"The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever."
information itself is readily available. people who already understand taht information... maybe in your house. What happens when Jimmy doesn't learn fractions because mommy sucks at fractions? What happens when Jimmy doesn't learn anything because mommy is working at Walmart?
Homeschooling is great... but it requires:
a) a person capable of actually teaching the information: answering the kids questions, presenting the information and making it interesting, ability to organize time, and maintain some discipline...
b) enough affluence that the person a) above doesn't have to work at walmart instead.
A propeller is a specific type of wing. Wings are airfoils. Propellers are airfoils. Planes have fixed wings. Helicopters have rotatory wings. Both have wings.
Submarines have propellers. Propellers are rotary wings. Therefore submarines have wings. Wings are airfoils. Airfoils are used by planes and helicopters to fly. Therefore submarines can probably fly. Gotcha.
Considering employers are likely within their rights to monitor when their networks are used to make private posts, this doesn't really seem so bad.
Given how many of us own personal laptops, personal smart phones, and have personal wireless data plans, this doesn't really seem so bright either. I am also legally entitled to breaks from work.
I'm actually all in favor of IT locking down and monitoring the corporate network to -protect the corporate network-. However, attempting to monitor or restrict the corporate network as a measure to control employee behaviour and/or productivity however is doomed to failure.
If the employee has a blackberry and a 15 minute break, who is management to tell them they can't update their facebook page. (Sure there are perhaps a few isolated work environments where it would be reasonable to prevent the employee. But the VAST majority of jobs out there... it just wouldn't be realistic to even attempt to enforce such a policy.
"Google has given me a browser, they gave me a superior search engine years ahead of any competition, they offer me a free operating system, AND they host a boatload of code for free stuff for which I've never paid a dime."
Right. They wanted your eyeballs more. Turns out they are worth more than your dimes. Well that and sucking every last bit of information about you that they can to resell along with your eyeballs.
I use their search because it is best in class, but I avoid the rest of their stuff.
Cattle gets free room and board too. I don't think they've got a great deal either.;) Not that I think google plans to slaughter you, the advertisers want you alive and consuming.
At least with Microsoft I am the customer, not the product.
Who's "they" ? Nobody in the IT and CS fields that I've ever met, that's for sure. And I've been around for longer than kibi came around. I still feel like laughing every time I have to speak that word out loud:]
I think that's fully 3 quarters of the the problem, whoever came up with the SI standard names for base 2 was an idiot. kibibyte? gibibyte? tebibyte? They're just gibberish. Everyone who hears them can't help but laugh. They are ridiculous.
If they'd come up with better names they wouldn't have slammed into so much resistance; should have just gone with "Binary KiloByte" or "Base 2 Kilobyte" and abbreviated as bKB. People would have likely just called them "b"-Kilobytes "b"-Gigabytes for short. That would have gotten a lot less resistance I think.
If thats all it takes then the system is broken, not the people abusing it.
Its twitter not a bank account. Just how secure do you really need twitter to be? Oh noes, somebody not me can annoy people 140 characters at a time. We need better security!
Actually I figured out how to improve his business model: the malware serves you the content, now he can be sure that you're infected and maximizing his profits before you get to access his content.
Exactly. Like DRM music.;)
Of course my response to that was to stop consuming content. And now drm free music is readily available again.
I avoid the checkout counter at the local supermarket as I exit with groceries, it trivially renders their business model non-viable, but really, it's up to them to change it, not me to suffer with it.
What? You've never seen a supermarket in with a security gaurd? Or where they check receipts as you leave? Or where they've renovated the store to make avoiding the checkout much harder, added turnstiles at the entrance to make going "out" the "in" harder, etc, etc. Of course a certain level of theft is inevitable... but I'm sure you are the price of goods on the shelves already covers a certain level of anticipated theft.
So far they've adapted just fine to people 'avoiding the checkout counter'. That's why they're still in business. If avoiding the checkout counter became so epidemic that all these measures didn't work, rest assured they'd adapt.
Not that I'm saying the West is as bad as China. I don't think that at all.
No, I was pointing out that when China does something like this someone says they are terrified of their citizens. When the west makes a move in the same direction, its because they don't fear their citizens enough. I found it an interesting juxtaposition... that we rationalize why two different governments are on precisely the same sort of march against freedoms (even if the west isn't as far down the path) for apparently polar opposite reasons: terrified vs not afraid
This is what you get when you have a government that is stark raving terrified of its citizens.
LMAO. Clash of the memes!
Yet in America all the "tyranny", warrentless wiretapping, no-fly lists, copyright/dmca insanity, airport "security", corruption and rampant pandering to special interest,,, all this is regularly attributed by slashbots as "This is what you get when you have a government that no longer fears its citizens." and is modded up.
So apparently, whenever the government attempts to impose / imposes absurd levels of control over its citizens its both "stark raving terrified of its citizens" and yet "no longer fears its citizens".
The gpl does allow for commercial use, it just doesn't allow the product using the code to be proprietary. So selling the popcorn would not be in violation of the license.(well, assuming it covered popcorn:P)
Touche.
Right the problem isn't that the person started charging 10 cents for popcorn and butter. Its that he also required the recipients of the the popcorn and butter to agree that they had to eat it themselves and weren't allowed to share. He can theoretically impose such a restriction on his popcorn, but not the butter.
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms.
Sure. IF they were the producers.
But what if I gave YOU butter for free, but under a license (i.e. the GPL) which improves your popcorn. And you in turn gave it away for free along with the popcorn you produced. (which is allowed).
Then you decide to start charging 10 cents for the popcorn, and are still including my butter. That's not ok. It violates my license.
You are allowed to change the license and re-license the stuff YOU produce, but in this case, and in most oss projects, the individual contributors retain copyright, and as a result the project 'founder' cannot simply relicense it, because he only owns copyright on his actual code. He can change its terms, but not the terms of contributed code. Separating the two is not easy, and the end result may not be desirable... like popcorn without butter.
On the other hand, Vista provided negative value to users, and many paid hundreds for the privilege. Maybe that evens it out.
Meh, I had to downgrade my bosses laptop (1st generation 17" Macbook Pro) back to Leopard from Snow Leopard due to Snow Leopard simply not networking properly. Signal strength to the wifi networks he used was half what it was under Leopard. And performance was dismal, as if it was perpetually losing connection... it would take seconds to navigate from web page to web page, and this was happening even when plugged in via ethernet.
So we wiped and clean installed snow leopard, and immediately had the same problem. So we wiped and clean installed leopard, and its just fine again. The apple support pages and sites are full of complaints like this. Apple of course is silent on the issue.
Additionally, I have had to upgrade a LOT more applications going from OSX 10.1 to 10.6 than I did from XP to 7. As many things as Microsoft broke with its new improved (and desperately neened) security enhancements in Vista, Apple managed to break more over the years. With nearly every point release of OSX I had to buy a whole raft of new application upgrades to stay compatible. Only a handful were required with Windows.
Finally, for people who don't run the apple upgrade treadmill, they got left behind. A lot of stuff, even basic applications won't run on 10.4 or 10.3. But if you bought XP, almost all software released today will still run on it. Granted you may need SP2 or 3... but those are at least free.
A simple adage - "If it's too good to be true, it probably is". People never seem to learn it. Always falling for scams. I'm not surprised.
it -probably- is. Even you hedged your wording, because even you know sometimes it just really is as good as the promise. Lots of stuff seems too good to be true, but delivers. Enough that its often hard for even a fairly intelligent and rational person to really know.
I mean, who'd believe linux, or bsd, or asterix, or postgresql, or apache,... were all free. I've met people who were skeptical, who wanted to know what the catch was...
Nothing is impossible.
Write a program that can determine whether another arbitrary program will halt on a given set of inputs, or run forever. You can't do it. Its impossible. We can't even generally prove a software function will return, and you are arguing that we can prove not only that it will return, but that it will be bug free? That's absurd.
It's simply a matter of cost vs. benefit.
Up to a point yes. Proving its zero is impossible for arbitrary software, but we certainly can put more resources into it and produce software with fewer bugs.
The main problem with cost v benefit as an argument is that its trite. I'd like to buy a 2010 Toyota for $25,000 in 2010. Not for 1.2 Billion dollars in 2050. And more pragmatically, any manufacturer that went down this road wouldn't sell any cars, and would rapidly go bankrupt.
For all that consumers say they want perfect cars, they don't. They mostly want cheap cars.
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications...
Both wrong.:)
Developers hate them and users hate them.
Unfortunately Marketing departments, bean counters like them. (Neither of these groups actually use them of course, but based on their paradigm shifting synergistic sizzle coolness 2.0 and low support costs per table 16-1 in Appendix PHBs couldn't possibly resist foisting them onto their users even if they wanted resist. (But why would they resist... overseeing the deployment of paradigm shifting synergistic coolness that would save the company money on paper is what PHB promotions are driven by. Its resume gold.
I watched visiting trends, by hour, over the last two years in Google Analytics and picked 7:30 AM and 10:30 AM as the times to post material. It seemed as if most people were checking once in the morning when they got to the office and once at breaktime/lunchtime around 11 AM. To account for some of the time variance seen across those two years I went with 15 minutes earlier than the stats showed. Seems to work for me.
Odd that everyone who reads your content is in your timezone. Do you primarily post articles of local interest? Or is there some other local network effect in play here? Or are the two spikes separated by 3 hours simply morning on the east coast, and morning on the west coast?....
They used open-source code, namely JavaScript, which is open and free and created a process by leveraging existing technology.
While I think the patent in question (and virtually all software patents) is bullshit, this part of the argument above is utterly absurd.
Even the most legitimate patents trivially fall into this category of things developed using other things that already exist by leveraging existing technology.
Slashdot Mirror
"The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever."
information itself is readily available.
people who already understand taht information... maybe in your house. What happens when Jimmy doesn't learn fractions because mommy sucks at fractions? What happens when Jimmy doesn't learn anything because mommy is working at Walmart?
Homeschooling is great... but it requires:
a) a person capable of actually teaching the information: answering the kids questions, presenting the information and making it interesting, ability to organize time, and maintain some discipline...
b) enough affluence that the person a) above doesn't have to work at walmart instead.
A propeller is a specific type of wing. Wings are airfoils. Propellers are airfoils. Planes have fixed wings. Helicopters have rotatory wings. Both have wings.
Submarines have propellers.
Propellers are rotary wings.
Therefore submarines have wings.
Wings are airfoils.
Airfoils are used by planes and helicopters to fly.
Therefore submarines can probably fly.
Gotcha.
I never really had any need for, say, Gas Cubby (or really, any 3rd party app) to continue running in the background while I did something else.
In large part because the sort of apps that make sense running in the background don't get written in the first place.
Considering employers are likely within their rights to monitor when their networks are used to make private posts, this doesn't really seem so bad.
Given how many of us own personal laptops, personal smart phones, and have personal wireless data plans, this doesn't really seem so bright either. I am also legally entitled to breaks from work.
I'm actually all in favor of IT locking down and monitoring the corporate network to -protect the corporate network-. However, attempting to monitor or restrict the corporate network as a measure to control employee behaviour and/or productivity however is doomed to failure.
If the employee has a blackberry and a 15 minute break, who is management to tell them they can't update their facebook page. (Sure there are perhaps a few isolated work environments where it would be reasonable to prevent the employee. But the VAST majority of jobs out there... it just wouldn't be realistic to even attempt to enforce such a policy.
"Google has given me a browser, they gave me a superior search engine years ahead of any competition, they offer me a free operating system, AND they host a boatload of code for free stuff for which I've never paid a dime."
Right. They wanted your eyeballs more. Turns out they are worth more than your dimes. Well that and sucking every last bit of information about you that they can to resell along with your eyeballs.
I use their search because it is best in class, but I avoid the rest of their stuff.
Cattle gets free room and board too. I don't think they've got a great deal either. ;) Not that I think google plans to slaughter you, the advertisers want you alive and consuming.
At least with Microsoft I am the customer, not the product.
Who's "they" ? Nobody in the IT and CS fields that I've ever met, that's for sure. And I've been around for longer than kibi came around. I still feel like laughing every time I have to speak that word out loud
I think that's fully 3 quarters of the the problem, whoever came up with the SI standard names for base 2 was an idiot. kibibyte? gibibyte? tebibyte? They're just gibberish. Everyone who hears them can't help but laugh. They are ridiculous.
If they'd come up with better names they wouldn't have slammed into so much resistance; should have just gone with "Binary KiloByte" or "Base 2 Kilobyte" and abbreviated as bKB. People would have likely just called them "b"-Kilobytes "b"-Gigabytes for short. That would have gotten a lot less resistance I think.
I bet with all the electronics, that landfill contains more gold than a normal gold mine.
Processing rocks to extract gold, copper, etc, is relatively straight forward; its a lot harder to extract it from it from heterogeneous trash.
So in essence they are banning all connections that have a source and a target ip adress at the same time.
Or you could read the full article, and find out what they are really doing.
Wow. EPIC FAIL
So is a snap judgment based on a slashdot headline and reading the first few knee jerk responses.
Is it a good move by congress? No, not really. But did they really just ban connecting to the office network printer? No.
If thats all it takes then the system is broken, not the people abusing it.
Its twitter not a bank account. Just how secure do you really need twitter to be? Oh noes, somebody not me can annoy people 140 characters at a time. We need better security!
We should fix bad laws for the good of everyone, not merely try to circumvent them.
You can't fix what you don't know is broken.
By its nature a law that conceals or allows to be concealed governments misdeeds from public knowledge has to be circumvented in order to be fixed.
Actually I figured out how to improve his business model: the malware serves you the content, now he can be sure that you're infected and maximizing his profits before you get to access his content.
Exactly. Like DRM music. ;)
Of course my response to that was to stop consuming content. And now drm free music is readily available again.
I avoid the checkout counter at the local supermarket as I exit with groceries, it trivially renders their business model non-viable, but really, it's up to them to change it, not me to suffer with it.
What? You've never seen a supermarket in with a security gaurd? Or where they check receipts as you leave? Or where they've renovated the store to make avoiding the checkout much harder, added turnstiles at the entrance to make going "out" the "in" harder, etc, etc. Of course a certain level of theft is inevitable... but I'm sure you are the price of goods on the shelves already covers a certain level of anticipated theft.
So far they've adapted just fine to people 'avoiding the checkout counter'. That's why they're still in business. If avoiding the checkout counter became so epidemic that all these measures didn't work, rest assured they'd adapt.
Uh, what are you on about? I think you pretty much entirely missed my point.
That said, I'd like to address one point:
"Try typing "Tienanmen massacre" in China and see what you get up..."
Is this really any better? Hell, its not even really that different.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
Not that I'm saying the West is as bad as China. I don't think that at all.
No, I was pointing out that when China does something like this someone says they are terrified of their citizens. When the west makes a move in the same direction, its because they don't fear their citizens enough. I found it an interesting juxtaposition... that we rationalize why two different governments are on precisely the same sort of march against freedoms (even if the west isn't as far down the path) for apparently polar opposite reasons: terrified vs not afraid
This is what you get when you have a government that is stark raving terrified of its citizens.
LMAO. Clash of the memes!
Yet in America all the "tyranny", warrentless wiretapping, no-fly lists, copyright/dmca insanity, airport "security", corruption and rampant pandering to special interest,,, all this is regularly attributed by slashbots as "This is what you get when you have a government that no longer fears its citizens." and is modded up.
So apparently, whenever the government attempts to impose / imposes absurd levels of control over its citizens its both "stark raving terrified of its citizens" and yet "no longer fears its citizens".
Good to know.
Well if his business model is trading content for malware, then it's just plain unfair that you get content but he doesn't get to give you malware
If his business model can be trivially rendered non-viable, its up to him to change it, not us to suffer with it.
The gpl does allow for commercial use, it just doesn't allow the product using the code to be proprietary. So selling the popcorn would not be in violation of the license.(well, assuming it covered popcorn :P)
Touche.
Right the problem isn't that the person started charging 10 cents for popcorn and butter. Its that he also required the recipients of the the popcorn and butter to agree that they had to eat it themselves and weren't allowed to share. He can theoretically impose such a restriction on his popcorn, but not the butter.
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms.
Sure. IF they were the producers.
But what if I gave YOU butter for free, but under a license (i.e. the GPL) which improves your popcorn. And you in turn gave it away for free along with the popcorn you produced. (which is allowed).
Then you decide to start charging 10 cents for the popcorn, and are still including my butter. That's not ok. It violates my license.
You are allowed to change the license and re-license the stuff YOU produce, but in this case, and in most oss projects, the individual contributors retain copyright, and as a result the project 'founder' cannot simply relicense it, because he only owns copyright on his actual code. He can change its terms, but not the terms of contributed code. Separating the two is not easy, and the end result may not be desirable... like popcorn without butter.
On the other hand, Vista provided negative value to users, and many paid hundreds for the privilege. Maybe that evens it out.
Meh, I had to downgrade my bosses laptop (1st generation 17" Macbook Pro) back to Leopard from Snow Leopard due to Snow Leopard simply not networking properly. Signal strength to the wifi networks he used was half what it was under Leopard. And performance was dismal, as if it was perpetually losing connection... it would take seconds to navigate from web page to web page, and this was happening even when plugged in via ethernet.
So we wiped and clean installed snow leopard, and immediately had the same problem. So we wiped and clean installed leopard, and its just fine again. The apple support pages and sites are full of complaints like this. Apple of course is silent on the issue.
Additionally, I have had to upgrade a LOT more applications going from OSX 10.1 to 10.6 than I did from XP to 7. As many things as Microsoft broke with its new improved (and desperately neened) security enhancements in Vista, Apple managed to break more over the years. With nearly every point release of OSX I had to buy a whole raft of new application upgrades to stay compatible. Only a handful were required with Windows.
Finally, for people who don't run the apple upgrade treadmill, they got left behind. A lot of stuff, even basic applications won't run on 10.4 or 10.3. But if you bought XP, almost all software released today will still run on it. Granted you may need SP2 or 3... but those are at least free.
A simple adage - "If it's too good to be true, it probably is". People never seem to learn it. Always falling for scams. I'm not surprised.
it -probably- is. Even you hedged your wording, because even you know sometimes it just really is as good as the promise. Lots of stuff seems too good to be true, but delivers. Enough that its often hard for even a fairly intelligent and rational person to really know.
I mean, who'd believe linux, or bsd, or asterix, or postgresql, or apache, ... were all free. I've met people who were skeptical, who wanted to know what the catch was...
Nothing is impossible. Write a program that can determine whether another arbitrary program will halt on a given set of inputs, or run forever. You can't do it. Its impossible. We can't even generally prove a software function will return, and you are arguing that we can prove not only that it will return, but that it will be bug free? That's absurd. It's simply a matter of cost vs. benefit. Up to a point yes. Proving its zero is impossible for arbitrary software, but we certainly can put more resources into it and produce software with fewer bugs. The main problem with cost v benefit as an argument is that its trite. I'd like to buy a 2010 Toyota for $25,000 in 2010. Not for 1.2 Billion dollars in 2050. And more pragmatically, any manufacturer that went down this road wouldn't sell any cars, and would rapidly go bankrupt. For all that consumers say they want perfect cars, they don't. They mostly want cheap cars.
"Syntax error line 4. Expected )), got EOF."
I guess my calculator apps spoil me.
if I enter 2+3)*4)-2 it automatically interprets it as ((2+3)-4)+2
or 2+(3*(4-2 is interpreted as 2+(3*(4-2))
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications...
Both wrong. :)
Developers hate them and users hate them.
Unfortunately Marketing departments, bean counters like them. (Neither of these groups actually use them of course, but based on their paradigm shifting synergistic sizzle coolness 2.0 and low support costs per table 16-1 in Appendix PHBs couldn't possibly resist foisting them onto their users even if they wanted resist. (But why would they resist... overseeing the deployment of paradigm shifting synergistic coolness that would save the company money on paper is what PHB promotions are driven by. Its resume gold.
I watched visiting trends, by hour, over the last two years in Google Analytics and picked 7:30 AM and 10:30 AM as the times to post material. It seemed as if most people were checking once in the morning when they got to the office and once at breaktime/lunchtime around 11 AM. To account for some of the time variance seen across those two years I went with 15 minutes earlier than the stats showed. Seems to work for me.
Odd that everyone who reads your content is in your timezone. Do you primarily post articles of local interest? Or is there some other local network effect in play here? Or are the two spikes separated by 3 hours simply morning on the east coast, and morning on the west coast? ....
My school solved it by having the teacher issue graphing calculators along with the test.
Your school had a budget, at least at some point. ;)
They used open-source code, namely JavaScript, which is open and free and created a process by leveraging existing technology.
While I think the patent in question (and virtually all software patents) is bullshit, this part of the argument above is utterly absurd.
Even the most legitimate patents trivially fall into this category of things developed using other things that already exist by leveraging existing technology.