How can slashdot NOT have a link to the only candidate that isn't in the "i love to shit on your freedoms, and i want to tax and steal your internet" business?
Your mother uses the same public restrooms as my wife. As your mother is a member of the adult society we all live in, please, instruct her to report to the genital examination room, where me and the other democratically elected members of the health board will "inspect her vigorously" for infectuous diseases.
Look, the health of everybody is important. I'm sure you understand.
I am reluctant to let something so important as the proper development of my child's mind and love for learning be left to the government.
It's not that home schoolers don't like their child "learning" a certain thing. They object to their child being taught specific _values_. To deny that government schooling has any sort of value subjugation aspect in its curriculum is being dishonest. It does, and some parents find it objectionable.
When you add to that the horrible quality of education received, and the numerous behavioral disorders arising from the large-prison-colony approach, and the legal maze teachers, parents, and students are subjected to... it is very apealing to step away from all of that mess and try and do a better job yourself. And results suggest that more often than not, homeschooled kids are smarter and better adjusted than public schooled kids. You can interpret that however you like, since we both know of the shortcomings of the distillation of survey data into talking points:)
The people most interested in home schooling are those that actually give a shit about their child's education and the experiences they'll have growing up and the values they'll be indoctrinated with from a young age.
How many home schooled children do you know on any real basis? How many home schooled children of ultra-conservative christians do you know on any real basis? What makes you think your opinion is accurate or representative?
There are a large variety of reasons to be utterly and completely dissatisfied with public schools. Private schools go part way to addressing these problems, but not far enough for some people.
I'm good friends with a large family (6 kids!) of ultra-conservative christian homeschooled kids. They're the most wonderful people i've ever met. The older kids openly disagree with aspects of their parents viewpoints on religious and societal issues -- they're certainly not brainwashed. And arguing about contemporary issues with them is engaging and rewarding - the kids are smart and have well considered opinions. they have to because all of society attacks everything about their very existinace at every turn. (how they're educated, their religious beleifs, their family structure, etc).
These kids are learning how to be adults and have their own identities, just like normal kids. They're rebelling, they get in fights, the older ones have jobs, etc.
The amount of anti-religious and anti-conservative christian prejudice on slashdot is sickening.
It is a perfectly valid and oft heard criticism of christianity that "the biggest problem with christianity is the christians". However, my opinion is that the notion of government indoctrinating all children is a far scarier, uglier world than a family "indoctrinating" its own children. Indeed, it is only when people assemble in groups, so that some may weild power over others, that societies ugliest traits are brought to bear.
You need only to look at all of the criticisms of public education here on slashdot, by prominent educators, by historical politicians, by people like Mark Twain... and perhaps your own experiences to understand that public education is fundamentally flawed. Yet when people are successfully engaging in alternatives, you criticize or seek to eliminate that opportunity. Why?
I hope that I am able to homeschool my upcoming child. I've had the amazing opportunity to meet a family that has made it work. It opened my eyes to the possibility of unthinkable things.. like a middle school girl that you don't want to choke to death after 4 minutes. That's saying something.
What that page doesn't show you us that the US GDP is 12tr$, so 5.7% is 648 BILLION dollars, or over $2k per year for every man, woman, and child in this country. When you consider the fraction of the 300m assumed population that actually receive public school instruction, and the magnificent failure of public schooling to produce much more than school shootings, the crushing magnitude of the failure of this investment is starkly obvious - even in comparison to the "investments" we make in our military.
When i think back to all the public school english literature teachers that had their big NOW/Teachers Union pow-wows and the classroms filled with posters about it being a wonderful day when the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber, i want to smack them un-stupid more than ever.
The notion that we (the US) overspend on defense to the detriment of education, loudly trumpeted by the entrenched teachers unions of our horrible nationalized schooling system, is one of the critical self-serving fallacies in popular culture.
I want kids to be educated. I like hard working teachers. I hate the modern US government, which goes to tremendous lengths to prevent good hard working teachers from having a meaningful positive impact in the lives of deserving kids.
Given the nature in which you contribute to the problem, it's not surprising the wikipedia article on "successful marriage" has apparently been edited to be purposefully incorrect.
The correct article clearly, in large friendly letters, states the following: "In order for your marraige to be successful, your wife is ALWAYS RIGHT". That the current article doesn't seem to include this sugggests that someone, perhaps someone like yourself, has intentionally defaced the article to try and make a point.
Irrespective of what the wikipedia article says, your wife is ALWAYS RIGHT. Even when shes wrong, you shut up and route around the defect:)
Computer Science was originally applied mathematics.
Computer Science is roughly, the study of what sorts of problems you can solve with a computer, and how to make them do so.
Just like Mathematics is the study of what sorts of problems you can solve with Mathematics, and how to solve them:)
The applied mathematics legacy of computer science is thankfully wearing off more and more - we're now thinking about algorithms from a discrete, slow-convergent, approximative perspective -- thing's you'd never do if you started on paper or if computation time were prohibative (i.e. limited by human protein instead of teraflops silicon).
Web development is no more a computer science degree than sabarnes oxley compliance is economics or accounting. The former is the specialization of a topic made relevant by the latter, a specialization that will be gone in a few short years. Just last week we had the article about the "death of the webmaster". I eaglerly await the "death of the web developer". We will either transcend the web, or publishing content to the web will become so commonplace and pervasive that it hardly seems worth calling a specialty.
No offense to your or your career choice intended, but hopefully the work you do today sets the stage for tomorrow. You and the world will move on to better things.
One thing will be invariant, through all of this, however. There will be problems to solve, and people will want to know if computers can solve them effectively. That is what computer science is and should remain. New problems will arise, and new general solutions will emerge, each becoming an area of further research or career specialization.
A new study shows there may be a conflict of interest amongst some climate scientists.
The study, done over the course of the last 60 years, shows some startling conclusions:
- many climate scientists are employed by public universities, which themselves are funded by governments - the employment of many climate scientists is contingent upon publication in referreed journals. Those journals themselves are paneled by other government-employed climate scientists - a key finding of climate science research is that climate scientists should have more say in public policy - another key finding of climate science research is that considerably more government money needs to be spent doing climate science research at institutions that pay climate scientists with government money
Some nerve ExxonMobil has in paying people to do research.
It's also unforgivable that in Romania, they still import busses, engines, cars, tractors, lightbulbs, wheat, humans, and a variety of other products from outside their own borders.
The bus mechanics, engine builders, car repair professionals, tractor operators, lightbulb replacers, farmers, and menial-wage/sex trade workers in that country should be ashamed of themselves.
Medical care is supposed to be a dialog between the doctor and the patient. I frankly resent the attitude of "doctor knows best".
I am certainly no luddite, but one lamentable aspect of the scientific and technological advances in medicine is that medical professionals can use it as a substitute for, instead of a supplement to, actually _listening_ to their pateints.
The abuse of power and conflict of interest in a system where the patient is assumed to be wrong/dumb and the doctor intelligent/powerful is rampant. Does it surprise you that there is a high incidence of C-section birth at highly profitable hospitals? Do you think, in aggregate, that pateints asking for medicines they've seen on TV is more or less of a problem than physicians prescribing medications they've received kickbacks for from pharmecuetical companies?
What we have is worse - companies must be licensed by the FCC to operate cell phone service. This means that licenseholders ahve an effective monopoly- the government has created a barrier to entry of effective competitors.
The US wireless scheme is assinine. 2 year contracts with "early termination fees" are the norm here, and the phones are locked to one carrier, the multitude of technologies doesn't help this, etc.
I'll never have a cell phone contract again, nor will i ever buy an locked phone. I plan in using unlocked ebay phones and ebay prepaid SIMs. You can get a pre-activated T-mobile pre-paid SIM off ebay very easily. Do this once a week or so and it is near-anonymous mobile usage. Get a Skype In number and forward it to this weeks cell number if you want to give people a reliable but "portable" number.
T-mobile 2 Go is probably the best bet in the US.
I've not done this yet but i'm seriously thinking about it.
I speak the truth! There are No Bugs In The Macintosh! Those whom you have heard saying there are bugs? Where are they now? They are not in the Macintosh. They are roasting in the stomach of the Jobs.
Even if there were Bugs in the Mac OS, the infidels would not find them. We would know about them first and Fix them forthwright. They will never defeat us for 1000 generations.
We welcome the discovery of bugs in the Macintosh! We have set a trap for them and when they fall into it, we will be victorious, Jobs willing! We will ensnare them with the traps we have set and will cast them out of the kernel and back to where they came from!
That's an "insightful" point of view I also once held.
Then I grew up.
You can speculate about alternate realities and "what would have happened" as much as anyone else, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been at the center of the personal computing revolution, one which has profoundly shaped how people communicate and interact with each other across contentinents and across all segments of life (work, play, love, etc).
In my own (short) life time, the personal computer (and the internet) has gone from something squarely the realm of nerds, hobbyists, and weirdos, to something indispensible to anyone which has the means to access it. The OLPC project discusses sending laptops to places that have basic disease, food, and other issues because the impact a connected computer can have on a person's present and future cannot be overstated.
Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for bringing computing, such as it is, to everyone. There's a lot to dislike about the Microsoft shaped idea of "computing", but it is what it is, and they played a central role, perhaps larger than even intel, in making it happen.
I don't know where you live, but in much of America, kids start using firearms as young as 7 years old. The nature of the use and the type of fire arm are variables, but the statement is generally true.
150 years ago, every 7-10 year old boy knew how to operate a basic rifle because not knowing meant boy and family being sure-prey for bears, etc.
The exact circumstances of this particular accident are unknown, but i beleive the gun belonged to the boy - it was a new gift or something and he was "showing it off". These kids were also older than me - in their young teens.
In much of America, growing up owning and using firearms is just part of life. Every farmer has at least a shotgun - it's an indispensible tool, and nearly every young farmhand (i.e. every child born of farming parents) grows up learning how to use that tool. A friend of mine used to shoot clay pigeons when she was having relationship trouble.
I agree that there are some responsibility problems here. The kid obviously wasn't following any sort of proper safety rules, no doubt because his parents hadn't demonstrated it to him adequately. That's a different issue than "a kid shouldn't have access to a gun at all" - on that point, I disagree.
In rural highschools all around the midwest, you'll see pickups with rifles in the back window. Teens drove those trucks to school. It's just a part of life. There is no magic age at which gun ownership and use becomes appropriate - it is an issue of maturity and proper training. Obviously, the kid(s) I was writing about had neither.
When I was younger, a neighbor kid was shot by one of the other kids in the neighborhood. This was in a horrible town in Texas, and it was an accident.
Even so, the neighbor kid's parents sued the other family and got a pretty good chunk of money. They got a new TV and a bunch of other things that white trash buy when they come into some money.
I was about 10 years old at the time. But even then, it struck me. "Is this what your son was worth to you? This is the replacement? A big TV and more shit in your shit filled house?"
I lost my mom when i was 9, but at no point did i figure that i had any entitlements coming my way from society. From God - sure. He and I were through.. but nobody owed me anything. As a coping mechanism, I asked my dad if I was going to start getting lots of extra presents. When I was younger, we had met a family where the father had passed away and the kids were showered with toys all the time. He and I both knew i was "joking" (joking as a coping mechanism).
I dont think there can be much of anything more devastating to a young girl than rape or other coerced sex acts (I'm assuming what happened here was only partly consentual..) But it's not clear that a big pile of money is going to make that better now. Where is this money going to go? To pay for the counseling the girl needs? For hymen reconstruction? Maybe it could be donated to to a battered womens shelter or something meaningful? To what extent are the parents saying "if you're going to enable the sexual assault of our daughter, that is forsale for $zzz".
It's not clear what mySpace could do better here. Block the display / transfer of pictures from those under 16 to those over 19? It would be one thing if mySpace was ONLY setup to allow sexual exploitation of minors. Putting a bus stop in a bad part of town is arguably as much of risk as the way myspace works.
We hosted a technology day for middle school and high school girls here at work recently. It was pretty cool, but i was pretty alarmed that one of the prizes was a web cam. One of the things we did was a seminar on online safety for kids/girls, but then we turned around and gave out cameras. Oops:)
I looked for a neighborhood with no HOA and no covenants, and found one. I bought my house and have been a happy resident for a few years now.
Today I just wrote an email to the city planning department asking them for the details of the "historic overlay" plan that they are planning on sticking over me. It includes such ridiculous bullshit as the type of windows I can put on my house.
Do you know what it's called when someone changes the definition of what you bought after you agreed to buy it? Fraud and/or theft. Know who gets away with it? The government.
Where can I live that's freer than the US? Because it stopped being free enough a while ago...
Can anyone explain why there are _any_ limits on political speech? Isn't that the most important kind of speech to protect? Why do you need to "register" as a PAC?
Isn't there already a law that limits how much political speech can happen leading up to an election and who can say it?
We can all find the bad in pretty much every law on the books. What i can't find is the "good" about any political-speech-restriction laws.
There are lots of voices out there that i'd just as soon not have to hear, but silencing them via government intervention seems pretty unAmerican (for historical values of "American").
No, it's a bug, one that i complained about, and one that i'm happy to see fixed in Excel 2007.
I'm a former DBA, and one of my favorite activities was getting a dataset out of SQL with "some" processing done on it, and then pasting it right from isqlw (or now, sqlwb) into excel and doing more ad-hoc sorting and aggregate functions on it. You could usually do these things in SQL, but the indexes or partial computation was such that it might have been a 10-60 second query for each ad-hoc scenario you wanted to try.
However, once you had a snapshot of the output, even if it was 100k - 150k rows, excel can go over it faster for a few different data presentation views. (sort this, diff these two columns -- whatever).
Plus, it's not chewing up DB resources.
Excel 2007 is great for SQL db people - im not sure what features are new vs just better, but its really easy to embed sql statements into sheets, have their output show up as a grid of cells, refresh the dataset right from the ribbon, and have a chart defined on the data grid. I cooked up something that sucked the bvt-test result data out of our sql database and gave us pass/fail bargraphs from build to build in just a few minutes. Save the.xlsx file and anytime you want to look at bvt history, open it, hit "refresh", and you've got an up-to-date database driven bar graph, with the raw data over on the left.
Suppose that I told you that i saw a working prototype of an audio watermarking system. When someone wanted to download a song, a per-user watermark was injected into the audio stream right before they downloaded it. This watermark was not detectable to the human ears, however, it survived generational copying. Infact, in the demo i saw, computer A played the watermarked file over its speakers in a busy convention hall. Computer B had a mic and recorded the audio (along with convention floor noise). Computer B was able to detect and verify the watermark.
I would say that this watermark was resilient to basic attacks, and would allow for format shifting, resampling, and so on. By the time you had destroyed the watermark, you'd have destroyed the audio quality.
I was describing the demo of this prototype i saw to someone and they asked "wow why aren't companies using it?"
I thought about it for a while, and I'll tell you what I told him.
Because audio watermarking doesn't make them as much money.
Under a DRM scheme, content mogels get 2 improtant benefits
1) They have more control then they are supposed to according to fair use rights. They've effectively invented new distributino terms and opened up all kinds of control schemes.. limited only by their whims. Fair use is completely out the window. Now you can be charged for the same thing 33 times - once on each of your computers, each of your phones, and so on. DRM gives them control, control in a way that is orthogonal or in opposition to the normal protections that content consumers have via exceptions to copyright like fair use or public domain expiration
2) Under the watermark scheme, rights enforcement remains a civil matter. So the RIAA sees "bob.mp3" out ont he torrent sites, extracts the watermark, and matches it up with the Credit Card in their database. Now they go after Joe Blow and sue him in court.
The problem here is that 1) they have to file a civil suit. that costs them money 2) the defendant has all kinds of ways to weasel out of this (someone hacked my PC, someone stole my credit card, etc etc)
But the big problem is that it is so unattractive compared to the alternative:
Under a DRM scheme, for the file to be in any way useful to anyone at all, including illegal file sharing, the DRM protections must be cracked or removed.
This constitutes a violation of the DMCA. Now, as I understand it, a DMCA violation is a violation of Uncle Sam's laws. This means that the RIAA gives the FBI a "tip" and then uncle sam goes after Joe Blow. Making this a DMCA violation means that apprehension, prosecution, enforcement, and conviction are all paid for by the government. And its damn sight harder for Joe to weasel his way out of a criminal charge than a civil one.
So by using DRM, the **AA give themselves more rights than they actually deserve, and they can also offset the cost of litigation and enforcement onto the federal government, and ultimately, tax payers. It's a great example of industry using government to further its own interests at the expense of normal people.
This theory is a little on the tin-foil-hat side of things, but it just sounds so plausible and so inline with how we've seen the **AA people act.
There is no "home server" market, except for.1% of the population that is geeky enough to need one
Microsoct doesn't agree with you. I've been keeping up with the internal information on the Microsoft Home Server product for months now and am exited its finally public.
Based on what I've read, and what anecdotes suggest, the market segment exists.
Think about how many people in the US have more than one computer at home. How many people have wireless at home, or have multiple computer users in their family, or have broadband. Look at the penetration of digital cameras.
Broadband, home routers, multiple-PCs per house, and multiple ipods, cameras, etc, are happening to normal families. The personas we've identified for who does or does not want a home server, and what they'd use it for.. are pretty well thought out IMO.
I've been running in openBSD box since college as my "home server", and the MS home server exictes me just the same because it will make some of the stuff i'd like to do at home so easy that I'll actually get around to doing it. As others have said - it is _possible_ to do alot of this stuff with todays offerings. What MS brings to the table is that normal people will be able to start doing it, and people that _could_ do it today will do so in larger numbers because the time investment will be so minimal.
My wife and I have separate computers and separate digital cameras. It's harder for us to share digital photos with each other than it should be. Why should she store all of her digital photos on her small slow laptop drive when they're already stored on my machine? Well, she should because my desktop isn't running a RAID 1. But neither of us should restrict the size of our photo or music libraries to what we can mutually replicate between our respective desktops...
The scenarios for an easy-to-use home server are real, IMO.
A cursory glance at the article would reveal that the spooks also work with Apple and that Novel also works with "somebody" in the govt.
The article also states why the NSA thinks this is in their (and the countries) interest - the mandate has come down that procurement focus on COTS (commercial, off the shelf) for more and more things. If the security of the nation or the safety of a ship or soldier are going to be left to commercial software, the government should take a more active role in due dilligence and capability review of the products it is buying. The NSA is a logical choice for doing some of that work.
I am a little surprised that nobody has said "the NSA is hording vulnerability info on windows for their own evil purposes! Use Linux!" I'll leave it as an exercize to the reader as to why that is a non-issue. (Hint: does the NSA also get to review the linux code?)
Everything you say (which is great) can most effectively be summed up as:
"Electricity is a more flexible and efficient conduit for the creation, transit, and expenditure of energy than gasoline"
There's only one way to make Gas: suck oil out of the ground and distill it.
There are lots of ways to make electricity. The more we need to make, the better we'll get at making it.
E85 (better yet, E100) also has the same advantages over gasoline - Ethanol is a more intrinsically simple substance than gasoline. While some of the current mechanisms for making E100 suck, not all of them do, and the field of research is in its infancy.
Same for hygrodgen and the HCE - today, an end to end story for hydrogen vehicles is expensive and weird. But we know we can't run out of it, and there are lots of ways to make it.
It is actually possible to have privatized train and mass transit systems - Japan would be an example of this.
That said, I beleive mass transit requires a certain population density before it really makes sense, something like 7 families per acre? Given the average lot size of most residential areas of.2 to.25 acre, the density just isn't there except in large cities or concentrations of block/apartment housing.
I often wonder what a pervasive mass transit system in the US might look like. I loved everything about moving from A to B when I was in Germany - they have transit completely licked there.
Mass transit wont ever work if it is "forced" at people. And mass transit makes no sense in most modern American cities because the cities are completely designed around the automobile - wide multi-lane roads, which are impossible to cross safely. Large setbacks for all homes and businesses, usually with acres of paved parking.
For density to develop, cars are simply not an option - consider that a man walking on a sidewalk needs about 9 sq ft (a 3x3 square that moves with him) to walk comfortably with low liklihood of colliding. Now consider a single occupant vehicle, which needs 10-15 feet of width and however long of a distance the car will cover in 2 seconds at the posted speed. Building cities such that people get around by car is just inefficient, and places an intrinsic limit on the density of the city. Yet only in cities where the density is already higher than that will mass transit develop and be successful.
Europe in many senses got lucky - not through autocratic or socialist government, but by having many of its cities completely pre-date the automobile.
Slashdot Mirror
How can slashdot NOT have a link to the only candidate that isn't in the "i love to shit on your freedoms, and i want to tax and steal your internet" business?
Ron Paul.
http://www.ronpaulexplore.com/
that my Alma Mater was #3 on the list and that my local university is #10 on the list.
Perhaps there's still hope in the American university system after all..
Your mother uses the same public restrooms as my wife. As your mother is a member of the adult society we all live in, please, instruct her to report to the genital examination room, where me and the other democratically elected members of the health board will "inspect her vigorously" for infectuous diseases.
Look, the health of everybody is important. I'm sure you understand.
taking a favorite cue from the slashdot playbook, the wikipedia link to today's logical fallacy is:
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Dichotomy
I am reluctant to let something so important as the proper development of my child's mind and love for learning be left to the government.
It's not that home schoolers don't like their child "learning" a certain thing. They object to their child being taught specific _values_. To deny that government schooling has any sort of value subjugation aspect in its curriculum is being dishonest. It does, and some parents find it objectionable.
When you add to that the horrible quality of education received, and the numerous behavioral disorders arising from the large-prison-colony approach, and the legal maze teachers, parents, and students are subjected to... it is very apealing to step away from all of that mess and try and do a better job yourself. And results suggest that more often than not, homeschooled kids are smarter and better adjusted than public schooled kids. You can interpret that however you like, since we both know of the shortcomings of the distillation of survey data into talking points
The people most interested in home schooling are those that actually give a shit about their child's education and the experiences they'll have growing up and the values they'll be indoctrinated with from a young age.
How many home schooled children do you know on any real basis? How many home schooled children of ultra-conservative christians do you know on any real basis? What makes you think your opinion is accurate or representative?
There are a large variety of reasons to be utterly and completely dissatisfied with public schools. Private schools go part way to addressing these problems, but not far enough for some people.
I'm good friends with a large family (6 kids!) of ultra-conservative christian homeschooled kids. They're the most wonderful people i've ever met. The older kids openly disagree with aspects of their parents viewpoints on religious and societal issues -- they're certainly not brainwashed. And arguing about contemporary issues with them is engaging and rewarding - the kids are smart and have well considered opinions. they have to because all of society attacks everything about their very existinace at every turn. (how they're educated, their religious beleifs, their family structure, etc).
These kids are learning how to be adults and have their own identities, just like normal kids. They're rebelling, they get in fights, the older ones have jobs, etc.
The amount of anti-religious and anti-conservative christian prejudice on slashdot is sickening.
It is a perfectly valid and oft heard criticism of christianity that "the biggest problem with christianity is the christians". However, my opinion is that the notion of government indoctrinating all children is a far scarier, uglier world than a family "indoctrinating" its own children. Indeed, it is only when people assemble in groups, so that some may weild power over others, that societies ugliest traits are brought to bear.
You need only to look at all of the criticisms of public education here on slashdot, by prominent educators, by historical politicians, by people like Mark Twain... and perhaps your own experiences to understand that public education is fundamentally flawed. Yet when people are successfully engaging in alternatives, you criticize or seek to eliminate that opportunity. Why?
I hope that I am able to homeschool my upcoming child. I've had the amazing opportunity to meet a family that has made it work. It opened my eyes to the possibility of unthinkable things.. like a middle school girl that you don't want to choke to death after 4 minutes. That's saying something.
More is spent on education than defense in this country.
c ation-spending-of-gdp
CIA world factbook shows that Defense is 4.06% of GDP.
This page shows that Education is 5.7% of GDP.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_spe-edu
What that page doesn't show you us that the US GDP is 12tr$, so 5.7% is 648 BILLION dollars, or over $2k per year for every man, woman, and child in this country. When you consider the fraction of the 300m assumed population that actually receive public school instruction, and the magnificent failure of public schooling to produce much more than school shootings, the crushing magnitude of the failure of this investment is starkly obvious - even in comparison to the "investments" we make in our military.
When i think back to all the public school english literature teachers that had their big NOW/Teachers Union pow-wows and the classroms filled with posters about it being a wonderful day when the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber, i want to smack them un-stupid more than ever.
The notion that we (the US) overspend on defense to the detriment of education, loudly trumpeted by the entrenched teachers unions of our horrible nationalized schooling system, is one of the critical self-serving fallacies in popular culture.
I want kids to be educated. I like hard working teachers. I hate the modern US government, which goes to tremendous lengths to prevent good hard working teachers from having a meaningful positive impact in the lives of deserving kids.
Given the nature in which you contribute to the problem, it's not surprising the wikipedia article on "successful marriage" has apparently been edited to be purposefully incorrect.
:)
The correct article clearly, in large friendly letters, states the following: "In order for your marraige to be successful, your wife is ALWAYS RIGHT". That the current article doesn't seem to include this sugggests that someone, perhaps someone like yourself, has intentionally defaced the article to try and make a point.
Irrespective of what the wikipedia article says, your wife is ALWAYS RIGHT. Even when shes wrong, you shut up and route around the defect
Computer Science was originally applied mathematics.
:)
Computer Science is roughly, the study of what sorts of problems you can solve with a computer, and how to make them do so.
Just like Mathematics is the study of what sorts of problems you can solve with Mathematics, and how to solve them
The applied mathematics legacy of computer science is thankfully wearing off more and more - we're now thinking about algorithms from a discrete, slow-convergent, approximative perspective -- thing's you'd never do if you started on paper or if computation time were prohibative (i.e. limited by human protein instead of teraflops silicon).
Web development is no more a computer science degree than sabarnes oxley compliance is economics or accounting. The former is the specialization of a topic made relevant by the latter, a specialization that will be gone in a few short years. Just last week we had the article about the "death of the webmaster". I eaglerly await the "death of the web developer". We will either transcend the web, or publishing content to the web will become so commonplace and pervasive that it hardly seems worth calling a specialty.
No offense to your or your career choice intended, but hopefully the work you do today sets the stage for tomorrow. You and the world will move on to better things.
One thing will be invariant, through all of this, however. There will be problems to solve, and people will want to know if computers can solve them effectively. That is what computer science is and should remain. New problems will arise, and new general solutions will emerge, each becoming an area of further research or career specialization.
A new study shows there may be a conflict of interest amongst some climate scientists.
The study, done over the course of the last 60 years, shows some startling conclusions:
- many climate scientists are employed by public universities, which themselves are funded by governments
- the employment of many climate scientists is contingent upon publication in referreed journals. Those journals themselves are paneled by other government-employed climate scientists
- a key finding of climate science research is that climate scientists should have more say in public policy
- another key finding of climate science research is that considerably more government money needs to be spent doing climate science research at institutions that pay climate scientists with government money
Some nerve ExxonMobil has in paying people to do research.
It's also unforgivable that in Romania, they still import busses, engines, cars, tractors, lightbulbs, wheat, humans, and a variety of other products from outside their own borders.
The bus mechanics, engine builders, car repair professionals, tractor operators, lightbulb replacers, farmers, and menial-wage/sex trade workers in that country should be ashamed of themselves.
Medical care is supposed to be a dialog between the doctor and the patient. I frankly resent the attitude of "doctor knows best".
I am certainly no luddite, but one lamentable aspect of the scientific and technological advances in medicine is that medical professionals can use it as a substitute for, instead of a supplement to, actually _listening_ to their pateints.
The abuse of power and conflict of interest in a system where the patient is assumed to be wrong/dumb and the doctor intelligent/powerful is rampant. Does it surprise you that there is a high incidence of C-section birth at highly profitable hospitals? Do you think, in aggregate, that pateints asking for medicines they've seen on TV is more or less of a problem than physicians prescribing medications they've received kickbacks for from pharmecuetical companies?
What we have is worse - companies must be licensed by the FCC to operate cell phone service. This means that licenseholders ahve an effective monopoly- the government has created a barrier to entry of effective competitors.
The US wireless scheme is assinine. 2 year contracts with "early termination fees" are the norm here, and the phones are locked to one carrier, the multitude of technologies doesn't help this, etc.
I'll never have a cell phone contract again, nor will i ever buy an locked phone. I plan in using unlocked ebay phones and ebay prepaid SIMs. You can get a pre-activated T-mobile pre-paid SIM off ebay very easily. Do this once a week or so and it is near-anonymous mobile usage. Get a Skype In number and forward it to this weeks cell number if you want to give people a reliable but "portable" number.
T-mobile 2 Go is probably the best bet in the US.
I've not done this yet but i'm seriously thinking about it.
I speak the truth! There are No Bugs In The Macintosh! Those whom you have heard saying there are bugs? Where are they now? They are not in the Macintosh. They are roasting in the stomach of the Jobs.
Even if there were Bugs in the Mac OS, the infidels would not find them. We would know about them first and Fix them forthwright. They will never defeat us for 1000 generations.
We welcome the discovery of bugs in the Macintosh! We have set a trap for them and when they fall into it, we will be victorious, Jobs willing! We will ensnare them with the traps we have set and will cast them out of the kernel and back to where they came from!
That's an "insightful" point of view I also once held.
Then I grew up.
You can speculate about alternate realities and "what would have happened" as much as anyone else, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been at the center of the personal computing revolution, one which has profoundly shaped how people communicate and interact with each other across contentinents and across all segments of life (work, play, love, etc).
In my own (short) life time, the personal computer (and the internet) has gone from something squarely the realm of nerds, hobbyists, and weirdos, to something indispensible to anyone which has the means to access it. The OLPC project discusses sending laptops to places that have basic disease, food, and other issues because the impact a connected computer can have on a person's present and future cannot be overstated.
Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for bringing computing, such as it is, to everyone. There's a lot to dislike about the Microsoft shaped idea of "computing", but it is what it is, and they played a central role, perhaps larger than even intel, in making it happen.
I don't know where you live, but in much of America, kids start using firearms as young as 7 years old. The nature of the use and the type of fire arm are variables, but the statement is generally true.
150 years ago, every 7-10 year old boy knew how to operate a basic rifle because not knowing meant boy and family being sure-prey for bears, etc.
The exact circumstances of this particular accident are unknown, but i beleive the gun belonged to the boy - it was a new gift or something and he was "showing it off". These kids were also older than me - in their young teens.
In much of America, growing up owning and using firearms is just part of life. Every farmer has at least a shotgun - it's an indispensible tool, and nearly every young farmhand (i.e. every child born of farming parents) grows up learning how to use that tool. A friend of mine used to shoot clay pigeons when she was having relationship trouble.
I agree that there are some responsibility problems here. The kid obviously wasn't following any sort of proper safety rules, no doubt because his parents hadn't demonstrated it to him adequately. That's a different issue than "a kid shouldn't have access to a gun at all" - on that point, I disagree.
In rural highschools all around the midwest, you'll see pickups with rifles in the back window. Teens drove those trucks to school. It's just a part of life. There is no magic age at which gun ownership and use becomes appropriate - it is an issue of maturity and proper training. Obviously, the kid(s) I was writing about had neither.
When I was younger, a neighbor kid was shot by one of the other kids in the neighborhood. This was in a horrible town in Texas, and it was an accident.
:)
Even so, the neighbor kid's parents sued the other family and got a pretty good chunk of money. They got a new TV and a bunch of other things that white trash buy when they come into some money.
I was about 10 years old at the time. But even then, it struck me. "Is this what your son was worth to you? This is the replacement? A big TV and more shit in your shit filled house?"
I lost my mom when i was 9, but at no point did i figure that i had any entitlements coming my way from society. From God - sure. He and I were through.. but nobody owed me anything. As a coping mechanism, I asked my dad if I was going to start getting lots of extra presents. When I was younger, we had met a family where the father had passed away and the kids were showered with toys all the time. He and I both knew i was "joking" (joking as a coping mechanism).
I dont think there can be much of anything more devastating to a young girl than rape or other coerced sex acts (I'm assuming what happened here was only partly consentual..) But it's not clear that a big pile of money is going to make that better now. Where is this money going to go? To pay for the counseling the girl needs? For hymen reconstruction? Maybe it could be donated to to a battered womens shelter or something meaningful? To what extent are the parents saying "if you're going to enable the sexual assault of our daughter, that is forsale for $zzz".
It's not clear what mySpace could do better here. Block the display / transfer of pictures from those under 16 to those over 19? It would be one thing if mySpace was ONLY setup to allow sexual exploitation of minors. Putting a bus stop in a bad part of town is arguably as much of risk as the way myspace works.
We hosted a technology day for middle school and high school girls here at work recently. It was pretty cool, but i was pretty alarmed that one of the prizes was a web cam. One of the things we did was a seminar on online safety for kids/girls, but then we turned around and gave out cameras. Oops
Actually, you don't own anything in the US.
I looked for a neighborhood with no HOA and no covenants, and found one. I bought my house and have been a happy resident for a few years now.
Today I just wrote an email to the city planning department asking them for the details of the "historic overlay" plan that they are planning on sticking over me. It includes such ridiculous bullshit as the type of windows I can put on my house.
Do you know what it's called when someone changes the definition of what you bought after you agreed to buy it? Fraud and/or theft. Know who gets away with it? The government.
Where can I live that's freer than the US? Because it stopped being free enough a while ago...
You were pretty forward thinking I guess.
Presumably, most people get excited about the inverse scenario.
Can anyone explain why there are _any_ limits on political speech? Isn't that the most important kind of speech to protect? Why do you need to "register" as a PAC?
Isn't there already a law that limits how much political speech can happen leading up to an election and who can say it?
We can all find the bad in pretty much every law on the books. What i can't find is the "good" about any political-speech-restriction laws.
There are lots of voices out there that i'd just as soon not have to hear, but silencing them via government intervention seems pretty unAmerican (for historical values of "American").
No, it's a bug, one that i complained about, and one that i'm happy to see fixed in Excel 2007.
.xlsx file and anytime you want to look at bvt history, open it, hit "refresh", and you've got an up-to-date database driven bar graph, with the raw data over on the left.
I'm a former DBA, and one of my favorite activities was getting a dataset out of SQL with "some" processing done on it, and then pasting it right from isqlw (or now, sqlwb) into excel and doing more ad-hoc sorting and aggregate functions on it. You could usually do these things in SQL, but the indexes or partial computation was such that it might have been a 10-60 second query for each ad-hoc scenario you wanted to try.
However, once you had a snapshot of the output, even if it was 100k - 150k rows, excel can go over it faster for a few different data presentation views. (sort this, diff these two columns -- whatever).
Plus, it's not chewing up DB resources.
Excel 2007 is great for SQL db people - im not sure what features are new vs just better, but its really easy to embed sql statements into sheets, have their output show up as a grid of cells, refresh the dataset right from the ribbon, and have a chart defined on the data grid. I cooked up something that sucked the bvt-test result data out of our sql database and gave us pass/fail bargraphs from build to build in just a few minutes. Save the
Here's why.
Suppose that I told you that i saw a working prototype of an audio watermarking system. When someone wanted to download a song, a per-user watermark was injected into the audio stream right before they downloaded it. This watermark was not detectable to the human ears, however, it survived generational copying. Infact, in the demo i saw, computer A played the watermarked file over its speakers in a busy convention hall. Computer B had a mic and recorded the audio (along with convention floor noise). Computer B was able to detect and verify the watermark.
I would say that this watermark was resilient to basic attacks, and would allow for format shifting, resampling, and so on. By the time you had destroyed the watermark, you'd have destroyed the audio quality.
I was describing the demo of this prototype i saw to someone and they asked "wow why aren't companies using it?"
I thought about it for a while, and I'll tell you what I told him.
Because audio watermarking doesn't make them as much money.
Under a DRM scheme, content mogels get 2 improtant benefits
1) They have more control then they are supposed to according to fair use rights. They've effectively invented new distributino terms and opened up all kinds of control schemes.. limited only by their whims. Fair use is completely out the window. Now you can be charged for the same thing 33 times - once on each of your computers, each of your phones, and so on. DRM gives them control, control in a way that is orthogonal or in opposition to the normal protections that content consumers have via exceptions to copyright like fair use or public domain expiration
2) Under the watermark scheme, rights enforcement remains a civil matter. So the RIAA sees "bob.mp3" out ont he torrent sites, extracts the watermark, and matches it up with the Credit Card in their database. Now they go after Joe Blow and sue him in court.
The problem here is that
1) they have to file a civil suit. that costs them money
2) the defendant has all kinds of ways to weasel out of this (someone hacked my PC, someone stole my credit card, etc etc)
But the big problem is that it is so unattractive compared to the alternative:
Under a DRM scheme, for the file to be in any way useful to anyone at all, including illegal file sharing, the DRM protections must be cracked or removed.
This constitutes a violation of the DMCA. Now, as I understand it, a DMCA violation is a violation of Uncle Sam's laws. This means that the RIAA gives the FBI a "tip" and then uncle sam goes after Joe Blow. Making this a DMCA violation means that apprehension, prosecution, enforcement, and conviction are all paid for by the government. And its damn sight harder for Joe to weasel his way out of a criminal charge than a civil one.
So by using DRM, the **AA give themselves more rights than they actually deserve, and they can also offset the cost of litigation and enforcement onto the federal government, and ultimately, tax payers. It's a great example of industry using government to further its own interests at the expense of normal people.
This theory is a little on the tin-foil-hat side of things, but it just sounds so plausible and so inline with how we've seen the **AA people act.
Microsoct doesn't agree with you. I've been keeping up with the internal information on the Microsoft Home Server product for months now and am exited its finally public.
Based on what I've read, and what anecdotes suggest, the market segment exists.
Think about how many people in the US have more than one computer at home. How many people have wireless at home, or have multiple computer users in their family, or have broadband. Look at the penetration of digital cameras.
Broadband, home routers, multiple-PCs per house, and multiple ipods, cameras, etc, are happening to normal families. The personas we've identified for who does or does not want a home server, and what they'd use it for.. are pretty well thought out IMO.
I've been running in openBSD box since college as my "home server", and the MS home server exictes me just the same because it will make some of the stuff i'd like to do at home so easy that I'll actually get around to doing it. As others have said - it is _possible_ to do alot of this stuff with todays offerings. What MS brings to the table is that normal people will be able to start doing it, and people that _could_ do it today will do so in larger numbers because the time investment will be so minimal.
My wife and I have separate computers and separate digital cameras. It's harder for us to share digital photos with each other than it should be. Why should she store all of her digital photos on her small slow laptop drive when they're already stored on my machine? Well, she should because my desktop isn't running a RAID 1. But neither of us should restrict the size of our photo or music libraries to what we can mutually replicate between our respective desktops...
The scenarios for an easy-to-use home server are real, IMO.
A cursory glance at the article would reveal that the spooks also work with Apple and that Novel also works with "somebody" in the govt.
The article also states why the NSA thinks this is in their (and the countries) interest - the mandate has come down that procurement focus on COTS (commercial, off the shelf) for more and more things. If the security of the nation or the safety of a ship or soldier are going to be left to commercial software, the government should take a more active role in due dilligence and capability review of the products it is buying. The NSA is a logical choice for doing some of that work.
I am a little surprised that nobody has said "the NSA is hording vulnerability info on windows for their own evil purposes! Use Linux!" I'll leave it as an exercize to the reader as to why that is a non-issue. (Hint: does the NSA also get to review the linux code?)
Everything you say (which is great) can most effectively be summed up as:
"Electricity is a more flexible and efficient conduit for the creation, transit, and expenditure of energy than gasoline"
There's only one way to make Gas: suck oil out of the ground and distill it.
There are lots of ways to make electricity. The more we need to make, the better we'll get at making it.
E85 (better yet, E100) also has the same advantages over gasoline - Ethanol is a more intrinsically simple substance than gasoline. While some of the current mechanisms for making E100 suck, not all of them do, and the field of research is in its infancy.
Same for hygrodgen and the HCE - today, an end to end story for hydrogen vehicles is expensive and weird. But we know we can't run out of it, and there are lots of ways to make it.
It is actually possible to have privatized train and mass transit systems - Japan would be an example of this.
.2 to .25 acre, the density just isn't there except in large cities or concentrations of block/apartment housing.
That said, I beleive mass transit requires a certain population density before it really makes sense, something like 7 families per acre? Given the average lot size of most residential areas of
I often wonder what a pervasive mass transit system in the US might look like. I loved everything about moving from A to B when I was in Germany - they have transit completely licked there.
Mass transit wont ever work if it is "forced" at people. And mass transit makes no sense in most modern American cities because the cities are completely designed around the automobile - wide multi-lane roads, which are impossible to cross safely. Large setbacks for all homes and businesses, usually with acres of paved parking.
For density to develop, cars are simply not an option - consider that a man walking on a sidewalk needs about 9 sq ft (a 3x3 square that moves with him) to walk comfortably with low liklihood of colliding. Now consider a single occupant vehicle, which needs 10-15 feet of width and however long of a distance the car will cover in 2 seconds at the posted speed. Building cities such that people get around by car is just inefficient, and places an intrinsic limit on the density of the city. Yet only in cities where the density is already higher than that will mass transit develop and be successful.
Europe in many senses got lucky - not through autocratic or socialist government, but by having many of its cities completely pre-date the automobile.