Enforcing a rating scheme is better than the alternative. Most people seem to agree that there are games that kids shouldn't play -- some games are violent, some have drug references, some have sexual content. I think that having a rating scheme and then actually enforcing those ratings, in much the same way that equivalent laws regarding the sale of tobacco products are enforced, is a sensible idea.
At the moment, in most areas, all games are allowed to be sold to kids. This leads to activist groups loudly calling for a blanket ban on mature content every time little Johnny picks up a copy of GTA. Sure, in a perfect world, little Johnny's parents would be watching him and would point him at Mario Karts or something, but because little Johnny's parents are probably the same people who let their kids scream the place down in restaurants, that's not going to happen.
Johnny's parents want it not to be their problem, and because there are so many parents like that, legislators are inclined to agree with them. That either makes it the problem of the people selling the game or the people writing the game. I reckon the consequences of forcibly imposing G-rating standards on the games industry would be worse than the consequences of making game retailers look at ID before selling mature-rated games.
Sure, not all retailers will check IDs, just like not all tobacconists check IDs. The point is that when little Johnny comes home from EB with the latest instalment of GTA or whatever, it's the EB store that cops the butt-kicking and not the game developers (who after all didn't have little Johnny in mind when they wrote the thing). If you want fun games, let the game developers get on with designing them without a committee of wowsers hanging over their shoulders checking pixellated necklines.
They found some of the ordinary matter that has gone unaccounted for, not dark matter.
It was in my daughter's bedroom closet. I could have told them that. (It's mostly in the form of My Little Ponies and clothes. Another cosmic mystery: she can't put her clothes away because her drawers are full, but she never has anything to wear...)
Fair's fair. I'm sure we would all like to see operating systems built that are less vulnerable to viruses, but that doesn't necessarily mean an application-level virus scanner. I would like to see systems secured at design level -- by limiting the potential interactions between OS components, which is the main problem with the Windows architecture as I see it; by building OS components and controls in stack-safe languages where possible and rigorously bounds-checking everything where it absolutely has to be implemented in C; and by providing open and well-documented API hooks that third-party AV software providers can use.
Windows is the worst offender when it comes to poor security design, but even most proponents of other OSes must admit that no current OS is as good as it could be -- and shipping AV software with the OS can only apply a bandaid to the problem. It'd also encourage yet another security monoculture, but that's a subject for another post.:)
I don't want to have to defend EA here, but do we really know if they're worse than the rest of the industry? I'd never work for a company like that, but let's remember that this whole thing started from the blog of a wife of an EA programmer.
My husband works for Atari (Melbourne House), and we have no complaints at all. Sure, he works long hours during crunch time, but crunch time isn't all that long and they let him leave early or take long lunches when there's not much doing to make up for it.
Why does everybody assume that rapid typing is a bringer of unalloyed good? I find that one easy way to improve my prose is to write it more slowly. That way the part of my brain that is looking after logic and expression has a chance to catch up with the part that's controlling my fingers. The more quickly my words flow, the more they seem like speech -- informal and sprinkled with usages that, while accepted in speech, are grammatical errors in writing. Even if I'm not writing for publication, I still find that going slowly helps me pick up the odd error that would otherwise render my words completely zymurgy incoherent.
I'm a CS PhD student, so I write more prose than code, but the same principle applies -- the hard part isn't coming up with the words, the hard part is coming up with the ideas and the logical structures. Taking mental short cuts with logic when you are programming is asking for trouble.
Obviously, painfully slow hunt-and-peck typing is going to annoy anyone who has to actually do it and so the alphabetic keyboard is going to be fabulous for people who can't type and don't need to learn; that's not in dispute. I am only pointing out that the competition between partisans of DVORAK and QWERTY is not necessarily based on the correct metric.
(I must admit though, I don't like DVORAK -- it's optimized for right-handers, and I'm a lefty.)
We tend to do this where I work. Part of the reason is that we often can't be certain exactly where the cutoff between pass and fail is going to fall -- this is especially true when we are rolling out new subjects or new assessment. If the assessment ends up being marked harder than advertised, the student body will scream and there will be formal complaints (and justifiably so). If we mark easier than advertised, most people will be OK with that. Therefore we tend to overstate the difficulty at the start of semester, if there's any doubt.
There's also the psychological factor -- most of our students come to our university from schools in which you got plenty of catch-up time and revision. High-school subjects are usually paced slowly enough that most students can get through them. The pace picks up tremendously at university.
The subjects we teach do not usually ease students gently into the course. Students are expected to hit the ground running. Because they are drawn from the more gifted high school students, they are usually used to goofing off; it's a lot harder to get away with that at Uni. Every year we fail a few students, not because they can't keep up with the course, but because they just don't. If we can save some of these students from dropping out by putting the frighteners on at the start of the year, I'm all for it. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than providing instructor-heavy remedial courses.
I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information at the end of the class.
I hear this line a lot from my students -- I'm not a lecturer, but I am an experienced departmental tutor (I think Americans call us TAs). It is an argument based on an incorrect premise. You're not there to absorb information, although that is part of what you will have to do. The hardest part of study lies in reshaping your worldview to accommodate the new information and skill set that you've acquired. The mere transmission of data is insufficient -- in order for you to remember it and be able to apply it, you're going to have to structure it in ways that make sense to you. A good lecturer will be able to make this structuring easier through good presentation, but the actual work has to be done by you. It's your brain, after all.
I'm often asked in tutorials, "What do we need to know for the exam?" These students are usually missing the point. They should be asking me what they will need to know how to do. Their misconception of education as the unstructured amassing of data leads them to adopt cram-and-forget study strategies that, while usually letting them scrape through first year, are not adequate preparation for second year. For example, first-year computer science students who approach the exam by trying to memorize the C source code to the algorithms we teach instead of by comprehending the algorithms and then coding them into C might end up in second year CS with neither adequate algorithmic problem-solving skills nor adequate programming skills.
This situation goes some way toward explaining both the perceived difficulty of CS as a major and the quality of our less-able graduates.
I have two daughters aged 7 and 11, and more computers in the house than I can enumerate offhand -- I think there are probably three desktop PCs in bootable condition, plus a DECstation and a couple of laptops. Most of the rest is old 8-bit micros and only comes out when Dad's feeling historically-inclined.
Of course, both kids reckon they should be allowed to either use the computer or watch the TV non-stop between home time and bedtime. We have imposed a few rules: no electronic entertainment devices until after you've done your chores; you may only use one device at a time (so you can't be "watching" That's So Raven while you're playing The Sims); and parents are allowed to set a time limit. I usually allow them an hour each on the TV and the computer.
I agree that computers can be an anaesthetizing influence on some kids -- anything escapist usually gives you the chance to turn your brain off -- but I think that TV is much worse. At least computer games are interactive. Viewers of TV are usually passive recipients of stimuli, and I find that an extended session in front of the TV makes them grumpy and lethargic. Moreover, because their father and I are both computing professionals -- he writes computer games, I'm doing a PhD in CS education -- letting the girls use the computer gives us another way that we can engage with them apart from nagging them over the housework. I'm also trying to role-model geek-grrrl coolness, although I'm probably on the wrong side of thirty to be able to pull it off successfully.:)
Both of our kids are currently in their primary school's gifted children's program, and Number One Child has been accepted into her high school's enrichment program, so I suppose we can't be doing too much harm.
Most are under the impression that they shouldn't bother with anything other than Windows because there's no money in it. "95% of the market is Windows, so why bother with a poultry 5%" type attitude
Those were the days. There was an Ikari Warriors machine in the Union Building at my university -- we also had Ghosts and Goblins, and der Asteroidenmaschinen (which had been nobbled by sparkers so many times it was stuck in German mode, or so the story ran).
Ikari Warriors was performance art. You'd throw a grenade as the enemies ambushed you, and if you timed it right you'd get half a dozen of them evenly spaced across the screen, all going into their spin-around-and-fall-over death animation simultaneously. We used to call that one the North Vietnamese Formation Dying Team.
...we are supposed to trust someone we cannot even watch from half a world away that they will not harm source code or be a risk to security?
Welcome to the rest of the world, pal. Governments worldwide are relying on Microsoft's OSes and apps. Not everybody is pleased with this situation from a national security point of view: at linux.conf.au in 2002 it was mentioned that national security concerns was a major driver of open source uptake in South America.
I'm talking about the M-word here, but the same applies to most software vendors and some hardware outfits as well. The non-US world still seems to be mostly running US-authored software; US companies don't seem to put a big priority on scrutiny of their practices by foreigners.
Anyone else notice that the spokesman for Port80 claims that they have been running the survey all year "except for a period between February and June"? That means they've been running for about eleven months, except for the five months when they weren't running...
I don't think they have much in the way of credibility, even without their transparent bias. They seem to have a creative way with arithmetic.
I don't know. I'd like to think we in Australia still retain a modicum of self-government, but our Prime Minister does have an embarrassing tendency to roll over wagging his tail and widdling uncontrollably whenever your President says "here, boy!" so American involvement is not out of the question.
You were aware this was an Australian case, weren't you?
What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA?
We have the EFA over here, which is like the EFF with one of those cute Crocodile Hunter accents we all seem to have.
Out of the 40 people that started a Java class in my college, only 6 of us finished it. 34 couldn't keep pace and couldn't understand it. The class wasn't that hard. One chapter a week, and one little app a week to re-enforce the chapter's materials. How is 'everyone' going to learn programming if that many can't hack a beginning class?
Maybe it's not an impossible task. Maybe it's our teaching methods that are at fault.
Look at it this way. We've been doing (and teaching) computer science for about fifty years. We've been doing (and teaching) mathematics for millenia, and there is still an active literature on the best ways to teach it. On what basis can we conclude that we're using the most effective teaching practices for programming? My gut tells me we can do better.
In other words, the green house effect may very well be *mostly* caused by the Sun, rather than CO2 in the atmosphere.
uh -- nitpick: the "greenhouse effect", per se, is definitely down to CO2 and other such insulating gases in the atmosphere, keeping solar heat inside and warming up the planet. Pretty much nobody denies that this effect exists; it's the main reason Venus is so hot (It's closer to the sun than we are, but not *that* much closer) and Mars is so cold (we're closer to the sun, but etc.) Back when science fiction was young, before the temperature of these planets had been measured, it wasn't all that silly to postulate life on Venus and Mars.
But it's still an open question as to whether *global warming* (in the sense of recent change in global average temperature) is a real phenomenon, and if so how much of it is due to the greenhouse effect, and if that proportion is significant then how much of it is due to human activity.
When I was first at Uni, I used to have a lot of trouble starting anything. If I actually got started, I'd usually do pretty well, but I had so much trouble starting that I usually wound up pulling all-nighters, beginning so late I couldn't finish or proof what I'd done, or just pretending the homework didn't exist. Finally, after a pretty disastrous second year, I dropped out and got a job. This was in 1987.
In 1994 I came back to Uni as a part-time student, after seven years as a junior public servant. Much to my surprise, I handed pretty much everything in on time. In first year I got almost straight High Distinctions without really raising a sweat! I did well enough in my degree course that I'm now planning to begin a PhD in 2004.
So what happened in the meantime? I guess the main difference is that, after spending seven years in a job I couldn't give a stuff about, I lost the mental habit of tying my self-esteem so closely to the quality of my work. At Uni I had been so afraid of not excelling that I couldn't bear to start, especially because, for the first time, I was now finding the work difficult. I suspect that many Slashdotters will have had similar experiences, being almost completely unchallenged by their lowest-common-denominator secondary education and then hitting a brick wall in their tertiary study.
I was a fat, plain chick with buck teeth and glasses the first time round, but I'd always done well at school. I felt I had nothing else to hang my self-esteem on. The second time around I still looked about the same, but I'd gotten over the high-school programming that told me that I was primarily to be valued by my appearance (and, furthermore, that it was sensible to judge my own appearance on the basis of what some know-nothing moccie-wearing outer-suburban yobboes said about it!)
I guess the take-home lesson is that sometimes your psychological need for success is so strong that it stops you succeeding. If this happens to you, it can help to find something other than academic perfection to tie your self-esteem to -- perhaps sport or fitness, or a good relationship. (Seven years in the Public Service is also an option, but not one I recommend.)
no one seemed to care that they could be taken away without any trial if the government wanted to, or that their isp could be forced to reveal weblogs or ip traffic from their account.
Oh, that won't happen to us. That will only happen to bad men. The Government will protect us from the bad men. Bad men are scary.
So if you notice one day that your hairdresser or your plumber or your kid's best friend isn't there any more, and nobody can tell you where they've gone, and people in suits and sunglasses start looking at you funny when you ask, don't worry. They were probably a bad man (or woman).
Yes, we do have fair trading legislation, which protects us (in theory) against being ripped off: for example, you're not allowed to make misleading claims in advertising.
The US concept of "fair use", as it applies to copyright law, is that you can make copies of things you legally own for your own personal use. Australian copyright law does allow some fair use exceptions, but "personal use" isn't one of them -- research, review, news, and legal advice are the only reasons you're allowed to make copies here.
That's just our print media copyright laws though. Our software laws rock: we have a legal right to reverse-engineer if that's the only way to ensure interoperability, for example. I asked some friends of mine who own a slimp3 component MP3 player what their take on the legal situation was, and they told me that as far as they were concerned, digital media came under the same laws as software and that it's legal to make a copy of software in order to render it usable (this is the legislation that lets you copy a program into memory before you run it -- betcha didn't know that right needed to be granted to you explicitly...)
EMI Australia's website, though, says different: MP3 ripping is illegal in Australia, they reckon, and although it's OK to own an MP3 player, it's illegal to play anything through it unless, of course, it's yours and EMI haven't signed you yet. They also reckon they're unlikely to ever be willing to sell you legal MP3s, but they advise looking into some obscure format they call.WMA. Who'd've thought it?
I believe that this is consistent with Australian copyright law, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't seem to have a Fair Use clause. If that's true, it makes me wonder why you can buy solid- state MP3 players in this country at all.
Australia is a signatory to the Berne Convention, which has a provision for "fair dealing" rights. However, under Australian law, "fair dealing" is confined to purposes of research/study, criticism/review, news reporting, or professional advice given by a lawyer or patent attorney, and is only allowable if it does not unreasonably prejudice the author's rights over the work. It is not certain whether personal listening falls under the heading of "study", but audio compression research seems to be safe.
On the other hand, even if ripping an MP3 is legal, putting it up for distribution is certainly not. And if I were counsel for the prosecution (disclaimer: IANAL) I'd probably claim that putting the MP3 somewhere other people could download it counts as distribution -- that could include just leaving it in your home directory, depending on how the permissions are set.
By the way, I bought my solid-state MP3 player from Singapore through ebay. When I bought my CD player, though, the shop assistant tried to sell me one that plays MP3 CDs as well, and couldn't believe it when I told him my workplace (I'm at Monash, too) had taken the position that MP3s were, by definition, illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Enforcing a rating scheme is better than the alternative. Most people seem to agree that there are games that kids shouldn't play -- some games are violent, some have drug references, some have sexual content. I think that having a rating scheme and then actually enforcing those ratings, in much the same way that equivalent laws regarding the sale of tobacco products are enforced, is a sensible idea.
At the moment, in most areas, all games are allowed to be sold to kids. This leads to activist groups loudly calling for a blanket ban on mature content every time little Johnny picks up a copy of GTA. Sure, in a perfect world, little Johnny's parents would be watching him and would point him at Mario Karts or something, but because little Johnny's parents are probably the same people who let their kids scream the place down in restaurants, that's not going to happen.
Johnny's parents want it not to be their problem, and because there are so many parents like that, legislators are inclined to agree with them. That either makes it the problem of the people selling the game or the people writing the game. I reckon the consequences of forcibly imposing G-rating standards on the games industry would be worse than the consequences of making game retailers look at ID before selling mature-rated games.
Sure, not all retailers will check IDs, just like not all tobacconists check IDs. The point is that when little Johnny comes home from EB with the latest instalment of GTA or whatever, it's the EB store that cops the butt-kicking and not the game developers (who after all didn't have little Johnny in mind when they wrote the thing). If you want fun games, let the game developers get on with designing them without a committee of wowsers hanging over their shoulders checking pixellated necklines.
They found some of the ordinary matter that has gone unaccounted for, not dark matter.
It was in my daughter's bedroom closet. I could have told them that. (It's mostly in the form of My Little Ponies and clothes. Another cosmic mystery: she can't put her clothes away because her drawers are full, but she never has anything to wear...)
Algol 68 has a +:= operator, but I think that comes from C.
Algol 68: designed 1963-1968, definition accepted in 1968 and published in 1969.
C: designed 1969-73, first edition of "The C Programming Language" published in 1978.
Algol 68's designers didn't take anything from C unless they used a time machine.
Fair's fair. I'm sure we would all like to see operating systems built that are less vulnerable to viruses, but that doesn't necessarily mean an application-level virus scanner. I would like to see systems secured at design level -- by limiting the potential interactions between OS components, which is the main problem with the Windows architecture as I see it; by building OS components and controls in stack-safe languages where possible and rigorously bounds-checking everything where it absolutely has to be implemented in C; and by providing open and well-documented API hooks that third-party AV software providers can use.
:)
Windows is the worst offender when it comes to poor security design, but even most proponents of other OSes must admit that no current OS is as good as it could be -- and shipping AV software with the OS can only apply a bandaid to the problem. It'd also encourage yet another security monoculture, but that's a subject for another post.
I don't want to have to defend EA here, but do we really know if they're worse than the rest of the industry? I'd never work for a company like that, but let's remember that this whole thing started from the blog of a wife of an EA programmer.
My husband works for Atari (Melbourne House), and we have no complaints at all. Sure, he works long hours during crunch time, but crunch time isn't all that long and they let him leave early or take long lunches when there's not much doing to make up for it.
Why does everybody assume that rapid typing is a bringer of unalloyed good? I find that one easy way to improve my prose is to write it more slowly. That way the part of my brain that is looking after logic and expression has a chance to catch up with the part that's controlling my fingers. The more quickly my words flow, the more they seem like speech -- informal and sprinkled with usages that, while accepted in speech, are grammatical errors in writing. Even if I'm not writing for publication, I still find that going slowly helps me pick up the odd error that would otherwise render my words completely zymurgy incoherent.
I'm a CS PhD student, so I write more prose than code, but the same principle applies -- the hard part isn't coming up with the words, the hard part is coming up with the ideas and the logical structures. Taking mental short cuts with logic when you are programming is asking for trouble.
Obviously, painfully slow hunt-and-peck typing is going to annoy anyone who has to actually do it and so the alphabetic keyboard is going to be fabulous for people who can't type and don't need to learn; that's not in dispute. I am only pointing out that the competition between partisans of DVORAK and QWERTY is not necessarily based on the correct metric.
(I must admit though, I don't like DVORAK -- it's optimized for right-handers, and I'm a lefty.)
We tend to do this where I work. Part of the reason is that we often can't be certain exactly where the cutoff between pass and fail is going to fall -- this is especially true when we are rolling out new subjects or new assessment. If the assessment ends up being marked harder than advertised, the student body will scream and there will be formal complaints (and justifiably so). If we mark easier than advertised, most people will be OK with that. Therefore we tend to overstate the difficulty at the start of semester, if there's any doubt.
There's also the psychological factor -- most of our students come to our university from schools in which you got plenty of catch-up time and revision. High-school subjects are usually paced slowly enough that most students can get through them. The pace picks up tremendously at university.
The subjects we teach do not usually ease students gently into the course. Students are expected to hit the ground running. Because they are drawn from the more gifted high school students, they are usually used to goofing off; it's a lot harder to get away with that at Uni. Every year we fail a few students, not because they can't keep up with the course, but because they just don't. If we can save some of these students from dropping out by putting the frighteners on at the start of the year, I'm all for it. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than providing instructor-heavy remedial courses.
I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information at the end of the class.
I hear this line a lot from my students -- I'm not a lecturer, but I am an experienced departmental tutor (I think Americans call us TAs). It is an argument based on an incorrect premise. You're not there to absorb information, although that is part of what you will have to do. The hardest part of study lies in reshaping your worldview to accommodate the new information and skill set that you've acquired. The mere transmission of data is insufficient -- in order for you to remember it and be able to apply it, you're going to have to structure it in ways that make sense to you. A good lecturer will be able to make this structuring easier through good presentation, but the actual work has to be done by you. It's your brain, after all.
I'm often asked in tutorials, "What do we need to know for the exam?" These students are usually missing the point. They should be asking me what they will need to know how to do. Their misconception of education as the unstructured amassing of data leads them to adopt cram-and-forget study strategies that, while usually letting them scrape through first year, are not adequate preparation for second year. For example, first-year computer science students who approach the exam by trying to memorize the C source code to the algorithms we teach instead of by comprehending the algorithms and then coding them into C might end up in second year CS with neither adequate algorithmic problem-solving skills nor adequate programming skills.
This situation goes some way toward explaining both the perceived difficulty of CS as a major and the quality of our less-able graduates.
I have two daughters aged 7 and 11, and more computers in the house than I can enumerate offhand -- I think there are probably three desktop PCs in bootable condition, plus a DECstation and a couple of laptops. Most of the rest is old 8-bit micros and only comes out when Dad's feeling historically-inclined.
:)
Of course, both kids reckon they should be allowed to either use the computer or watch the TV non-stop between home time and bedtime. We have imposed a few rules: no electronic entertainment devices until after you've done your chores; you may only use one device at a time (so you can't be "watching" That's So Raven while you're playing The Sims); and parents are allowed to set a time limit. I usually allow them an hour each on the TV and the computer.
I agree that computers can be an anaesthetizing influence on some kids -- anything escapist usually gives you the chance to turn your brain off -- but I think that TV is much worse. At least computer games are interactive. Viewers of TV are usually passive recipients of stimuli, and I find that an extended session in front of the TV makes them grumpy and lethargic. Moreover, because their father and I are both computing professionals -- he writes computer games, I'm doing a PhD in CS education -- letting the girls use the computer gives us another way that we can engage with them apart from nagging them over the housework. I'm also trying to role-model geek-grrrl coolness, although I'm probably on the wrong side of thirty to be able to pull it off successfully.
Both of our kids are currently in their primary school's gifted children's program, and Number One Child has been accepted into her high school's enrichment program, so I suppose we can't be doing too much harm.
"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said.
I take it you haven't heard of the technique known as the '86'? That's like a 69, but the female partner's overweight.
(As a lady of mature years, these days my husband and I mostly prefer the '96'. Zzzzz...)
Those were the days. There was an Ikari Warriors machine in the Union Building at my university -- we also had Ghosts and Goblins, and der Asteroidenmaschinen (which had been nobbled by sparkers so many times it was stuck in German mode, or so the story ran).
Ikari Warriors was performance art. You'd throw a grenade as the enemies ambushed you, and if you timed it right you'd get half a dozen of them evenly spaced across the screen, all going into their spin-around-and-fall-over death animation simultaneously. We used to call that one the North Vietnamese Formation Dying Team.
Ah, nostalgia.
...we are supposed to trust someone we cannot even watch from half a world away that they will not harm source code or be a risk to security?
Welcome to the rest of the world, pal. Governments worldwide are relying on Microsoft's OSes and apps. Not everybody is pleased with this situation from a national security point of view: at linux.conf.au in 2002 it was mentioned that national security concerns was a major driver of open source uptake in South America.
I'm talking about the M-word here, but the same applies to most software vendors and some hardware outfits as well. The non-US world still seems to be mostly running US-authored software; US companies don't seem to put a big priority on scrutiny of their practices by foreigners.
Slashdot: Moos for Herds. Stuff that splatters.
Anyone else notice that the spokesman for Port80 claims that they have been running the survey all year "except for a period between February and June"? That means they've been running for about eleven months, except for the five months when they weren't running...
I don't think they have much in the way of credibility, even without their transparent bias. They seem to have a creative way with arithmetic.
Do you feel like killing anybody?
Are you offering me a service, or a job?
Is Washington even aware of this?
I don't know. I'd like to think we in Australia still retain a modicum of self-government, but our Prime Minister does have an embarrassing tendency to roll over wagging his tail and widdling uncontrollably whenever your President says "here, boy!" so American involvement is not out of the question.
You were aware this was an Australian case, weren't you?
What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA?
We have the EFA over here, which is like the EFF with one of those cute Crocodile Hunter accents we all seem to have.
Out of the 40 people that started a Java class in my college, only 6 of us finished it. 34 couldn't keep pace and couldn't understand it. The class wasn't that hard. One chapter a week, and one little app a week to re-enforce the chapter's materials. How is 'everyone' going to learn programming if that many can't hack a beginning class?
Maybe it's not an impossible task. Maybe it's our teaching methods that are at fault.
Look at it this way. We've been doing (and teaching) computer science for about fifty years. We've been doing (and teaching) mathematics for millenia, and there is still an active literature on the best ways to teach it. On what basis can we conclude that we're using the most effective teaching practices for programming? My gut tells me we can do better.
In other words, the green house effect may very well be *mostly* caused by the Sun, rather than CO2 in the atmosphere.
uh -- nitpick: the "greenhouse effect", per se, is definitely down to CO2 and other such insulating gases in the atmosphere, keeping solar heat inside and warming up the planet. Pretty much nobody denies that this effect exists; it's the main reason Venus is so hot (It's closer to the sun than we are, but not *that* much closer) and Mars is so cold (we're closer to the sun, but etc.) Back when science fiction was young, before the temperature of these planets had been measured, it wasn't all that silly to postulate life on Venus and Mars.
But it's still an open question as to whether *global warming* (in the sense of recent change in global average temperature) is a real phenomenon, and if so how much of it is due to the greenhouse effect, and if that proportion is significant then how much of it is due to human activity.
Did you mean "global warming"?
Yasser Arafat's a *liberal*? What, anti-gun, pro-choice, pro-environment, in favour of progressive taxation and against business subsidies?
Blimey. So much for my understanding of international politics. Well, you learn something new every day.
In 1994 I came back to Uni as a part-time student, after seven years as a junior public servant. Much to my surprise, I handed pretty much everything in on time. In first year I got almost straight High Distinctions without really raising a sweat! I did well enough in my degree course that I'm now planning to begin a PhD in 2004.
So what happened in the meantime? I guess the main difference is that, after spending seven years in a job I couldn't give a stuff about, I lost the mental habit of tying my self-esteem so closely to the quality of my work. At Uni I had been so afraid of not excelling that I couldn't bear to start, especially because, for the first time, I was now finding the work difficult. I suspect that many Slashdotters will have had similar experiences, being almost completely unchallenged by their lowest-common-denominator secondary education and then hitting a brick wall in their tertiary study.
I was a fat, plain chick with buck teeth and glasses the first time round, but I'd always done well at school. I felt I had nothing else to hang my self-esteem on. The second time around I still looked about the same, but I'd gotten over the high-school programming that told me that I was primarily to be valued by my appearance (and, furthermore, that it was sensible to judge my own appearance on the basis of what some know-nothing moccie-wearing outer-suburban yobboes said about it!)
I guess the take-home lesson is that sometimes your psychological need for success is so strong that it stops you succeeding. If this happens to you, it can help to find something other than academic perfection to tie your self-esteem to -- perhaps sport or fitness, or a good relationship. (Seven years in the Public Service is also an option, but not one I recommend.)
Oh, that won't happen to us. That will only happen to bad men. The Government will protect us from the bad men. Bad men are scary.
So if you notice one day that your hairdresser or your plumber or your kid's best friend isn't there any more, and nobody can tell you where they've gone, and people in suits and sunglasses start looking at you funny when you ask, don't worry. They were probably a bad man (or woman).
Don't you feel safer now?
The US concept of "fair use", as it applies to copyright law, is that you can make copies of things you legally own for your own personal use. Australian copyright law does allow some fair use exceptions, but "personal use" isn't one of them -- research, review, news, and legal advice are the only reasons you're allowed to make copies here.
That's just our print media copyright laws though. Our software laws rock: we have a legal right to reverse-engineer if that's the only way to ensure interoperability, for example. I asked some friends of mine who own a slimp3 component MP3 player what their take on the legal situation was, and they told me that as far as they were concerned, digital media came under the same laws as software and that it's legal to make a copy of software in order to render it usable (this is the legislation that lets you copy a program into memory before you run it -- betcha didn't know that right needed to be granted to you explicitly...)
EMI Australia's website, though, says different: MP3 ripping is illegal in Australia, they reckon, and although it's OK to own an MP3 player, it's illegal to play anything through it unless, of course, it's yours and EMI haven't signed you yet. They also reckon they're unlikely to ever be willing to sell you legal MP3s, but they advise looking into some obscure format they call
Australia is a signatory to the Berne Convention, which has a provision for "fair dealing" rights. However, under Australian law, "fair dealing" is confined to purposes of research/study, criticism/review, news reporting, or professional advice given by a lawyer or patent attorney, and is only allowable if it does not unreasonably prejudice the author's rights over the work. It is not certain whether personal listening falls under the heading of "study", but audio compression research seems to be safe.
On the other hand, even if ripping an MP3 is legal, putting it up for distribution is certainly not. And if I were counsel for the prosecution (disclaimer: IANAL) I'd probably claim that putting the MP3 somewhere other people could download it counts as distribution -- that could include just leaving it in your home directory, depending on how the permissions are set.
By the way, I bought my solid-state MP3 player from Singapore through ebay. When I bought my CD player, though, the shop assistant tried to sell me one that plays MP3 CDs as well, and couldn't believe it when I told him my workplace (I'm at Monash, too) had taken the position that MP3s were, by definition, illegal.