorow's politics, and understand that as a card-carrying evangelist for the EFF, I ought to expect a little evangelizing in his fiction. I read, and enjoyed, his short-story "I, Robot", because although the preaching came across a little thick, it nevertheless 'fit' into the story.
However, in Someone Comes To Town, I felt the 'internet for the masses' story was completely and utterly peripheral to the 'real' story, and in fact was solely there to provide a platform for more evangelizing. It's almost as if it started out as a short story about a guy called A.* whose mother was a washing machine and whose father was a mountain... but instead of promoting it to a novel by fleshing out the characters a little more (particularly Krishna and B.*), and giving the ending a little more coherence, Doctorow simply bolted on a completely unrelated rant about how cool city-wide WiFi access would be.
It seems to me that he had a perfectly good fantasy story, but for some reason felt obliged to add some gratuitous geek-friendly content instead of fleshing the fantasy out some more... one example of this is the use of the word 'blinkenlights'. As a geek, I appreciated it, but as a reader, it felt completely out of place.
AFAICT, the reason why the mere possession of certain things is illegal is simply because there is no reasonable explanation of why you have them other than the intent to break the law. Whether or not that's actually that case is another matter, but isn't the central question actually one of reasonable doubt?
To extropolate a few examples...
If a cop finds me with a bag of sweet, juicy crack in my back pocket, and I insist that someone shoved them there and ran off, it does indeed look bad. However, if I have no prior drug-related convictions, a battery of character-witnesses testifying to my law-abiding nature and a squeaky-clean blood analysis, reasonable doubt says that I'll almost certainly get off.
Similarly in this case, if there is kiddie-porn in the guy's cache, it looks bad. However, if there's none anywhere else on his PC, or in his house, and no reference to kidde-porn sites in his browser's history, then IMHO, he should probably be allowed to walk... because there are numerous explanations of how that stuff could've got there 'by itself' that do not involve any illegal activity.
For it to be illegal simply to be in possession of a 'bad thing' regardless of context, and without any recourse to any kind of legal defense, is obviously dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a slow, inexorable trend in Slashdot headlines to misrepresent their content. Whether that's because the editors prefer a 'shocking' headline to an accurate one, or because no-one Rs TFA anymore, I guess we'll never know. Moreover, the survey compares countries, not students. The actual article (ZOMG!) seems to say that in countries where the average student enjoys their maths lessons and thinks they have a good handle on the content, their actual proficiency is sub-par. Presumably because their lessons are focused on entertainment and not content. Also, note that the article refers to grade 4 and grade 8. In most countries, maths education at this level still primarily consists of a lot of rote learning, in several disparate areas. I was a relatively competent maths-geek at school, and even for me maths only really stopped being a chore at about 10th grade.
"Sony announces X" is quite different from "Sony suddenly realizes that it seriously needs X, and will start work immediately". For all we know, they've been working on "PS3 Live" for as long as the PS3 itself, but only chose to announce it now.
... and remember, this is Sony. Apart from consumer electronics, they're well established in the content distribution market. For them "PS3 Live" won't just be a gaming matchup service, it'll be another distribution channel with built-in client-side DRM. Given that the PS3 is supposed to have CD-RW capabilities, it wouldn't suprise me if they offered a straight-to-CD iTunes clone... which could make things very interesting.
I've been using Eclipse as my sole IDE for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the last 3 years. But yeah, aside from that, very little of my time is spent using Java apps.
However, in Someone Comes To Town, I felt the 'internet for the masses' story was completely and utterly peripheral to the 'real' story, and in fact was solely there to provide a platform for more evangelizing. It's almost as if it started out as a short story about a guy called A.* whose mother was a washing machine and whose father was a mountain... but instead of promoting it to a novel by fleshing out the characters a little more (particularly Krishna and B.*), and giving the ending a little more coherence, Doctorow simply bolted on a completely unrelated rant about how cool city-wide WiFi access would be.
It seems to me that he had a perfectly good fantasy story, but for some reason felt obliged to add some gratuitous geek-friendly content instead of fleshing the fantasy out some more... one example of this is the use of the word 'blinkenlights'. As a geek, I appreciated it, but as a reader, it felt completely out of place.
AFAICT, the reason why the mere possession of certain things is illegal is simply because there is no reasonable explanation of why you have them other than the intent to break the law. Whether or not that's actually that case is another matter, but isn't the central question actually one of reasonable doubt? To extropolate a few examples... If a cop finds me with a bag of sweet, juicy crack in my back pocket, and I insist that someone shoved them there and ran off, it does indeed look bad. However, if I have no prior drug-related convictions, a battery of character-witnesses testifying to my law-abiding nature and a squeaky-clean blood analysis, reasonable doubt says that I'll almost certainly get off. Similarly in this case, if there is kiddie-porn in the guy's cache, it looks bad. However, if there's none anywhere else on his PC, or in his house, and no reference to kidde-porn sites in his browser's history, then IMHO, he should probably be allowed to walk... because there are numerous explanations of how that stuff could've got there 'by itself' that do not involve any illegal activity. For it to be illegal simply to be in possession of a 'bad thing' regardless of context, and without any recourse to any kind of legal defense, is obviously dangerous.