Well, it's hardly worth arguing, and we're not going to agree. I think if the universities in question saw fit to merge what UW has in two faculties into a single faculty, there must be a reason. I would assume that the reason is that there wasn't enough math (or nat. sci.) to justify a whole faculty. At waterloo, that is not the case -- there is enough math to justify an entire faculty.
This, in turn, implies to me that there are definitely things going on at Waterloo that are not going on elsewhere.
Thus, while I may be wrong in fact, that is the reason for my guess. And my original statement stands technically, and I think, semantically.
Really? All I can see are "Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences" or other tag-ons. Waterloo's is exclusively mathematics. There are, of course, join degrees for applied mathematicians with physics, and that sort of thing.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Faculty+of+Mat he matics%22+site:.no (admittedly, this is an english search, but I would assume that's sufficient.)
While they may amount to the same thing, I believe I have heard that UW has one of five "Faculty of Mathematics"s in the world. I could definitely be wrong, or a victim of propaganda.
And yes, I would consider leaving. I'm not particularly attached to my waterloo degree. I patently refuse to work for microsoft. I have plenty of work experience, and plenty of good references. I don't need a waterloo degree to carry me, I can stand on my own merits.
Except for the.. you know.. aditional mandatory course. E&CE 050 will (apparently) be a required course for those who *apply* to UW. It will be delivered online. To get accepted you must do the course. The course will become available to you when you apply. Thus, most students, even those who do not end up accepted (about 300 out of 1500 applicants are accepted to E&CE each year.) will probably take the course.
It affects a student indirectly even if not directly. The "spirit" of the E&CE department may have changed irrevocably today.
I don't think there's been a CS class since UW started that didn't have some screwiness. I went through the first CS130 as Java instead of Pascal. We also had things moved around with CS246, and ended up with a course that had about 5 weeks of material. It's part of the process of education, albeit one that they aren't very forthcoming about.
If you're interested in signing onto the letter that will be drafted to the CS department, drop me a line. my user id is raewasch, and I go to the same school as you. you can figure out my email.:-)
I'm sorry- what do you mean one of a few in the world? What tech/science/engineering oriented school with any reputation doesn't have a mathematical science department & faculty?
That's the point. Waterloo has a Faculty of Mathematics, with many thousand students and about a dozen departments in it, not a department of mathematics with a couple dozen students.
I'm really surprised this isn't affecting the new Computer Science faculty that's opening at Waterloo next year. I imagine it's only a matter of time until they fall too though..
Waterloo does not have, and is not getting a Comp Sci faculty. They have a mathematics faculty, one of a few in the world. That in turn had a Computer Science department, which has now become a School of Computer Science. They are also now starting to offer a Bachelors of Computer Science, although the old Bachelors of Math with a major in Computer Science will still be available. The new B.CS will be less math intensive, and more open to specialization in various areas.
Unless, of course, it's the ONLY mandatory programming course they have?
No, of course it isn't. It's one of several. The point, and the problem, is that this is curriculum set by industry members. And not just any industry members, but a convicted monopoly, that has been known to weasle in and out of things before.
And what about those students that are already here? I'm not in Computer Engineering, but Computer Science at Waterloo. I find it offensive that my school would sell out its curriculum to Microsoft. Switching schools is hardly a reasonable option for someone that's already here, though I would consider it if it happened in CS and not just CompEng.
I'm curious about your other obligations. I'm a student, I'm heavily involved in making student life better. I'm also canadian, which puts me out for this sort of thing, but I would turn it down as well, because of other obligations. Are yours family? work? Do they go beyond that? If you're already involved in some aspect of your world outside family and work, then you're doing your part...if everyone did that, we'd be doin' just fine.:-) If your obligations are all family and work, I find it hard to believe you can't drop something (watching TV would be the most statistically probably "something") to make some time for something like this.
I'm glad you thought about what I had to say. I think that the idea of singling out an elected official is an excellent one - one of the best (in terms of manageability, understandability, explainability, cost, time, and effect) that I've ever seen WRT to "your rights online." It brings things into the realm of what one voter, one citizen, one consumer, can understand, while having a broader "chilling" ("warming"?:-) ) effect.
Someone needs to run with this, for the sake of US online rights. In Canada, I am monitor the "battle," and will dig in and help out if the time is necessary. The politics of the game here are very, very different, though.
Cheers, -Rob PS. -- I'd prefer this be by email, if you're indifferent. my address is in my last post.
I think the idea is fully documented file formats that we can edit with alternate applications.
The fact that fully documents file formats don't happen, even internally, at most companies, and will never happen externally from microsoft is enough reason to not accept this. It's feasible, but it doesn't seem to happen in the current consumer software development environment. However, if they release the source code that interprets the documents to build an object model for the document (Which is presumably what they are doing) then indeed this argument goes away.
I don't think we should legislate free software, because quite honestly if MS has the best solution for that task, we SHOULD use it.
I take offense to my government storing things in (practically, if not "officially") closed data formats. I work for a branch of the Government of Canada, and I get stuff delivered to me on my Redhat box that uses.doc all the time. The only way to fix this is to use truly open data formats that are well supported. Nothing microsoft does fits that definition. I doubt that anything MS provides is the "best solution" for the task, if you consider licencing costs, loss of freedoms in a democracy, vendor lockin, etc.
I'm also a canadian. I'm also already quite involved in more local politics.
Here's what you do:
register eliminatehollings.com or somesuch. collect some basic information, put it on the site. get slashdot to post a link for it. set up for paypal donations. Donations should pay for the site, (bandwidth and hosting, *nothing more*) and the rest should go to the EFF, or better yet, an opponent of Hollings that there is a general agreement is better than Hollings.
Set up credit card donations. All along the way, you should be asking people (credit card people, hosting companies, etc.) for a discount or free stuff, as you're running a non-profit site to promote traditionally guarded rights in the digital era. If nothing else, you'll get the message out in an interesting way.
Post anything you can find about the amount of money Hollings has received from Hollywood, and the bills he has introduced, sponsored, supported, etc. Post anything about his voting record you can find. Use lines like "Hollings has been convinced by Big Media that their profits are more important than any of your rights!"...Make sure you don't slander.
If you want more elaboration, reach me at r a e w a s c h a t u w a t e r l o o d o t c a
But *you*, yes *you* need to run with this. You need to do it quickly, well, and you need to get it posted on slashdot. Then some other people will take over aspects. Once Hollings is gone, you pass the torch to someone else.
It will become your life's work (other than your job & family, hopefully!) for a year or two. If you do it right, you *can* succeed.
The law is not code to find bugs in. The law is not stupid. The law has judges that are (mostly) hired and trained to use their judgement to stop stupid things like this. Your idea demonstrates such an unfathomable naivety about the way Western law works that I think you just might be a troll.
Most of the time when you see people skirting the law, they're using explicitely defined loopholes and tugging them bigger. Sometimes even those people get slammed by judges for pushing things too far. That's the whole point of having judges, is because we aren't good enough to write law (code) that thinks of every case.
It sounds rather DMCA-like. I wonder if Parliament passed something DMCA-like with almost no fanfare.
No. Heritage Canada and Industry Canada have been collaborating in a very significant consultation process accross Canada. I attended their Ottawa consultation meeting, which had surprisingly strong "citizen" representation. The big american content producers were given their say, but not given a lot of credibility. Michael Geist, a U of Ottawa lawyer , was particularly good with not letting things by.
They are the Greenpeace nuts on inflatables ramming whaling ships or nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the coast of France.
I think that a lot of people posting to this have neglected the fact that the greenpeace nuts, the stallmanites, hecklers, etc., act as "Extremists" on a spectrum. There are always two most extreme sets of people in any particular debate. The farther these people are, the more extreme you can get and still appear reasonable. If you like source code availability, the Free Software movement acted as extremists, and the Open Source movement was made to appear very reasonable and thought-out. Without the FS movement, the OS movement would have looked extreme.
So yeah, they make you look bad. And they might not accomplish alot. But they're an important part of a dynamic in any debate.
another example... of a law we just don't need.... save the legislative branch for getting rid of all the stupid laws, not passing new mandates.
Uhh? No one is discussing a new law here. All the law is in place. Nothing is taking up the time of the legislative branch. This is a FTC issue - they have the mandate and the ability to impose such things. Learn how the system works before you go about criticising it.
The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...
It seems to me that he should have developed the penalties empirically. It would have been very cool if he measured the time it took to type characters with the pinky at each level, compared to the index finger at each level, and the cost to do two letters on the same hand, two letters on the same finger, two of the same letter in a row (it's not clear to me whether it's better or worse to do "tt" or "tu" for example. although a layout can't get rid of the double-letter pairs in the english language.)
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to write a program that dumped your typing and the timing between keystrokes to a file. You could even track backspaces. Then in post-processing, you could notice what mistakes were made a lot. You could probably even get lots of people to run it.
Along a similar line, the 8-hour work day, would become a 33.3333333333333 unit work-day.
There's a benefit to being in bases that have multiple factors. That's why base 60 was popular with the sumerians (?)...you can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 15,... which has its advantages. There's the (400) gradient measure for circles, but no one uses it, because having 1/3 of a circle is an obvious thing to do, and it doesn't allow it.
It just so happens that for measuring distance and weight, this doesn't seem to be such a problem. I guess they aren't quantities that are fixed in any way that's comprehensible to the normal human brain. Or maybe we're just used to it.
Otto Schily, the German Federal Minister of the Interior, announced last Monday a deal with IBM to promote, for the pubic sector, hardware and software products that support Linux.
What if they modify the code so it only compiles on a special in-house compiler?
That's a pretty interesting question. I think that the following section address that: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable.
however, it continues to exclude the distribution of the compiler and such: However, as a
special exception, the source code distributed need not include
anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
itself accompanies the executable.
My guess is that if you made trivial, obfuscating changes to the code (and then a compiler that compiled those changes), a judge would find you in violation of the first part quoted above. Whereas if you made a useful change to the language, the compiler would become part of what you were required to distribute. That's definitely not clear to me, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's hardly worth arguing, and we're not going to agree. I think if the universities in question saw fit to merge what UW has in two faculties into a single faculty, there must be a reason. I would assume that the reason is that there wasn't enough math (or nat. sci.) to justify a whole faculty. At waterloo, that is not the case -- there is enough math to justify an entire faculty.
This, in turn, implies to me that there are definitely things going on at Waterloo that are not going on elsewhere.
Thus, while I may be wrong in fact, that is the reason for my guess. And my original statement stands technically, and I think, semantically.
-Rob
Really? All I can see are "Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences" or other tag-ons. Waterloo's is exclusively mathematics. There are, of course, join degrees for applied mathematicians with physics, and that sort of thing.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Faculty+of+Ma
While they may amount to the same thing, I believe I have heard that UW has one of five "Faculty of Mathematics"s in the world. I could definitely be wrong, or a victim of propaganda.
-Rob
I call that selling out curriculum.
And yes, I would consider leaving. I'm not particularly attached to my waterloo degree. I patently refuse to work for microsoft. I have plenty of work experience, and plenty of good references. I don't need a waterloo degree to carry me, I can stand on my own merits.
-Rob
Except for the
-Rob
It affects a student indirectly even if not directly. The "spirit" of the E&CE department may have changed irrevocably today.
:-)
I don't think there's been a CS class since UW started that didn't have some screwiness. I went through the first CS130 as Java instead of Pascal. We also had things moved around with CS246, and ended up with a course that had about 5 weeks of material. It's part of the process of education, albeit one that they aren't very forthcoming about.
If you're interested in signing onto the letter that will be drafted to the CS department, drop me a line.
my user id is raewasch, and I go to the same school as you. you can figure out my email.
-Rob
I'm sorry- what do you mean one of a few in the world? What tech/science/engineering oriented school with any reputation doesn't have a mathematical science department & faculty?
That's the point. Waterloo has a Faculty of Mathematics, with many thousand students and about a dozen departments in it, not a department of mathematics with a couple dozen students.
-Rob
I'm really surprised this isn't affecting the new Computer Science faculty that's opening at Waterloo next year. I imagine it's only a matter of time until they fall too though..
Waterloo does not have, and is not getting a Comp Sci faculty. They have a mathematics faculty, one of a few in the world. That in turn had a Computer Science department, which has now become a School of Computer Science. They are also now starting to offer a Bachelors of Computer Science, although the old Bachelors of Math with a major in Computer Science will still be available. The new B.CS will be less math intensive, and more open to specialization in various areas.
-Rob
Unless, of course, it's the ONLY mandatory programming course they have?
No, of course it isn't. It's one of several. The point, and the problem, is that this is curriculum set by industry members. And not just any industry members, but a convicted monopoly, that has been known to weasle in and out of things before.
It's a compromise of academic integrity.
-Rob
And what about those students that are already here? I'm not in Computer Engineering, but Computer Science at Waterloo. I find it offensive that my school would sell out its curriculum to Microsoft. Switching schools is hardly a reasonable option for someone that's already here, though I would consider it if it happened in CS and not just CompEng.
-Rob
I'm curious about your other obligations. I'm a student, I'm heavily involved in making student life better. I'm also canadian, which puts me out for this sort of thing, but I would turn it down as well, because of other obligations. Are yours family? work? Do they go beyond that? If you're already involved in some aspect of your world outside family and work, then you're doing your part...if everyone did that, we'd be doin' just fine.
I'm glad you thought about what I had to say. I think that the idea of singling out an elected official is an excellent one - one of the best (in terms of manageability, understandability, explainability, cost, time, and effect) that I've ever seen WRT to "your rights online." It brings things into the realm of what one voter, one citizen, one consumer, can understand, while having a broader "chilling" ("warming"?
Someone needs to run with this, for the sake of US online rights. In Canada, I am monitor the "battle," and will dig in and help out if the time is necessary. The politics of the game here are very, very different, though.
Cheers,
-Rob
PS. -- I'd prefer this be by email, if you're indifferent. my address is in my last post.
I think the idea is fully documented file formats that we can edit with alternate applications.
.doc all the time. The only way to fix this is to use truly open data formats that are well supported. Nothing microsoft does fits that definition. I doubt that anything MS provides is the "best solution" for the task, if you consider licencing costs, loss of freedoms in a democracy, vendor lockin, etc.
The fact that fully documents file formats don't happen, even internally, at most companies, and will never happen externally from microsoft is enough reason to not accept this. It's feasible, but it doesn't seem to happen in the current consumer software development environment. However, if they release the source code that interprets the documents to build an object model for the document (Which is presumably what they are doing) then indeed this argument goes away.
I don't think we should legislate free software, because quite honestly if MS has the best solution for that task, we SHOULD use it.
I take offense to my government storing things in (practically, if not "officially") closed data formats. I work for a branch of the Government of Canada, and I get stuff delivered to me on my Redhat box that uses
-Rob
I agree.
...Make sure you don't slander.
I'm also a canadian. I'm also already quite involved in more local politics.
Here's what you do:
register eliminatehollings.com or somesuch.
collect some basic information, put it on the site.
get slashdot to post a link for it. set up for paypal donations. Donations should pay for the site, (bandwidth and hosting, *nothing more*) and the rest should go to the EFF, or better yet, an opponent of Hollings that there is a general agreement is better than Hollings.
Set up credit card donations. All along the way, you should be asking people (credit card people, hosting companies, etc.) for a discount or free stuff, as you're running a non-profit site to promote traditionally guarded rights in the digital era. If nothing else, you'll get the message out in an interesting way.
Post anything you can find about the amount of money Hollings has received from Hollywood, and the bills he has introduced, sponsored, supported, etc. Post anything about his voting record you can find. Use lines like "Hollings has been convinced by Big Media that their profits are more important than any of your rights!"
If you want more elaboration, reach me at r a e w a s c h a t u w a t e r l o o d o t c a
But *you*, yes *you* need to run with this. You need to do it quickly, well, and you need to get it posted on slashdot. Then some other people will take over aspects. Once Hollings is gone, you pass the torch to someone else.
It will become your life's work (other than your job & family, hopefully!) for a year or two. If you do it right, you *can* succeed.
-Rob
I dunno where slashdotters get ideas like this.
The law is not code to find bugs in. The law is not stupid. The law has judges that are (mostly) hired and trained to use their judgement to stop stupid things like this. Your idea demonstrates such an unfathomable naivety about the way Western law works that I think you just might be a troll.
Most of the time when you see people skirting the law, they're using explicitely defined loopholes and tugging them bigger. Sometimes even those people get slammed by judges for pushing things too far. That's the whole point of having judges, is because we aren't good enough to write law (code) that thinks of every case.
Sheesh.
-Rob
What exactly does this story have to do with VeriSign?
:-)
This. I'll refrain from snide comments.
-Rob
It sounds rather DMCA-like. I wonder if Parliament passed something DMCA-like with almost no fanfare.
No. Heritage Canada and Industry Canada have been collaborating in a very significant consultation process accross Canada. I attended their Ottawa consultation meeting, which had surprisingly strong "citizen" representation. The big american content producers were given their say, but not given a lot of credibility. Michael Geist, a U of Ottawa lawyer , was particularly good with not letting things by.
Canada DMCA opponents mailing list.
Digital-Copyright.ca
Thorough background brought to you by Matthew Skala, the chap that broke (IIRC) the Cyber-Patrol encryption and, again IIRC, was pursued by Mattel for DMCA violations, despite being a Canadian.
They are the Greenpeace nuts on inflatables ramming whaling ships or nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the coast of France.
I think that a lot of people posting to this have neglected the fact that the greenpeace nuts, the stallmanites, hecklers, etc., act as "Extremists" on a spectrum. There are always two most extreme sets of people in any particular debate. The farther these people are, the more extreme you can get and still appear reasonable. If you like source code availability, the Free Software movement acted as extremists, and the Open Source movement was made to appear very reasonable and thought-out. Without the FS movement, the OS movement would have looked extreme.
So yeah, they make you look bad. And they might not accomplish alot. But they're an important part of a dynamic in any debate.
-Rob
another example ... of a law we just don't need. ... save the legislative branch for getting rid of all the stupid laws, not passing new mandates.
Uhh? No one is discussing a new law here. All the law is in place. Nothing is taking up the time of the legislative branch. This is a FTC issue - they have the mandate and the ability to impose such things. Learn how the system works before you go about criticising it.
Do it, and make a Mozilla toolbar, so you can just click "report this site as b0rked."
Have Mozilla do the validation with its internal engine, report its version, etc.
-Rob
The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...
It seems to me that he should have developed the penalties empirically. It would have been very cool if he measured the time it took to type characters with the pinky at each level, compared to the index finger at each level, and the cost to do two letters on the same hand, two letters on the same finger, two of the same letter in a row (it's not clear to me whether it's better or worse to do "tt" or "tu" for example. although a layout can't get rid of the double-letter pairs in the english language.)
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to write a program that dumped your typing and the timing between keystrokes to a file. You could even track backspaces. Then in post-processing, you could notice what mistakes were made a lot. You could probably even get lots of people to run it.
Along a similar line, the 8-hour work day, would become a 33.3333333333333 unit work-day.
There's a benefit to being in bases that have multiple factors. That's why base 60 was popular with the sumerians (?)...you can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 15,... which has its advantages. There's the (400) gradient measure for circles, but no one uses it, because having 1/3 of a circle is an obvious thing to do, and it doesn't allow it.
It just so happens that for measuring distance and weight, this doesn't seem to be such a problem. I guess they aren't quantities that are fixed in any way that's comprehensible to the normal human brain. Or maybe we're just used to it.
Read: Political dissidents (now called "benign domestic terrorists" by the media) have no rights to privacy.
really?
It's too bad that one little thing makes me wonder about the truth of the whole post.
Otto Schily, the German Federal Minister of the Interior, announced last Monday a deal with IBM to promote, for the pubic sector, hardware and software products that support Linux.
teee hee. [blushes like schoolgirl]
Just how big of a company was it?
:-)
I always thought that logo looked like it had been designed with the aid of inebriation.
Negative. Factoring reduces to RSAP (The RSA Problem). And RSAP reduces to factoring. They are computationally equivalent.
What if they modify the code so it only compiles on a special in-house compiler?
That's a pretty interesting question. I think that the following section address that:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
however, it continues to exclude the distribution of the compiler and such:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
My guess is that if you made trivial, obfuscating changes to the code (and then a compiler that compiled those changes), a judge would find you in violation of the first part quoted above. Whereas if you made a useful change to the language, the compiler would become part of what you were required to distribute. That's definitely not clear to me, though.
IANAL, but I might be someday...