Provide government union jobs to re-elect incumbents.
Oh look, an anti-union plug. The TSA has been around for over a decade, and only gained the right to collective bargaining a year ago, and only in a limited form. The attacks on unions have really gotten out of hand at this point.
I don't know about you, but I'd like my daughter to become an educated, thinking adult, not a member of a cargo cult.
Part of being an educated adult in a computerized world is understanding how to write a computer program, which means more than buying a shrink-wrapped program that other people wrote for you (i.e. the current approach with computers in schools). You say there is value in pencil and paper techniques; I say there is at least equal value in learning how to use a computer to solve a problem, if not more. Why sit there with a pocket calculator, a pencil, and a heap of scrap paper when you could be writing a program in Python?
The fact that students pull out pencils and paper is not strictly a bad thing. What is bad is when they pull out pencils and paper to do things like multiply numbers, when sitting in front of them is a computer that can be programmed to multiply. Why are we giving students assignments that ask them to multiply 4-column numbers, when we could be asking them to write a program that multiplies numbers with arbitrarily many columns? We might as well teach students how to use slide-rules, and then have a computer tell them if their answer is correct.
The problem with your approach here is that you are assuming that students will understand why pen and paper tricks work if they have a right-or-wrong oracle available to them. If we want students to think for themselves, they need to be taught in a way that encourages them to develop solutions on their own -- something which almost never happens when we teach them pen-and-paper tricks. When students are given a right-or-wrong oracle and 100 questions to answer, they learn the tricks and nothing more, if even that much (sometimes they just learn how to guess quickly until the computer says "correct"). We ask students to basically run an algorithm using pen and paper dozens of times, then use a computer to verify their output is correct; do you really think that encourages students to think (nevermind how absurdly backwards that approach is)?
When students exit the school system, they have learned that math is a matter of memorizing formulas, computers are black boxes that allow other people to think for you, and that by asking an oracle whether or not they are correct they can extract the right answer. Is that what you want your daughter to be trained to do?
We stop teaching certain techniques as our priorities change. I am 25; when I was in school, we were not taught how to use logarithmic tables or slide rules. The world should move forward; perhaps instead of having students perform arithmetic or solve geometry problems all day, we should be teaching them about algorithms and having them write programs.
This idea of blame the victims don't blame the criminals that so many on Slashdot have is stupid. Fine, I'll be ok with that so long as you are ok with it applying to the real world. You are ok with me being legally allowed to break in to your house, so long as I am able.
"Waahh waahhh I left my front door unlocked and someone stole my valuables!"
Thing is, I'd be very able. Your physical security is shit, as is everyone's
If I kept enough information to hijack hundres of thousans of identities in my home, I would beef up my security.
Also this is funny because show me this perfect security
Who said anything about perfect security? The problem is that most attacks exploit the same security problems that have been exploited over and over and which people have been warned about over and over again. The fact that techniques for securing information exist and go unused is the problem here; there are criminals in the world, and law enorcement agencies cannot preempt those criminals.
Maybe in the last couple of years of highschool it makes sense, but in the early years, a computer serves no useful purpose in school and actually hinders important learning.
It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems. Students are given computers with more restrictions than China's firewall, and if they dare to defeat those restrictions they are punished more severely than students who start fistfights.
Is it any surprise that the computers are not helping? We give students prepackaged software, and do little to help them learn how to solve problems using computers. We teach students how to add, and then we give them a computer that tells then whether or not they added correctly -- yet at no point does anyone think to have students implement addition as a computer program, let alone how to do solve more complex problems. More time is spent worrying about students using computers to access pornography and how to prevent that from happening than about teaching students about how to solve problems using a computer.
Part of the problem with the standard approach to computers in education is that they are treated as tools for helping students learn how to use pre-computer techniques for solving problems. There is a tendency to treat computers like a combination flash-card/homework-grading system. We give students prepackaged education "solutions" that are supposed to reinforce traditional book learning, and lock down their computers so that they can only use the software they were given.
We should instead focus on teaching children how to solve problems by writing programs. We should have a completely different approach to computers in education, because computers are different sorts of tools than what we had previously. Let students hack, and moreover create an environment that is friendly toward programming. We live in a computerized world; programming should be considered a matter of basic literacy at this point.
There are good reasons for choosing GPL or BSD licensed software for OLPC, if you take the time to think about the point of the project. The ultimate goal of OLPC is to help developing nations bootstrap their computing infrastructure, so that they will not be dependent on others for their computing needs. It is pretty hard to make a case for proprietary software furthering that goal -- even if we ignore licensing, how are these countries supposed to break away from their dependence on the west if they never have access to source code, and if their OS is designed to prevent them from hacking?
Just GNU/Linux? No, *BSD, ReactOS, Minix, etc. could have been used, but would you complain less if they pushed Sugar on FreeBSD?
Sex is bad, don't you know? It must be hidden from view, and especially from chil^H^H^H^Hanyone under the age of 18, whose moral backbone will be undermined by it.
Here you have an algorithm for reducing the amount of work done at ports, which means less energy consumption or in other words less resource consumption. Assuming, of course, that it does not simply encourage more consumption for the same amount of resources.
The real problem that the world faces is not that technology is increasing resource consumption; technology is making things more efficient. The problem is that the demand for things keeps increasing as more and more countries join the high-tech revolution.
The incident probably cost airlines and various travellers plenty of money (delayed flights etc.). Sounds like a new way to harm America: sneak things onto airplanes that look like bombs. It should not be too hard; if you disassemble a typical laptop and turn a few things around, you'll have something that looks like a bomb.
Every American is a criminal... if you ask those in charge
FTFY. Why do you think the number of criminal offenses keeps increasing? Ayn Rand hit the ball out of the park:
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
Don't you know? Americans cannot be terrorists. Only people who hate America can be terrorists, and they also plot their attacks from outside the country.
If you identify the object of the advances is a minor, that would make it a predator
So when two high school students are chatting about sex, then what? This is more complicated than, "Is a minor involved."
But do please try and differentiate between an interesting computer science problem, and an actual government putting such an algorithm into use.
Except that it is practically guaranteed to be put to use by law enforcement, assuming it works at all. This is like saying, "Let's not confuse an interesting experiment in identifying which gun fired some bullet with law enforcement activities!"
Public libraries exist, they have computers, and they allow poor people to connect to the Internet. In fact, I have corresponded with a homeless person in the past, who was using a library computer. Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology, and we could spend less money paying cops to arrest poor people and more improving our library system. If we had priorities that did not come out of some Soviet playbook, that is.
Rosalind Franklin deserves credit. Shew as not the first to publish, but it was her data that Watson and Crick used and she had come to the same conclusion as they had.
Whose thinking seems to be that way? When last I checked, the thinking is that people in general are too technically illiterate to deal with computers, and that computer literacy should be something that we teach alongside math, reading, and writing (and that all of the above should be taught better than it is today).
In fact, the most sexist (or should I just go ahead and say "misogynist"?) things I have heard about computers and women have come from...women, especially feminists. Why are there so few women editing Wikipedia? Well, that's because nitpicking discussions alienate women. Open source has too many flamewars for women, as well as daring to show pictures of sexy women dressed in bikinis (yet these same feminists tell us not to criticize female displays of sexuality). It is not the people in these fields who are saying such things (most are sitting there lamenting the fact that they have a hard time meeting women who share their interests).
So don't sit there making generalizations about male "nerds" and their view of women. There are quite a few of us who want to meet women who can carry on a conversation about some interesting technical topic. We do not want to hide our nerdiness from women, we want to meet women who like the sort of things that we like.
So we should refrain from calling people naive or stupid, simply because they are computer-illiterate, naive, and they do not bother to be informed of the dozens of concerns that privacy advocates have raised?
Get real. These people might as well complain that after posting their phone number on a corkboard in a coffee shop, they started receiving calls from strangers.
People putting too much info into Facebook is a problem. But collating all the available information into one easy stalker's buffet is an additional problem that we hadn't seen until now.
So what you are saying is that we had better hope that none of the world's stalkers are smart enough to write this program for themselves? I have heard this argument before -- that criminals are not smart enough to write these things for themselves, that if we ban the technology then it won't be available to the bad guys, etc., etc. Let's get real: the program is not the problem, the services that teh program relies on and the fact that people are posting every detail of their lives on those services is the problem.
People need some common sense, like that it is a bad idea to parade your life around on the Internet and that "trendy" is not equivalent to "great idea."
Slashdot Mirror
Provide government union jobs to re-elect incumbents.
Oh look, an anti-union plug. The TSA has been around for over a decade, and only gained the right to collective bargaining a year ago, and only in a limited form. The attacks on unions have really gotten out of hand at this point.
I don't know about you, but I'd like my daughter to become an educated, thinking adult, not a member of a cargo cult.
Part of being an educated adult in a computerized world is understanding how to write a computer program, which means more than buying a shrink-wrapped program that other people wrote for you (i.e. the current approach with computers in schools). You say there is value in pencil and paper techniques; I say there is at least equal value in learning how to use a computer to solve a problem, if not more. Why sit there with a pocket calculator, a pencil, and a heap of scrap paper when you could be writing a program in Python?
The fact that students pull out pencils and paper is not strictly a bad thing. What is bad is when they pull out pencils and paper to do things like multiply numbers, when sitting in front of them is a computer that can be programmed to multiply. Why are we giving students assignments that ask them to multiply 4-column numbers, when we could be asking them to write a program that multiplies numbers with arbitrarily many columns? We might as well teach students how to use slide-rules, and then have a computer tell them if their answer is correct.
The problem with your approach here is that you are assuming that students will understand why pen and paper tricks work if they have a right-or-wrong oracle available to them. If we want students to think for themselves, they need to be taught in a way that encourages them to develop solutions on their own -- something which almost never happens when we teach them pen-and-paper tricks. When students are given a right-or-wrong oracle and 100 questions to answer, they learn the tricks and nothing more, if even that much (sometimes they just learn how to guess quickly until the computer says "correct"). We ask students to basically run an algorithm using pen and paper dozens of times, then use a computer to verify their output is correct; do you really think that encourages students to think (nevermind how absurdly backwards that approach is)?
When students exit the school system, they have learned that math is a matter of memorizing formulas, computers are black boxes that allow other people to think for you, and that by asking an oracle whether or not they are correct they can extract the right answer. Is that what you want your daughter to be trained to do?
We stop teaching certain techniques as our priorities change. I am 25; when I was in school, we were not taught how to use logarithmic tables or slide rules. The world should move forward; perhaps instead of having students perform arithmetic or solve geometry problems all day, we should be teaching them about algorithms and having them write programs.
This idea of blame the victims don't blame the criminals that so many on Slashdot have is stupid. Fine, I'll be ok with that so long as you are ok with it applying to the real world. You are ok with me being legally allowed to break in to your house, so long as I am able.
"Waahh waahhh I left my front door unlocked and someone stole my valuables!"
Thing is, I'd be very able. Your physical security is shit, as is everyone's
If I kept enough information to hijack hundres of thousans of identities in my home, I would beef up my security.
Also this is funny because show me this perfect security
Who said anything about perfect security? The problem is that most attacks exploit the same security problems that have been exploited over and over and which people have been warned about over and over again. The fact that techniques for securing information exist and go unused is the problem here; there are criminals in the world, and law enorcement agencies cannot preempt those criminals.
Telling incumbents that they could spy on their political opponents? That does not sound like a detterent to me...
Maybe in the last couple of years of highschool it makes sense, but in the early years, a computer serves no useful purpose in school and actually hinders important learning.
It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems. Students are given computers with more restrictions than China's firewall, and if they dare to defeat those restrictions they are punished more severely than students who start fistfights.
Is it any surprise that the computers are not helping? We give students prepackaged software, and do little to help them learn how to solve problems using computers. We teach students how to add, and then we give them a computer that tells then whether or not they added correctly -- yet at no point does anyone think to have students implement addition as a computer program, let alone how to do solve more complex problems. More time is spent worrying about students using computers to access pornography and how to prevent that from happening than about teaching students about how to solve problems using a computer.
Part of the problem with the standard approach to computers in education is that they are treated as tools for helping students learn how to use pre-computer techniques for solving problems. There is a tendency to treat computers like a combination flash-card/homework-grading system. We give students prepackaged education "solutions" that are supposed to reinforce traditional book learning, and lock down their computers so that they can only use the software they were given.
We should instead focus on teaching children how to solve problems by writing programs. We should have a completely different approach to computers in education, because computers are different sorts of tools than what we had previously. Let students hack, and moreover create an environment that is friendly toward programming. We live in a computerized world; programming should be considered a matter of basic literacy at this point.
There are good reasons for choosing GPL or BSD licensed software for OLPC, if you take the time to think about the point of the project. The ultimate goal of OLPC is to help developing nations bootstrap their computing infrastructure, so that they will not be dependent on others for their computing needs. It is pretty hard to make a case for proprietary software furthering that goal -- even if we ignore licensing, how are these countries supposed to break away from their dependence on the west if they never have access to source code, and if their OS is designed to prevent them from hacking?
Just GNU/Linux? No, *BSD, ReactOS, Minix, etc. could have been used, but would you complain less if they pushed Sugar on FreeBSD?
Sex is bad, don't you know? It must be hidden from view, and especially from chil^H^H^H^Hanyone under the age of 18, whose moral backbone will be undermined by it.
My guess is that he has a thing for green pieces of paper with pictures of dead men and numbers printed on them.
I am not an expert on container shipping, but this was one of the first things I thought to search for on Google:
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1954135
Here you have an algorithm for reducing the amount of work done at ports, which means less energy consumption or in other words less resource consumption. Assuming, of course, that it does not simply encourage more consumption for the same amount of resources.
The real problem that the world faces is not that technology is increasing resource consumption; technology is making things more efficient. The problem is that the demand for things keeps increasing as more and more countries join the high-tech revolution.
Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?
It does not help that Apple itself is telling people that their OS will protect them from malware:
https://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is/security.html
The incident probably cost airlines and various travellers plenty of money (delayed flights etc.). Sounds like a new way to harm America: sneak things onto airplanes that look like bombs. It should not be too hard; if you disassemble a typical laptop and turn a few things around, you'll have something that looks like a bomb.
Every American is a criminal... if you ask those in charge
FTFY. Why do you think the number of criminal offenses keeps increasing? Ayn Rand hit the ball out of the park:
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
So the lesson is, if you want to bomb an airplane, enclose your bomb in a smooth, brushed aluminum and/or plastic case?
Don't you know? Americans cannot be terrorists. Only people who hate America can be terrorists, and they also plot their attacks from outside the country.
If you identify the object of the advances is a minor, that would make it a predator
So when two high school students are chatting about sex, then what? This is more complicated than, "Is a minor involved."
But do please try and differentiate between an interesting computer science problem, and an actual government putting such an algorithm into use.
Except that it is practically guaranteed to be put to use by law enforcement, assuming it works at all. This is like saying, "Let's not confuse an interesting experiment in identifying which gun fired some bullet with law enforcement activities!"
It is not as simple as this:
G: I'm 12!
P: Oh, let's go have some sex. I can show you how, since I am an experienced 40 year old.
Public libraries exist, they have computers, and they allow poor people to connect to the Internet. In fact, I have corresponded with a homeless person in the past, who was using a library computer. Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology, and we could spend less money paying cops to arrest poor people and more improving our library system. If we had priorities that did not come out of some Soviet playbook, that is.
Really? What is so great about 60? At least 59 is a prime number...
Rosalind Franklin deserves credit. Shew as not the first to publish, but it was her data that Watson and Crick used and she had come to the same conclusion as they had.
Whose thinking seems to be that way? When last I checked, the thinking is that people in general are too technically illiterate to deal with computers, and that computer literacy should be something that we teach alongside math, reading, and writing (and that all of the above should be taught better than it is today).
In fact, the most sexist (or should I just go ahead and say "misogynist"?) things I have heard about computers and women have come from...women, especially feminists. Why are there so few women editing Wikipedia? Well, that's because nitpicking discussions alienate women. Open source has too many flamewars for women, as well as daring to show pictures of sexy women dressed in bikinis (yet these same feminists tell us not to criticize female displays of sexuality). It is not the people in these fields who are saying such things (most are sitting there lamenting the fact that they have a hard time meeting women who share their interests).
So don't sit there making generalizations about male "nerds" and their view of women. There are quite a few of us who want to meet women who can carry on a conversation about some interesting technical topic. We do not want to hide our nerdiness from women, we want to meet women who like the sort of things that we like.
So we should refrain from calling people naive or stupid, simply because they are computer-illiterate, naive, and they do not bother to be informed of the dozens of concerns that privacy advocates have raised?
Get real. These people might as well complain that after posting their phone number on a corkboard in a coffee shop, they started receiving calls from strangers.
People putting too much info into Facebook is a problem. But collating all the available information into one easy stalker's buffet is an additional problem that we hadn't seen until now.
So what you are saying is that we had better hope that none of the world's stalkers are smart enough to write this program for themselves? I have heard this argument before -- that criminals are not smart enough to write these things for themselves, that if we ban the technology then it won't be available to the bad guys, etc., etc. Let's get real: the program is not the problem, the services that teh program relies on and the fact that people are posting every detail of their lives on those services is the problem.
People need some common sense, like that it is a bad idea to parade your life around on the Internet and that "trendy" is not equivalent to "great idea."
Well you see, when we do it, we are doing it for the right reasons. When China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia do it, they are doing it for the wrong reasons.
Here is a typical reaction to criticism of a bill like PCFIPA:
How dare you criticize a bill that protects the children? You must a pedophile.