The better question is: How are genes different from logic? The sequences encode formulas for creating protiens. They are programs on a computer we call the cell.
We live (most readers) in a capitalist society. The thing that drives it is competition for resources.
What bad things do patents today do to innovation?:
1. Close information in testing phases.
2. Give profit to the first lab that has its lawyers file the paperwork.
3. Give lawyers money from "prior art" disputes.
What good things?
1. They allow small entitys to spend money in research and development that don't have the resources to manufacture the goods they design.
Getting rid of patents is great for huge corperations that have the production resources, but it sucks for all the little guys.
If you belive that argument you are a little nieve. Hear much about architects, engineers, and programmers that were low paid? There are valid business models for the little guys.
We don't need patents or long term copyright in our society. The only class that gets a lot out of them is lawyers, which tend to be our lawmakers.
I have to disagree. All the Physics types I knew back at my Undergrad university were good programmers. Not only that, but they were GREAT at Math. Working for an insurance company isn't that big of a step. Actuarial divisions love their Math skills, and the rest of the organisation loves how they are good at abstracting complex systems.
After sending out the electronic versions of my letters I noticed that every one of the congressmen was advertising for intern positons.
CALL TO ALL STUDENTS!!!
Apply to an intern position in your congressman's office. A friend of mine did it and he said it was a great expirence. Not only can you work to help your congressmen go through their piles of mail, you can explicitly weed out all the anti-DMCA letters to show them. So all student's out there wanting to help their country and stop copyright abuse apply for an intern position!!! We will be deeply in debt to you.
Great article. Hmm. For some reason I doubt my congressmen read Slash.
I am going to mail a copy of it with a short intro from yours truly to all my congressmen/representitives. I encourage all of you, even those not in the US to do the same. This article does a lot better in their hands than ours. For those in the US that are lazy here is a list of your House members and Senate members that has their adresses and such.
GNU Enterprise is still in its infancy, but to me it seems the most open/robust. Compiere and Appgen are ok for the financial side, but GNUEnterprise helps out the whole business.
The thing I find most attractive is the automated forms and report generators. Businesses like doctor's offices pay out thousands to get software that automatically generates patient reports. GNUEnterprise lets them keep track of day-to-day operations along with the financials. This way no matter what the business unit's title: Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Sales, RnD, Manufacturing,... they can all use the same suite of software. IT loves this.
I was at an interesting seminar today where one of my professors was talking about how P=NP seems to pop up in a lot of areas. The most intersting thing is that we can solve many NP problems in almost guarenteed polynomial time by using random techniques. As pseudorandom generators evolve we are able to generate numbers almost totaly random to the computation at hand.
The question may not be does P=NP, but are problems solvable in polynomal time in the same class as problems that can be solved using random methods, a class called BPP(Bounded-error Probabilistic Polynomial).
MS Research isn't necicaraly a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that Microsoft has an unfair advantage to other companies like IBM, Sun, Lucent, ATT, SGI, and Apple in that they gained their research bucks illegaly.
For society to function smoothly we have to play by the rules. I don't *hate* Microsoft. I just think that they shouldn't be allowed to get of the hook for doing illegal activites. If the EU and the US had the balls to smack Microsoft upside the head this wouldn't be a problem.
This is just the start of what is to come with it's newest tenticle: Microsoft Research. The whole idea behind the division is to grab the brightest people out of acadamia with a fat paycheck (from monopoly profits) and some great collegues to work with(previously bought out). This way they can come out with products such as WMA with an almost instant time to market buy releasing a new version of Windows Media Player or DirectX. This is great if you are running Windows. You get the latest algorithms straight out of the labs. Kind of sucks though for the rest of us.
Here are some links to Intrusion Detection systems being developed at Iowa State. They are offering fellowships for those interested in doing graduate work in computer security. Here is a link to one of their papers on distributed intrusion dection.
Re:Why waste all the time developing "gyros"...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
The question is do the gyros keep balence, or help to power the thing?
You can get a lot of energy going in gyro. Just think of the spinners in Battlebots. They have more powerfull hits than about anything else in the arena.
From the Time article it sounded to me more like he was using a gyroscopic motion as a form of momentum. I just can't think of how he translates that into ground friction, or beter yet got rid of most ground friction.
Quite the contrary. Software is machine readable code. If machine readable code were equated with human text then software would be nothing more than an electronic book in the eyes of the law. Any patents on books would render the ideas contained in them to be the sole property of the writer.
Kind of silly to patent a book. Publishing it gives the ideas contained in it to the buyers, thus giving them the right to use the information contained there. Buy selling the book you are in effect selling the "intelectual property" of the patent. Once sold the buyer could do with it what they want. Even use the text as research material for another text whether it be machine or human readable.
There would be one string attached that some of us might not like though. What of the GPL? Kind of renders it ineffective in a sense. This isn't all bad though. Since machine code would be considered the same as human text you could reverse engineer the heck out of software, and it would be no different than trying to read Kant. The GPL wouldn't be needed anymore. Anyway, its not the GPL that makes free and open software. It's the coders who spend many an hour scratching all those software itches they have. With the advent of the WWW colaberation has hit a critical mass where we don't need legal stonewalling to bring free software to the masses.
The DMCA would be in violation of the first amendment because machine code would be equated with free speech. The DMCA states that it is illegal to publish machine code that circumvents copyright protections. If speech were equated with code then the DMCA would also make it illegal to publish human readable articles outlining copyright protections. That would be a clear violation of the first amendment of the US constitution protecting free speech.
Interesting article. The judge in the case equated code with speech, but said that the speech wasn't expresive enough to deserve protection. Now if that isn't a load of BS... I propose an elongated version of the law more dummy proof for clueless judges:
Congresional Amendment XXX: to sections {A,B,C...}
"Machine readable code is equivalent human readable text. Thus, all laws pertaining to machine readable code are applicable to human text/speech, and all human text/speech laws are appicable to machine readable code.
It would take a heck of a lot of revisons to make implications of this law constitutional. Mainly getting rid of "Digital" and "Cyber" hogwash from the books.
I can see how the judge threw out the case aginast RIAA/SMDI party because a lack of evidence that harm would come to the plaintiffs, but I totaly disagree about his reasonings for mootnes on the part of the Justice Dept. Code was not equated with writing/speech, so the sale of the professor's works to Scientific American would have not have been a criminal violation of the DMCA.
The best way to get rid of the DMCA and a bunch of other BS that gets passed through congress is to pass one single law. The law would state: "Machine readable encodings are legaly equivalent to human readable text."
As a direct consequence the DMCA would be in violation of the 1st ammendment. Any patents on software would be voided because text to the best of my knowlage is only copywritable, not patentable. The headache of stupid digital legislation would hopefully be behind us.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, rockets to the moon,... Jules Verne has to be the most visionary science fiction writer I can think of in recent history. Assimov and friends will take his place soon, but I don't think our tech has advanced far enough yet for that.
Sorry Mr. Ridge. There is this invention called the Google Cache. A new terrorist tool used to defeat draconian ISP's, the RIAA, and now the US Government from stoping the flow of information.
Speaking of flow, how about some USGS dam safety links at
http://www.wes.army.mil/ITL/damsafe/sites.html, what??? 404? Not found??
Here are the good solutions that I have heard so far:
-Free Open File Formats
-Free Open Communication Protocols
-Free Open APIs
-No prorietary 3rd party file formats, API's, and communication protocols.
-60/90 day free an public pre-notice documentation of all changes and additons to Microsoft file formats, communications protocols, and APIs.
-Public Disclosure of OEM agreements
-"Flat rate" OEM agreements, so OEM's can bundle Windows any legal way they want and Microsoft has no recourse.
-Restriction of Licenceing agreements to "Copyright Only"
-Stop all bundleing with the OS. All aplications must be sold as a seperate package, or at least put on a seperate CD.
-Microsoft for a period of 5 years should not be able to invest in/buy out other companies.
-Microsoft must make public all agreements with hardware manufactures.
-The price of Windows must be artificialy price capped using a formula like PRICE = COST_OF_PRODUCTION*1.25 This will ensure that the consumer is paying a true "market" price for the product.
-Auction the rights to develop each Microsoft product for platforms that Microsoft does not support. Microsoft will then give the winner of each auction full acess to the product's source code under a NDA.
-No spinnoff of a Microsoft division can be made into a seperate company for the next 3 years.
Coursework got you down? Do a random coding project. The best way to keep interested in CS is be active in doing stuff that you find fun. Coursework definitely brodens your horizons, but if you want to do something interesting many times you have to take the initive. Here are some random projects that my roomate and/or I did to keep ourselves interested while at college.
-Teach yourself some Computer graphics and build a paralell ray-tracer.
-Get a book on Lex/Yacc and write your own programming language.
-Mess around with X-screensaver code and write a new screensaver.
-Teach yourself some about evolutionary computation and teach your computer to play blackjack.
-Learn about image filters and write yourself an image filter library.
-Pick up a book on neural nets and write one that does vowel recognition.
-Teach your self about kernel hacking and implement a new feature like process statistics.
Also notice sections J.2.b-d. To get API's, documentation, or protocols one needs to:
1. stiputlate that you must have a "reasonable business need", and one must certify "viability if its business".(sorry Open Source software isn't a valid bussiness model)
2.submit your program for microsoft "verification"
(which will probably take 2 years)
Sorry all you open source developers. You can't have any documentation or API's because you are all communist, and have commited the mortal sin of trying to compete with Microsoft.
I think this about sums it up. Micosoft can still screw over developers that are trying to compete with them.
"J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:
1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria; or (b) any API, interface or other information related to any Microsoft product if lawfully directed not to do so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction.
2. Prevent Microsoft from conditioning any license of any API, Documentation or Communications Protocol related to anti-piracy systems, anti-virus technologies, license enforcement mechanisms, authentication/authorization security, or third party intellectual property protection mechanisms of any Microsoft product to any person or entity on the requirement that the licensee: (a) has no history of software counterfeiting or piracy or willful violation of intellectual property rights, (b) has a reasonable business need for the API, Documentation or Communications Protocol for a planned or shipping product, (c) meets reasonable, objective standards established by Microsoft for certifying the authenticity and viability of its business, (d) agrees to submit, at its own expense, any computer program using such APIs, Documentation or Communication Protocols to third-party verification, approved by Microsoft, to test for and ensure verification and compliance with Microsoft specifications for use of the API or interface, which specifications shall be related to proper operation and integrity of the systems and mechanisms identified in this paragraph."
If Slash wants to stay profitable..
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If slashdot wants to stay alfoat in the dotbomb world it should understand why it is popular:
1. The only annoying advertising is a thin banner ad, no popups, and if you scroll down it doesn't stay there. i.e. CLEAN INTERFACE
2. Katz can be filtered through the user preferences.
3. CmdrTaco and friends do a decent job of highlighting a wide variety of tech/geek news sources, not just what the parent company shoves down their throat.
Hey, advertising revenues are down. Deal with it. You have a company that turns a profit. Don't get greedy and it will stay that way. If you need to shell out for more hardware and bandwidth for ISP support do so, but don't let that lead to bloat. Slashcode could be always be tweaked to save computing resources, but it is mature and doesn't need more bells and whistles.
The hacker skills are vital to the medical profession. The human body is a complex adaptive system. Every now and then it gets out of equalibrim, and it is a doctor's job to help the patient put it back on track. This requires a great amount of abstraction. Given almost any treatment there is going to be a side effect on another subsystem of the body. The doctor must know "how things tick," and analyize the best course of action with a limited amount of knowlege. These are skills one learns by "...f***ing around with computers..." Problem solving. And if they are a research doctor, they had better know how to crunch data too.
Laptops for 7th graders? And why don't we get them all PS2's while we're at it... The last thing we need to do is give every kid in 7th grade the M$ drone training program. Instead we need to teach Math and programming classes differently.
Arithmatic should be taught in grades 1-3 instead of 1-5. We all have calculators now and its ok if it takes you a few extra seconds to divide 37 into 34564 by hand. We need to teach algebra earlier, say from grades 4-6. Then grades 7-12 can focus on geometry, trig,calc, probability/stat, and most importantly discrete mathematics.
*RANT* The number of high schools that have manditory discrete math courses is very few (in the US). The one area of math that is most usefull in an information economy isn't being taught. Permuations, combinations, graphs, codes, and algorithms are WAY more useful than anything you will get out of an intro calculus course.
Many calculus techniques are becoming outdated. (Don't get me wrong here, Calculus is a MUST for those that are Science/Math inclined, but its importance is much less for those in the middle of the bell curve.) Instead of making continious approximations of our data we now have the computing power to crunch the whole data set. Algorithm efficency is becoming more important than how to do nasty Trig substitutions or integration by parts. The biggest problem is that there is no AP test for Discrete Math. Why take the course if you aren't required to, and you don't get college credit for it? *END_RANT*
As far as programming courses go, they should be manditory and probably be integrated with math courses. No more BASIC. Start kids out with C++/JAVA/Scheme/Python in 7th grade. By the time they graduate highschool every student should be able to abstract, design, code, and debug simple programming problems involving IO, conditionals, boolean algebra, loops, and a slight amount of recursion.
I would much rather see collage freshmen who knew [INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE] with a discrete math background than a student who could use Powerpoint/Word/Excel.
Back when I took compiler construction at Drake University three of us got together and made our own programming language called Eubonicode to help those who like to engage in ghetto algorithmic expression. I threw it up on the website. Here is the fibbonacci code:
sup
{
gimme fibo bitch
a be 1 bitch
b be 1 bitch
putou a bitch
putou b bitch
fibo be fibo widout 2 bitch
slongas (fibo bepimpin 0)
c be a an b bitch
a be b bitch
b be c bitch
putou b bitch
dissin fibo bitch
nomo
}
Slashdot Mirror
The better question is: How are genes different from logic? The sequences encode formulas for creating protiens. They are programs on a computer we call the cell.
We live (most readers) in a capitalist society. The thing that drives it is competition for resources.
What bad things do patents today do to innovation?:
1. Close information in testing phases.
2. Give profit to the first lab that has its lawyers file the paperwork.
3. Give lawyers money from "prior art" disputes.
What good things?
1. They allow small entitys to spend money in research and development that don't have the resources to manufacture the goods they design.
Getting rid of patents is great for huge corperations that have the production resources, but it sucks for all the little guys.
If you belive that argument you are a little nieve. Hear much about architects, engineers, and programmers that were low paid? There are valid business models for the little guys.
We don't need patents or long term copyright in our society. The only class that gets a lot out of them is lawyers, which tend to be our lawmakers.
I have to disagree. All the Physics types I knew back at my Undergrad university were good programmers. Not only that, but they were GREAT at Math. Working for an insurance company isn't that big of a step. Actuarial divisions love their Math skills, and the rest of the organisation loves how they are good at abstracting complex systems.
After sending out the electronic versions of my letters I noticed that every one of the congressmen was advertising for intern positons.
CALL TO ALL STUDENTS!!!
Apply to an intern position in your congressman's office. A friend of mine did it and he said it was a great expirence. Not only can you work to help your congressmen go through their piles of mail, you can explicitly weed out all the anti-DMCA letters to show them. So all student's out there wanting to help their country and stop copyright abuse apply for an intern position!!! We will be deeply in debt to you.
Great article. Hmm. For some reason I doubt my congressmen read Slash.
I am going to mail a copy of it with a short intro from yours truly to all my congressmen/representitives. I encourage all of you, even those not in the US to do the same. This article does a lot better in their hands than ours. For those in the US that are lazy here is a list of your House members and Senate members that has their adresses and such.
GNU Enterprise is still in its infancy, but to me it seems the most open/robust. Compiere and Appgen are ok for the financial side, but GNUEnterprise helps out the whole business.
The thing I find most attractive is the automated forms and report generators. Businesses like doctor's offices pay out thousands to get software that automatically generates patient reports. GNUEnterprise lets them keep track of day-to-day operations along with the financials. This way no matter what the business unit's title: Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Sales, RnD, Manufacturing,... they can all use the same suite of software. IT loves this.
I was at an interesting seminar today where one of my professors was talking about how P=NP seems to pop up in a lot of areas. The most intersting thing is that we can solve many NP problems in almost guarenteed polynomial time by using random techniques. As pseudorandom generators evolve we are able to generate numbers almost totaly random to the computation at hand.
The question may not be does P=NP, but are problems solvable in polynomal time in the same class as problems that can be solved using random methods, a class called BPP(Bounded-error Probabilistic Polynomial).
A tech paper on their "tornado codes". Also, the link to their tech papers website.
Didn't have much chance to look over the algorithms, but we really should have compression used more frequently in network transport.
BASIC Domino effect:
10 Create a monopoly
20 Use monopoly profits to further monopoly
30 GOTO 20
MS Research isn't necicaraly a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that Microsoft has an unfair advantage to other companies like IBM, Sun, Lucent, ATT, SGI, and Apple in that they gained their research bucks illegaly.
For society to function smoothly we have to play by the rules. I don't *hate* Microsoft. I just think that they shouldn't be allowed to get of the hook for doing illegal activites. If the EU and the US had the balls to smack Microsoft upside the head this wouldn't be a problem.
This is just the start of what is to come with it's newest tenticle: Microsoft Research. The whole idea behind the division is to grab the brightest people out of acadamia with a fat paycheck (from monopoly profits) and some great collegues to work with(previously bought out). This way they can come out with products such as WMA with an almost instant time to market buy releasing a new version of Windows Media Player or DirectX. This is great if you are running Windows. You get the latest algorithms straight out of the labs. Kind of sucks though for the rest of us.
Here are some links to Intrusion Detection systems being developed at Iowa State. They are offering fellowships for those interested in doing graduate work in computer security. Here is a link to one of their papers on distributed intrusion dection.
Automated Discovery of Concise Predictive Rules for Intrusion Detection
The question is do the gyros keep balence, or help to power the thing?
You can get a lot of energy going in gyro. Just think of the spinners in Battlebots. They have more powerfull hits than about anything else in the arena.
From the Time article it sounded to me more like he was using a gyroscopic motion as a form of momentum. I just can't think of how he translates that into ground friction, or beter yet got rid of most ground friction.
Quite the contrary. Software is machine readable code. If machine readable code were equated with human text then software would be nothing more than an electronic book in the eyes of the law. Any patents on books would render the ideas contained in them to be the sole property of the writer.
Kind of silly to patent a book. Publishing it gives the ideas contained in it to the buyers, thus giving them the right to use the information contained there. Buy selling the book you are in effect selling the "intelectual property" of the patent. Once sold the buyer could do with it what they want. Even use the text as research material for another text whether it be machine or human readable.
There would be one string attached that some of us might not like though. What of the GPL? Kind of renders it ineffective in a sense. This isn't all bad though. Since machine code would be considered the same as human text you could reverse engineer the heck out of software, and it would be no different than trying to read Kant. The GPL wouldn't be needed anymore. Anyway, its not the GPL that makes free and open software. It's the coders who spend many an hour scratching all those software itches they have. With the advent of the WWW colaberation has hit a critical mass where we don't need legal stonewalling to bring free software to the masses.
The DMCA would be in violation of the first amendment because machine code would be equated with free speech. The DMCA states that it is illegal to publish machine code that circumvents copyright protections. If speech were equated with code then the DMCA would also make it illegal to publish human readable articles outlining copyright protections. That would be a clear violation of the first amendment of the US constitution protecting free speech.
Interesting article. The judge in the case equated code with speech, but said that the speech wasn't expresive enough to deserve protection. Now if that isn't a load of BS... I propose an elongated version of the law more dummy proof for clueless judges:
Congresional Amendment XXX: to sections {A,B,C...}
"Machine readable code is equivalent human readable text. Thus, all laws pertaining to machine readable code are applicable to human text/speech, and all human text/speech laws are appicable to machine readable code.
It would take a heck of a lot of revisons to make implications of this law constitutional. Mainly getting rid of "Digital" and "Cyber" hogwash from the books.
I can see how the judge threw out the case aginast RIAA/SMDI party because a lack of evidence that harm would come to the plaintiffs, but I totaly disagree about his reasonings for mootnes on the part of the Justice Dept. Code was not equated with writing/speech, so the sale of the professor's works to Scientific American would have not have been a criminal violation of the DMCA.
The best way to get rid of the DMCA and a bunch of other BS that gets passed through congress is to pass one single law. The law would state: "Machine readable encodings are legaly equivalent to human readable text."
As a direct consequence the DMCA would be in violation of the 1st ammendment. Any patents on software would be voided because text to the best of my knowlage is only copywritable, not patentable. The headache of stupid digital legislation would hopefully be behind us.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, rockets to the moon,... Jules Verne has to be the most visionary science fiction writer I can think of in recent history. Assimov and friends will take his place soon, but I don't think our tech has advanced far enough yet for that.
Sorry Mr. Ridge. There is this invention called the Google Cache. A new terrorist tool used to defeat draconian ISP's, the RIAA, and now the US Government from stoping the flow of information.
;)
Speaking of flow, how about some USGS dam safety links at
http://www.wes.army.mil/ITL/damsafe/sites.html, what??? 404? Not found??
Lets try this google cache thingy
Wow. I can still see the website. We had better shut down that evil Google
Here are the good solutions that I have heard so far:
-Free Open File Formats
-Free Open Communication Protocols
-Free Open APIs
-No prorietary 3rd party file formats, API's, and communication protocols.
-60/90 day free an public pre-notice documentation of all changes and additons to Microsoft file formats, communications protocols, and APIs.
-Public Disclosure of OEM agreements
-"Flat rate" OEM agreements, so OEM's can bundle Windows any legal way they want and Microsoft has no recourse.
-Restriction of Licenceing agreements to "Copyright Only"
-Stop all bundleing with the OS. All aplications must be sold as a seperate package, or at least put on a seperate CD.
-Microsoft for a period of 5 years should not be able to invest in/buy out other companies.
-Microsoft must make public all agreements with hardware manufactures.
-The price of Windows must be artificialy price capped using a formula like PRICE = COST_OF_PRODUCTION*1.25 This will ensure that the consumer is paying a true "market" price for the product.
-Auction the rights to develop each Microsoft product for platforms that Microsoft does not support. Microsoft will then give the winner of each auction full acess to the product's source code under a NDA.
-No spinnoff of a Microsoft division can be made into a seperate company for the next 3 years.
Coursework got you down? Do a random coding project. The best way to keep interested in CS is be active in doing stuff that you find fun. Coursework definitely brodens your horizons, but if you want to do something interesting many times you have to take the initive. Here are some random projects that my roomate and/or I did to keep ourselves interested while at college.
-Teach yourself some Computer graphics and build a paralell ray-tracer.
-Get a book on Lex/Yacc and write your own programming language.
-Mess around with X-screensaver code and write a new screensaver.
-Teach yourself some about evolutionary computation and teach your computer to play blackjack.
-Learn about image filters and write yourself an image filter library.
-Pick up a book on neural nets and write one that does vowel recognition.
-Teach your self about kernel hacking and implement a new feature like process statistics.
Also notice sections J.2.b-d. To get API's, documentation, or protocols one needs to:
1. stiputlate that you must have a "reasonable business need", and one must certify "viability if its business".(sorry Open Source software isn't a valid bussiness model)
2.submit your program for microsoft "verification"
(which will probably take 2 years)
Sorry all you open source developers. You can't have any documentation or API's because you are all communist, and have commited the mortal sin of trying to compete with Microsoft.
I think this about sums it up. Micosoft can still screw over developers that are trying to compete with them.
"J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:
1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria; or (b) any API, interface or other information related to any Microsoft product if lawfully directed not to do so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction.
2. Prevent Microsoft from conditioning any license of any API, Documentation or Communications Protocol related to anti-piracy systems, anti-virus technologies, license enforcement mechanisms, authentication/authorization security, or third party intellectual property protection mechanisms of any Microsoft product to any person or entity on the requirement that the licensee: (a) has no history of software counterfeiting or piracy or willful violation of intellectual property rights, (b) has a reasonable business need for the API, Documentation or Communications Protocol for a planned or shipping product, (c) meets reasonable, objective standards established by Microsoft for certifying the authenticity and viability of its business, (d) agrees to submit, at its own expense, any computer program using such APIs, Documentation or Communication Protocols to third-party verification, approved by Microsoft, to test for and ensure verification and compliance with Microsoft specifications for use of the API or interface, which specifications shall be related to proper operation and integrity of the systems and mechanisms identified in this paragraph."
If slashdot wants to stay alfoat in the dotbomb world it should understand why it is popular:
1. The only annoying advertising is a thin banner ad, no popups, and if you scroll down it doesn't stay there. i.e. CLEAN INTERFACE
2. Katz can be filtered through the user preferences.
3. CmdrTaco and friends do a decent job of highlighting a wide variety of tech/geek news sources, not just what the parent company shoves down their throat.
Hey, advertising revenues are down. Deal with it. You have a company that turns a profit. Don't get greedy and it will stay that way. If you need to shell out for more hardware and bandwidth for ISP support do so, but don't let that lead to bloat. Slashcode could be always be tweaked to save computing resources, but it is mature and doesn't need more bells and whistles.
The hacker skills are vital to the medical profession. The human body is a complex adaptive system. Every now and then it gets out of equalibrim, and it is a doctor's job to help the patient put it back on track. This requires a great amount of abstraction. Given almost any treatment there is going to be a side effect on another subsystem of the body. The doctor must know "how things tick," and analyize the best course of action with a limited amount of knowlege. These are skills one learns by "...f***ing around with computers..." Problem solving. And if they are a research doctor, they had better know how to crunch data too.
Laptops for 7th graders? And why don't we get them all PS2's while we're at it ... The last thing we need to do is give every kid in 7th grade the M$ drone training program. Instead we need to teach Math and programming classes differently.
Arithmatic should be taught in grades 1-3 instead of 1-5. We all have calculators now and its ok if it takes you a few extra seconds to divide 37 into 34564 by hand. We need to teach algebra earlier, say from grades 4-6. Then grades 7-12 can focus on geometry, trig,calc, probability/stat, and most importantly discrete mathematics.
*RANT*
The number of high schools that have manditory discrete math courses is very few (in the US). The one area of math that is most usefull in an information economy isn't being taught. Permuations, combinations, graphs, codes, and algorithms are WAY more useful than anything you will get out of an intro calculus course.
Many calculus techniques are becoming outdated. (Don't get me wrong here, Calculus is a MUST for those that are Science/Math inclined, but its importance is much less for those in the middle of the bell curve.) Instead of making continious approximations of our data we now have the computing power to crunch the whole data set. Algorithm efficency is becoming more important than how to do nasty Trig substitutions or integration by parts. The biggest problem is that there is no AP test for Discrete Math. Why take the course if you aren't required to, and you don't get college credit for it?
*END_RANT*
As far as programming courses go, they should be manditory and probably be integrated with math courses. No more BASIC. Start kids out with C++/JAVA/Scheme/Python in 7th grade. By the time they graduate highschool every student should be able to abstract, design, code, and debug simple programming problems involving IO, conditionals, boolean algebra, loops, and a slight amount of recursion.
I would much rather see collage freshmen who knew [INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE] with a discrete math background than a student who could use Powerpoint/Word/Excel.
Back when I took compiler construction at Drake University three of us got together and made our own programming language called Eubonicode to help those who like to engage in ghetto algorithmic expression. I threw it up on the website. Here is the fibbonacci code:
sup
{
gimme fibo bitch
a be 1 bitch
b be 1 bitch
putou a bitch
putou b bitch
fibo be fibo widout 2 bitch
slongas (fibo bepimpin 0)
c be a an b bitch
a be b bitch
b be c bitch
putou b bitch
dissin fibo bitch
nomo
}