have you ever politely asked somebody to keep it down, or turn it off
And risk getting shot/stabbed/beaten?
No thanks. Gimme a discrete jammer every time. Hopefully they'll become so common that people will accept the futility of yelling into their phones in a public place and keep it down.
The situation I'd like to get to is where people talk into their phones at an acceptable, conversational, level. If some a**hole starts yelling, then one or more people will turn on their jammers. Everyone's cellphone dies that the considerate users take it out on the shouter.
I can't imagine the total amount of emails was smaller than the total amount of letters...
Oh I can.
Emails can be traced back to the sender. If I was going to threaten someone, a "real" letter would have much more impact and be non-tracable. (Unless of course you write your address on the top, in which case the proof of "crazy" has already been made.)
'corse[sic] you'd have to take a few basic precautions: never, ever touch the paper/envelope. Use a common type of printer (no handwritten stuff for analysis, naturally) and don't lick the envelope or stamp, so they've got no DNA. Post it where there are no surveillance cameras, preferably at night to reduce the chance of witnesses.
They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages... but they are more profane and disorganized
Probably something we all know in our hearts. When we write emails (including non-threatening ones) they tend to be more impulsive - stream of conciousness stuff. Whereas when people write proper letters they think about what they want to say. Even if they are crazy.
The study says that P2P'ers buy more CDs. Fine, but it cannot say whether the existance of P2P has increased or decreased legal music sales overall - which seems to be the main gripe of the music industry.
then I'll do whatever I can to help. Let's face it, most of the "work" done in call centres involves either saying "I don't know/can't help you/let me transfer you" or typing information that the caller provides into a database application. If web 2.0 can cut out the people element then that's a great step forward.
On a jobs front, since most of these positions are outsourced, there's no great loss (unless you're one of the estimated 3% of employees who work in a call centre).
As has already been
said, if your job can be replaced by a computer program, it's probably not an IT job to start with.
Not the lack of scientific knowledge, but the naivety of the proposer:
Not knowing the questions in advance would force them to study as much science as possible
No it wouldn't (they have neither the time nor the inclination). All it means is they would
answer "I don't know". However, much more likely is that they would not take part as it would
make them look like idiots if they couldn't answer a question.
Why not make it international and rename it: "Is your president smarter than a 10 year-old?"
And this is part of the problem with the process. It's no good hiding data in an undetectable way if you leave behind indicators that there's data hidden. It's a bit like breaking into a house, and leaving no trace of where/how you did it - then leaving your lockpicks by the side door.
If you're going to have steganographic software, it must not be recognisable as such.
The whole point of steganography is to embed undetectable data in a file. If some people now claim to have found evidence of it, then the original users can't have a very effective steganographic process.
Maybe this really means that the software available for this type of use just doesn't work very well?
... here's a report from a company that specialises in anti-virus and other security
products.
While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some
problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation
that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening
than it really is?
Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same
way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about
how bad the problem is.
The difference between the two tons (or tonnes if you must) is so small that
to qualify whether you're using one or the other is nit-picking[1]. As it is, unless the weight of the
spacecraft is an exact number of tons, the journalistic rounding-off of the weight
far exceeds this small difference in definitions.
[1]unless of course you're using the weight in orbital mechanics calculations, in which case you'll need better accruacy than the 1 significant digit reported here.
check out the specialist internet groups
on
Entry-Level Astronomy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There are many astro (and astro-photo) yahoogroups.
They are well versed in helping beginners and will be able to give you advice and guidance on this fascinating hobby. They have their own experts who don't necessarily post here.
As a starter, get the book "Turn Left at Orion". Read it. This will set your expectations of what you can really see. If you are still enthusiastic, go ahead and take advice on what equipment to buy. Be aware though that there are as many opposing opinions as there are people willing to offer you advice (including this one). You will still have to choose which ones you want to adopt.
USB? These days I pop in a USB stick and it shows up on the desktop in seconds. I don't know what you're talking about
Yeah, pick the easy one:-)
OK, now do the same with a webcam.
If you're lucky, it'll start up once - assuming you have an application that will display
it's output. Remember I'm talking about "Plug it in. See the picture."
Now unplug the webcam and stick it back in. Maybe in the same USB slot, maybe in another.
Even with notionally supported webcams (Philips models) I've never managed to have a Linux box consistently display webcam images when the camera is removed/re-plugged many times. Most webcams don't even make it to the starting block.
Are the three things I get embarassed talking about when trying to promote Linux to
non-technical friends and family. All they want it "to do stuff". As the article
mentions, they won't spend time fiddling with drivers, checking if the hardware will/might/won't work.
They have a real expectation that they can plug in whatever they choose to a PC and
it will just work. This is their experience of (modern) MS and they won't accept any less
from an alternative.
Until peripherals become seemlessly operable ordinary people will steer clear of Linux.
Until the applications (and I mean video playing in particular) just work, with no drama and no crashes (Kaffeine, why do you insist on popping up messages saying "The specified file or URL was not found", when you're playing it?) we're backing a loser.
So you (and your boss and his/her boss etc.) agree some metrics.
The next thing that happens is you spend *all* your time performing tasks that improve these numbers. You don't work on anything else.
Admin type problems are essentially unforeseen (if we could foresee them, we'de fix 'em before they became problems - duh!).
Therefore no unforeseeable events will be in your metrics, so none of them will ever get fixed.
What happens next is that the people who really matter have their own, tacit, metrics. These are things like increased stock value, not going to jail, getting huge personal bonuses. You get the picture.
No matter how well yuou perform against your metrics the real work is no longer getting done. This impacts on the top-peoples' metrics, some people get fired and your budget gets cut. This cycle will continue each year the metrics are in place.
You can't win in this situation. The IT dept. goes from being invisible to the top-brass to being either a problem or a "necessary evil". Either way your position witin the company goes from someone who could & would fix stuff to being a bunch of people who are the cause of most of the problems.
I'd suggest your personal metric should be the number of times each year you update your resume.
If the woman interviewed really believes that
"you're representing [females] with a capital F"
Then I'd say she has an issue. My personal experience of working with a lot of women (and yes, even more men) is that if people of either gender behave in a straightforward way, they'll be treated by the vast majority of their co-workers in an appropriate manner.
If someone starts to think they're representing more than themselves, maybe they need to look at their own self-image.
Apart from saying it uses a "special lens" there's no information about how the team managed to reverse this effect. In fact there's more space given to the hocus-pocus aspects (that every straight thinking/.'er dismissed in an instant) than of any actual science.
The thelegraph is supposed to be one of the more serious british dailies. So heaven help us all if this is what they pass off as a science story.
By coincidence, there was a programme on TV yesterday about the origins of democracy (in Athens, 400BC). One point that came across strongly was that when democracy is strong, states are willing to put up with more criticism.
As democracy weakens, states clamp down on their critics and introduce more extreme punishments for transgressors.
This sounds like a good example of this kind of action - sadly it seems to be getting more common across the world, not just in NZ.
Furthermore, has anyone paid taxes lately? We carefully pen or key all of our vitals, all of our earnings and where we earned them, all of our expenditures and where we spent them, our political affiliations, our medical conditions, our contact info, our religion, our blood types, et cetera. Then what? We can but choose between the creepy old letter carrier, Chester, and the creepy old internet. Who gets all this juicy data next, we can only imagine. I promise, it is not good.
You must live in a very strange country. When I make my online tax submission, they don't even need my address (it's already on file). All I have to put in is the tax ID number the govt. sent me, my earnings for the year, tick a few boxes regarding benefits, fill in a couple of boxes regarding allowed deductions and off it goes - works out my tax liability instantly and tells me how much I've over/under-paid.
Given that all of these appliances are carried voluntarily and have an off switch, this story has no merit at all.
At best it's the basis for a (rather bad and technically unsound) horror story. At worst it helps spread fear and paranoia - as if we didn't have enough real problems to worry about.
If you're bright enough to get into university, you're at least bright enough for most of the vacancies you will find for IT (programmer, admin, cleaner, whatever) jobs.
Most courses are far too academic and let's face it, behind the times, to be relevant for IT job-seeking. Stuff you learn in the first year of your course will either be mainstream or have sunk-without-trace by the time you graduate. Therefore only stuff you study in the final year will be relevant to employers.
Most IT jobs are sheer drudge - documentation, testing, meetings, debugging. You will soon realise this, once the novelty of being paid actual money wears off.
Therefore I'd suggest studying a course that will give you a "plan B" for a career if you decide IT's not for you.
So it's because of this sugar that people are fat. Not that they eat too much.
Isn't it about time the population at large (pun intended) got a grip and instead of looking for the cause in something they can shift the blame onto, started examining their own behaviour?
If people were meant to be private (and therefore solitary? I don't know) then we would not have evolved as a gregarious species. We'd still be roaming the plains and beating up other members of the human race whenever we met one - of the same gender as ourselves. We'd certainly never have developed language and probably wouldn't have any higher brain functions either.
OK, I know that's how a lot of people act - hopefully they will never reproduce, but having neighbours and sharing things with them is part of how we developed. Privacy only started when humans started wearing clothes: a great step backwards, ISTM.
Slashdot Mirror
For a politican to call them "moral pygmies" must've been hard to keep a straight face and not burst out laughing.
pathetic
And risk getting shot/stabbed/beaten?
No thanks. Gimme a discrete jammer every time. Hopefully they'll become so common that people will accept the futility of yelling into their phones in a public place and keep it down.
The situation I'd like to get to is where people talk into their phones at an acceptable, conversational, level. If some a**hole starts yelling, then one or more people will turn on their jammers. Everyone's cellphone dies that the considerate users take it out on the shouter.
Oh I can.
Emails can be traced back to the sender. If I was going to threaten someone, a "real" letter would have much more impact and be non-tracable. (Unless of course you write your address on the top, in which case the proof of "crazy" has already been made.)
'corse[sic] you'd have to take a few basic precautions: never, ever touch the paper/envelope. Use a common type of printer (no handwritten stuff for analysis, naturally) and don't lick the envelope or stamp, so they've got no DNA. Post it where there are no surveillance cameras, preferably at night to reduce the chance of witnesses.
Have I forgotten anything?
Probably something we all know in our hearts. When we write emails (including non-threatening ones) they tend to be more impulsive - stream of conciousness stuff. Whereas when people write proper letters they think about what they want to say. Even if they are crazy.
The study says that P2P'ers buy more CDs. Fine, but it cannot say whether the existance of P2P has increased or decreased legal music sales overall - which seems to be the main gripe of the music industry.
On a jobs front, since most of these positions are outsourced, there's no great loss (unless you're one of the estimated 3% of employees who work in a call centre).
As has already been said, if your job can be replaced by a computer program, it's probably not an IT job to start with.
Not knowing the questions in advance would force them to study as much science as possible
No it wouldn't (they have neither the time nor the inclination). All it means is they would answer "I don't know".
However, much more likely is that they would not take part as it would make them look like idiots if they couldn't answer a question.
Why not make it international and rename it: "Is your president smarter than a 10 year-old?"
And this is part of the problem with the process. It's no good hiding data in an undetectable way if you leave behind indicators that there's data hidden. It's a bit like breaking into a house, and leaving no trace of where/how you did it - then leaving your lockpicks by the side door.
If you're going to have steganographic software, it must not be recognisable as such.
Maybe this really means that the software available for this type of use just doesn't work very well?
While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening than it really is?
Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about how bad the problem is.
The difference between the two tons (or tonnes if you must) is so small that to qualify whether you're using one or the other is nit-picking[1]. As it is, unless the weight of the spacecraft is an exact number of tons, the journalistic rounding-off of the weight far exceeds this small difference in definitions.
[1]unless of course you're using the weight in orbital mechanics calculations, in which case you'll need better accruacy than the 1 significant digit reported here.
They are well versed in helping beginners and will be able to give you advice and guidance on this fascinating hobby. They have their own experts who don't necessarily post here.
As a starter, get the book "Turn Left at Orion". Read it. This will set your expectations of what you can really see. If you are still enthusiastic, go ahead and take advice on what equipment to buy. Be aware though that there are as many opposing opinions as there are people willing to offer you advice (including this one). You will still have to choose which ones you want to adopt.
Good luck and clear skies
Yeah, pick the easy one :-)
OK, now do the same with a webcam.
If you're lucky, it'll start up once - assuming you have an application that will display it's output. Remember I'm talking about "Plug it in. See the picture."
Now unplug the webcam and stick it back in. Maybe in the same USB slot, maybe in another.
Even with notionally supported webcams (Philips models) I've never managed to have a Linux box consistently display webcam images when the camera is removed/re-plugged many times. Most webcams don't even make it to the starting block.
Are the three things I get embarassed talking about when trying to promote Linux to non-technical friends and family. All they want it "to do stuff". As the article mentions, they won't spend time fiddling with drivers, checking if the hardware will/might/won't work.
They have a real expectation that they can plug in whatever they choose to a PC and it will just work. This is their experience of (modern) MS and they won't accept any less from an alternative.
Until peripherals become seemlessly operable ordinary people will steer clear of Linux.
Until the applications (and I mean video playing in particular) just work, with no drama and no crashes (Kaffeine, why do you insist on popping up messages saying "The specified file or URL was not found", when you're playing it?) we're backing a loser.
Oh no, the rednecks can't get their porn!
The next thing that happens is you spend *all* your time performing tasks that improve these numbers. You don't work on anything else.
Admin type problems are essentially unforeseen (if we could foresee them, we'de fix 'em before they became problems - duh!).
Therefore no unforeseeable events will be in your metrics, so none of them will ever get fixed.
What happens next is that the people who really matter have their own, tacit, metrics. These are things like increased stock value, not going to jail, getting huge personal bonuses. You get the picture.
No matter how well yuou perform against your metrics the real work is no longer getting done. This impacts on the top-peoples' metrics, some people get fired and your budget gets cut. This cycle will continue each year the metrics are in place.
You can't win in this situation. The IT dept. goes from being invisible to the top-brass to being either a problem or a "necessary evil". Either way your position witin the company goes from someone who could & would fix stuff to being a bunch of people who are the cause of most of the problems.
I'd suggest your personal metric should be the number of times each year you update your resume.
"you're representing [females] with a capital F"
Then I'd say she has an issue. My personal experience of working with a lot of women (and yes, even more men) is that if people of either gender behave in a straightforward way, they'll be treated by the vast majority of their co-workers in an appropriate manner.
If someone starts to think they're representing more than themselves, maybe they need to look at their own self-image.
The thelegraph is supposed to be one of the more serious british dailies. So heaven help us all if this is what they pass off as a science story.
... I can expect a dawn raid from armed police/soldiers to take back my Airfix model?
As democracy weakens, states clamp down on their critics and introduce more extreme punishments for transgressors.
This sounds like a good example of this kind of action - sadly it seems to be getting more common across the world, not just in NZ.
You must live in a very strange country. When I make my online tax submission, they don't even need my address (it's already on file). All I have to put in is the tax ID number the govt. sent me, my earnings for the year, tick a few boxes regarding benefits, fill in a couple of boxes regarding allowed deductions and off it goes - works out my tax liability instantly and tells me how much I've over/under-paid.
10 minutes, tops.
Given that all of these appliances are carried voluntarily and have an off switch, this story has no merit at all.
At best it's the basis for a (rather bad and technically unsound) horror story. At worst it helps spread fear and paranoia - as if we didn't have enough real problems to worry about.
Most courses are far too academic and let's face it, behind the times, to be relevant for IT job-seeking. Stuff you learn in the first year of your course will either be mainstream or have sunk-without-trace by the time you graduate. Therefore only stuff you study in the final year will be relevant to employers.
Most IT jobs are sheer drudge - documentation, testing, meetings, debugging. You will soon realise this, once the novelty of being paid actual money wears off.
Therefore I'd suggest studying a course that will give you a "plan B" for a career if you decide IT's not for you.
So it's because of this sugar that people are fat. Not that they eat too much.
Isn't it about time the population at large (pun intended) got a grip and instead of looking for the cause in something they can shift the blame onto, started examining their own behaviour?
OK, I know that's how a lot of people act - hopefully they will never reproduce, but having neighbours and sharing things with them is part of how we developed. Privacy only started when humans started wearing clothes: a great step backwards, ISTM.