How much work was it to work around the actual differences? Everyone loves to throw around the number of different platform variants, but how bad were the actual problems you found? (I realize that the great number of platform variants makes testing take longer, even if you don't find any bugs in that variant.)
For some topics, it's difficult to find an impartial-but-competent editor. Take politics: if the editor understands the topic, they will very likely have a personal position on it. If they don't understand it, they probably won't be able to figure out what's worth including, and how much coverage to give different points of view. (Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.) At some point, someone needs to make a judgement over which points of view are fringe and which are mainstream, if only to convey that to their readers, and that is a judgement that someone will always contest.
The controversial.xxx domain, if it ever gets approved, would allow people and countries that do not want to see porn to have a way to ensure that they will never see it unless they intentionally go to those sites.
A "country" cannot decide for its people that it "doesn't want to see porn". I can assure you, at least some people (of legal age) in that country probably want to see it, and it's not (morally) up to the country to make that decision.
The whole point of the GPL is that it grants a certain set of rights to anyone who gets the software, and requires them to pass those rights on to anyone they redistribute it to. Making it modular would make it easier for people to remove rights from the GPL that they don't like (say, the anti-Tivoization provision in GPL3). The FSF would never agree to it. (You might be able to just reuse their license text, depending on how it's licensed, though:)
I'd like to second this. I'm only using them for my personal sites, but their service runs fairly well, and their pay-for-usage model is neat. Their web interface for members is also elegant -- simple, not bogged down with graphics, works great in text browsers or from a phone.
they should have used one that's sensible and not as easily exploitable.
Why is JavaScript so easily exploitable? It's probably the APIs available to the JavaScript, and not the language (or interpreter) itself that's exploitable.
...just to clarify, our course policy said that student work was supposed to be done individually. If students need help, they are supposed to come to office hours or email the staff, not ask a friend.)
True story 1: TA'ing at an institution with a mandatory-failure policy, I noticed two students copying each others' assignments. Thing was, they were mid-career professionals married to one another. What to do?
Absolutely fail them. Why does their marriage have anything to do with academic honesty?
True story 2:...
I'm not sure what I'd do about this, although it sounds like the eventual outcome (new assignments) was good.
We do encourage our students to work together on some projects, but we also need individual assignments to test students' understanding. When they're just learning how to program, we can't risk that one partner in a group won't really get it -- we need to make sure they all know how to do the assignments individually.
Teamwork only works if all the team members can contribute. These labs are where they individually learn the skills they need. If we let them work together, some of them won't end up actually learning the material because their partner helped them through it, and then they'll pass the class when they don't know the material.
This is only beneficial if both partners in the pair know what they're doing. In a classroom environment, it's quite possible that one of them will know entirely how to do the lab, and simply walk the other through it.
I've been TAing every semester since I got to college, and every semester we tell people that we run their submissions through MOSS (the canonical code plagiarism detector, hosted at [and perhaps developed at?] Stanford). We exhort that it's really not worth their trouble to try to get their code past it, and that they really ought to just contact the course staff if they're in a bind, as there's really nothing worse for them than getting caught cheating. And every semester, we find several pairs of students who have copied each others' code. Sometimes it's a literal, word-for-word copy (comments too) with the name changed (or occasionally without!); sometimes it's the same structure with different comments, suggesting they just sat side by side and wrote the lab together.
I'd really like to see the penalty for cheating to be an immediate failure in the course, if not expulsion. The idea that honest students spend hours working on an assignment, and then someone who didn't plan their time well, or doesn't get things as well, or is too lazy to ask for help thinks they can just not do the work and get the same grade is offensive, and cheaters should be punished accordingly.
Cheating is very easy to avoid but it does require educators to be willing to create assignments that they themselves didn't download or buy from a teaching website.
I would also like to add, that cheating is far worse in the US since the teachers grade the students instead of third party independent testing organisations who are contracted to create unique material for each test.
...huh?! If we're talking about university classes, the idea that anything other than perhaps the intro courses would use materials provided by some company (say, the textbook publisher) is absurd. Also, what kind of a professor would outsource their tests to an independent organization? How can they possibly know the course material well enough, and adjust for what's been covered during the semester, and such?
It's pretty normal for support personnel to have access to production systems in order to provide support.
Yes, but this is a childishly simple and unaccountable way to provide said access. Their current system (described in the article) where you hit "Switch login", you have to justify your action, and it is logged, is much better, although I hope it is restricted only to employees who have an active need to switch to other users' profiles, and approved beforehand for anyone else who needs to use it.
The employer could have been able to discriminate people for falling for the scam and thus it is illegal for my company to do such a thing.
I don't understand... are idiots protected from "discrimination" in Austria? Or is it that they entered "personal information" (their login) on the fake site and you're misusing it?
Link, please? I know a professor who's setting up a laptop "computer lab", and would be interested in this. (He'd build or buy a regular cabinet, but is worried about ventilation, since power supplies and laptops can get hot.)
If you want to include a Mac in the mix, you have to do the latter, as the former doesn't support Mac OS X as a host or guest.
Why would anyone want to include Mac OS X as a guest? Apple goes out of their way to make it not run on things that aren't Macs. Why would someone then adopt it as a virtualized guest?
US Debit cards use the credit card networks, and as such can obtain the same information as required/optional by the credit card network.
Not true. There is a separate debit/ATM network. When they ask you "debit or credit", they're asking which network you want them to run the card on. If it's "sponsored" by Visa or Mastercard, you can run it as credit, you'll sign the receipt (or touchscreen gizmo) and it'll take a few days to take the money out. (They'll authorize it immediately, which puts a hold on the amount, though.) If you run it as debit, you'll enter your PIN, and the amount will be immediately removed from your account. This works with all debit cards, not just Visa/Mastercard ones.
That's sorta bullshit. Your website advertises 3G as a way to get faster Internet access on your phone. A "normal" phone user who just calls and texts sees no indication that the phones with the little blazing "3G" icons in the store are more likely to work well in a year or two. If you are phasing out 2G, stop selling the phones!
The only reason that 1&1 is "one of the biggest hosting companies in the world" is that, for many months, they ran ads in PC Magazine (and elsewhere, presumably) giving away a year of free webhosting. This likely accumulated many customers for them, who decided to stick with them. They gained customers by offering freebies, not good service.
The summary is inaccurate. Verizon offers MSN and Yahoo! "extras", which basically integrate MSN and Yahoo into their own portal. (I know this, as I am a customer.) All they're saying is that, instead of using Verizon's web portal, they'll be using Fairpoint's, since they're now being served by Fairpoint instead of Verizon.
Slashdot Mirror
How much work was it to work around the actual differences? Everyone loves to throw around the number of different platform variants, but how bad were the actual problems you found? (I realize that the great number of platform variants makes testing take longer, even if you don't find any bugs in that variant.)
For some topics, it's difficult to find an impartial-but-competent editor. Take politics: if the editor understands the topic, they will very likely have a personal position on it. If they don't understand it, they probably won't be able to figure out what's worth including, and how much coverage to give different points of view. (Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.) At some point, someone needs to make a judgement over which points of view are fringe and which are mainstream, if only to convey that to their readers, and that is a judgement that someone will always contest.
A "country" cannot decide for its people that it "doesn't want to see porn". I can assure you, at least some people (of legal age) in that country probably want to see it, and it's not (morally) up to the country to make that decision.
The whole point of the GPL is that it grants a certain set of rights to anyone who gets the software, and requires them to pass those rights on to anyone they redistribute it to. Making it modular would make it easier for people to remove rights from the GPL that they don't like (say, the anti-Tivoization provision in GPL3). The FSF would never agree to it. (You might be able to just reuse their license text, depending on how it's licensed, though :)
I'd like to second this. I'm only using them for my personal sites, but their service runs fairly well, and their pay-for-usage model is neat. Their web interface for members is also elegant -- simple, not bogged down with graphics, works great in text browsers or from a phone.
Do they have to just volunteer all the data automatically, or only if law enforcement asks? (If the former, [citation needed].)
...put it in your wallet, or on a keyring (if you can hole punch it)?
Why is JavaScript so easily exploitable? It's probably the APIs available to the JavaScript, and not the language (or interpreter) itself that's exploitable.
...just to clarify, our course policy said that student work was supposed to be done individually. If students need help, they are supposed to come to office hours or email the staff, not ask a friend.)
Absolutely fail them. Why does their marriage have anything to do with academic honesty?
I'm not sure what I'd do about this, although it sounds like the eventual outcome (new assignments) was good.
We do encourage our students to work together on some projects, but we also need individual assignments to test students' understanding. When they're just learning how to program, we can't risk that one partner in a group won't really get it -- we need to make sure they all know how to do the assignments individually.
Teamwork only works if all the team members can contribute. These labs are where they individually learn the skills they need. If we let them work together, some of them won't end up actually learning the material because their partner helped them through it, and then they'll pass the class when they don't know the material.
This is only beneficial if both partners in the pair know what they're doing. In a classroom environment, it's quite possible that one of them will know entirely how to do the lab, and simply walk the other through it.
I've been TAing every semester since I got to college, and every semester we tell people that we run their submissions through MOSS (the canonical code plagiarism detector, hosted at [and perhaps developed at?] Stanford). We exhort that it's really not worth their trouble to try to get their code past it, and that they really ought to just contact the course staff if they're in a bind, as there's really nothing worse for them than getting caught cheating. And every semester, we find several pairs of students who have copied each others' code. Sometimes it's a literal, word-for-word copy (comments too) with the name changed (or occasionally without!); sometimes it's the same structure with different comments, suggesting they just sat side by side and wrote the lab together.
I'd really like to see the penalty for cheating to be an immediate failure in the course, if not expulsion. The idea that honest students spend hours working on an assignment, and then someone who didn't plan their time well, or doesn't get things as well, or is too lazy to ask for help thinks they can just not do the work and get the same grade is offensive, and cheaters should be punished accordingly.
...huh?! If we're talking about university classes, the idea that anything other than perhaps the intro courses would use materials provided by some company (say, the textbook publisher) is absurd. Also, what kind of a professor would outsource their tests to an independent organization? How can they possibly know the course material well enough, and adjust for what's been covered during the semester, and such?
Yes, but this is a childishly simple and unaccountable way to provide said access. Their current system (described in the article) where you hit "Switch login", you have to justify your action, and it is logged, is much better, although I hope it is restricted only to employees who have an active need to switch to other users' profiles, and approved beforehand for anyone else who needs to use it.
Happened to me too.
Don't you need to buy an app for that? :P
I don't understand... are idiots protected from "discrimination" in Austria? Or is it that they entered "personal information" (their login) on the fake site and you're misusing it?
Link, please? I know a professor who's setting up a laptop "computer lab", and would be interested in this. (He'd build or buy a regular cabinet, but is worried about ventilation, since power supplies and laptops can get hot.)
Why would anyone want to include Mac OS X as a guest? Apple goes out of their way to make it not run on things that aren't Macs. Why would someone then adopt it as a virtualized guest?
Not true. There is a separate debit/ATM network. When they ask you "debit or credit", they're asking which network you want them to run the card on. If it's "sponsored" by Visa or Mastercard, you can run it as credit, you'll sign the receipt (or touchscreen gizmo) and it'll take a few days to take the money out. (They'll authorize it immediately, which puts a hold on the amount, though.) If you run it as debit, you'll enter your PIN, and the amount will be immediately removed from your account. This works with all debit cards, not just Visa/Mastercard ones.
(source)
That's sorta bullshit. Your website advertises 3G as a way to get faster Internet access on your phone. A "normal" phone user who just calls and texts sees no indication that the phones with the little blazing "3G" icons in the store are more likely to work well in a year or two. If you are phasing out 2G, stop selling the phones!
The only reason that 1&1 is "one of the biggest hosting companies in the world" is that, for many months, they ran ads in PC Magazine (and elsewhere, presumably) giving away a year of free webhosting. This likely accumulated many customers for them, who decided to stick with them. They gained customers by offering freebies, not good service.
The summary is inaccurate. Verizon offers MSN and Yahoo! "extras", which basically integrate MSN and Yahoo into their own portal. (I know this, as I am a customer.) All they're saying is that, instead of using Verizon's web portal, they'll be using Fairpoint's, since they're now being served by Fairpoint instead of Verizon.
There is no network neutrality violation here.