You can, but you'd be thanking the wrong person. Since the DMCA passed unanimously in the Senate, the only thing Clinton could have done was issue a token veto that wouldn't have any effect on reality. If you want to thank the correct people, you should thank the senators, both Republican and Democrat, that voted for it, as well as the contributors that paid for those votes.
Yeah, my numbers were just an example to show that the total number of days doesn't change when sick and vacation time get combined. I certainly wasn't trying to imply that we don't still get shafted with time off.
I remember in my theoretical computer science class I once got a 17/100 on a test. I thought, "oh, man, I'm on my way out." Then as I looked around the room and asked people what they got... 7, 5, 12, 8, 3... even the student that normally aced everything got a 21. That's when I laughed. Even the instructor said, "I guess I made that test a little too hard!", as he smiled too.
That's even worse than the first test of the semester in the first theory class I had my sophomore year. I got something like a 37, which turned out to be above the class average, which was around 30. The difference is that the professor didn't say anything about the test being too hard, since he's a sadistic asshole when it comes to the undergrad students.
If you think Americans work too hard, try working in Japan or China sometime. Ask your employer for 2 weeks off in most Japan companies and you'll get 52 weeks off instead.
Does that mean we should all be drinking mercury? After all, if you think mercury is toxic, you should try arsenic, then you'll be glad you only have to drink mercury.
At a lot of places if you get sick, your sick days come out of your vacation time.
To clarify this, many companies combine sick time and vacation time so that you can use your time off however you need to. It's a positive for people that rarely get sick, because they get a few more days of vacation, but it's a big problem for people more prone to illness. It also tends to create the mindset of not wanting to stay home when you're sick because you're effectively losing vacation time. You do get the same number of days off total, though; instead of 15 vacation days and 5 sick days, you'd just get 20 days off.
Then there's those of us who already have max karma. If I make a joke, I'd rather get +5 Funny. If someone mods one of my jokes Informative, I can't help but think that the moderator is the real joke.
What net neutrality does mean is that the ISPs cannot take that kilobyte of data, and charge you more or less depending on some arbitrary label they decide to put on that data (VoIP, high-def streaming video, P2P...).
That isn't what net neutrality means either. What it does mean is that ISP's cannot delay or charge more for data depending on source or destination. It's perfectly valid to prioritize VoIP packets over bittorrent packets, since VoIP is so much more sensitive to delays than bittorent, but the ISP is not allowed arbitrarily delay VoIP packets to everyone except their own service or the service of some other company that's paying them extra to be a "preferred" service provider.
the patent in and of itself proudly claims 100% ownership over the code in question, which is the antithesis of openness under any standard.
Copyright would be the claim of 100% ownership over the code. A patent is even less open, since you aren't even allowed to re-implement the software, even if you write it entirely yourself without ever seeing any of the source code of the original implementation.
In the UK you are not allowed to ride a bike on the pavement, so why should you be allowed an even more dangerous electric scooter or Segway?
Could you clarify this a bit for the Americans in the group? Over here, "pavement" usually refers to the surface itself, not whether it's a road, walkway, or even a parking lot, and for some reason I doubt that in the UK you're only allowed to ride a bicycle on grass.
Is it a really serious problem that there aren't enough minorities shooting other people in video games? And are there really teenagers that are going to think "every person that I shoot in this game is white, so anybody in the real world that isn't white must be inferior"? I'd like to think that nobody here will claim that discrimination isn't a serious problem in society, but I somehow doubt that having more minorities in video games is all that's needed to change anyone's attitudes.
One teacher I know is a black belt and even he says that the last thing he would ever do is use some martial arts in the class room - because a child slapping you in the face is not a life threatening situation, and no reasonable person would believe that a teacher breaking a student's bones is justified.
Of course, this is in a relatively safe country. In the United States, where many students own guns and could easily slaughter their classmates, things may be different.
I'm going to call bullshit. What grades does this teacher teach? I GUARANTEE you that if a high school jock threw a punch at that teacher or tried to kick him in the crotch he would INSTINCTIVELY use a martial arts block to defend himself. It becomes part of your muscle memory.
Judging by the "breaking a student's bones" part, I would assume he was referring back to the things that a teacher shouldn't do (punch, kick, etc.), not blocking an attack and then holding or pinning the student.
And guns are not as dangerous as you think. You could do more damage faster with an aluminum baseball bat in a classroom.
A student assaulting a teacher is illegal. The teacher defending themself is legal. This has been ruled on many places. I know that doesn't stop lawsuits from happening, but it sure as hell would stop them from succeeding most of the time.
You'd think so, but you'd be surprised what can succeed in a civil lawsuit. And as everyone here at Slashdot is well aware, a lawsuit doesn't need to be even remotely legitimate in order to cost too much money for the defendant to bother fighting.
The radio station I listen to started doing ads for Bing, and one of the guys doing the ad makes a couple dirty comments about the name. Of course the guy is well-known for making dirty comments, but it's still funny to hear them during a paid ad.
Sure, the computer could handle that kind of environment, but most of the people would probably find it very difficult to work with that much noise around them.
Hundreds of years ago, black slaves were released due to the civil war.
Which country's civil war was that? The first example of a civil war where slavery was a major issue that comes to my mind is the one in the United States, but that was only 150 years ago.
Or foundational. A knowledge of how computers work at the assembler level will improve performance when they advance to more modern tools.
In your example, though, it's technology that is still being used, even if it isn't being used directly by most programmers. I definitely agree that computer science students should have at least one semester of computer architecture (for me, it was a separate class from my Intel Assembly class). I wouldn't expect every CS student to be an expert in Assembly, but they should come out of the program knowing the basic concepts. If for some bizarre reason processors ever start running Java directly, I could see not teaching Assembly anymore, but details that a programmer doesn't use in their day-to-day work is much different than something like vacuum tubes that for all practical purposes don't even exist anymore.
Or maybe there won't be a massive revolution in input methods in the next few hundred years, so even with touch screens, you're still entering text using small squares with letters on them. The only replacement I can think of would be a wire sticking into your brain, since even flawless voice recognition wouldn't work too well in rooms with multiple people working at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
You can thank Bill Clinton for the DMCA.
You can, but you'd be thanking the wrong person. Since the DMCA passed unanimously in the Senate, the only thing Clinton could have done was issue a token veto that wouldn't have any effect on reality. If you want to thank the correct people, you should thank the senators, both Republican and Democrat, that voted for it, as well as the contributors that paid for those votes.
Yeah, my numbers were just an example to show that the total number of days doesn't change when sick and vacation time get combined. I certainly wasn't trying to imply that we don't still get shafted with time off.
I remember in my theoretical computer science class I once got a 17/100 on a test. I thought, "oh, man, I'm on my way out." Then as I looked around the room and asked people what they got... 7, 5, 12, 8, 3... even the student that normally aced everything got a 21. That's when I laughed. Even the instructor said, "I guess I made that test a little too hard!", as he smiled too.
That's even worse than the first test of the semester in the first theory class I had my sophomore year. I got something like a 37, which turned out to be above the class average, which was around 30. The difference is that the professor didn't say anything about the test being too hard, since he's a sadistic asshole when it comes to the undergrad students.
If you think Americans work too hard, try working in Japan or China sometime. Ask your employer for 2 weeks off in most Japan companies and you'll get 52 weeks off instead.
Does that mean we should all be drinking mercury? After all, if you think mercury is toxic, you should try arsenic, then you'll be glad you only have to drink mercury.
At a lot of places if you get sick, your sick days come out of your vacation time.
To clarify this, many companies combine sick time and vacation time so that you can use your time off however you need to. It's a positive for people that rarely get sick, because they get a few more days of vacation, but it's a big problem for people more prone to illness. It also tends to create the mindset of not wanting to stay home when you're sick because you're effectively losing vacation time. You do get the same number of days off total, though; instead of 15 vacation days and 5 sick days, you'd just get 20 days off.
It's not the shittiness that's xkcd's real problem, it's the general smugness and smart-arsed nature of a lot of it.
Being smug and smart-assed is the real problem? And here I thought it was the whole point.
Then there's those of us who already have max karma. If I make a joke, I'd rather get +5 Funny. If someone mods one of my jokes Informative, I can't help but think that the moderator is the real joke.
What net neutrality does mean is that the ISPs cannot take that kilobyte of data, and charge you more or less depending on some arbitrary label they decide to put on that data (VoIP, high-def streaming video, P2P...).
That isn't what net neutrality means either. What it does mean is that ISP's cannot delay or charge more for data depending on source or destination. It's perfectly valid to prioritize VoIP packets over bittorrent packets, since VoIP is so much more sensitive to delays than bittorent, but the ISP is not allowed arbitrarily delay VoIP packets to everyone except their own service or the service of some other company that's paying them extra to be a "preferred" service provider.
Not quite. The correct car analogy would be:
You drive up onto a Ford lot in your Subaru and then when you hand the salesman money, he takes it and says "Have a nice day."
Worse, choosing a name that goes from "The Shack" to "The Suck" so smoothly(and appropriately) just seems like a terrible plan...
I think going to "The Shaft" is an easier move.
the patent in and of itself proudly claims 100% ownership over the code in question, which is the antithesis of openness under any standard.
Copyright would be the claim of 100% ownership over the code. A patent is even less open, since you aren't even allowed to re-implement the software, even if you write it entirely yourself without ever seeing any of the source code of the original implementation.
In the UK you are not allowed to ride a bike on the pavement, so why should you be allowed an even more dangerous electric scooter or Segway?
Could you clarify this a bit for the Americans in the group? Over here, "pavement" usually refers to the surface itself, not whether it's a road, walkway, or even a parking lot, and for some reason I doubt that in the UK you're only allowed to ride a bicycle on grass.
Is it a really serious problem that there aren't enough minorities shooting other people in video games? And are there really teenagers that are going to think "every person that I shoot in this game is white, so anybody in the real world that isn't white must be inferior"? I'd like to think that nobody here will claim that discrimination isn't a serious problem in society, but I somehow doubt that having more minorities in video games is all that's needed to change anyone's attitudes.
Why is it you mainly hear about all this supposed dissatisfaction all over the world with their supposedly horrible health care from Fox news
Fixed that for ya.
One teacher I know is a black belt and even he says that the last thing he would ever do is use some martial arts in the class room - because a child slapping you in the face is not a life threatening situation, and no reasonable person would believe that a teacher breaking a student's bones is justified.
Of course, this is in a relatively safe country. In the United States, where many students own guns and could easily slaughter their classmates, things may be different.
I'm going to call bullshit. What grades does this teacher teach? I GUARANTEE you that if a high school jock threw a punch at that teacher or tried to kick him in the crotch he would INSTINCTIVELY use a martial arts block to defend himself. It becomes part of your muscle memory.
Judging by the "breaking a student's bones" part, I would assume he was referring back to the things that a teacher shouldn't do (punch, kick, etc.), not blocking an attack and then holding or pinning the student.
And guns are not as dangerous as you think. You could do more damage faster with an aluminum baseball bat in a classroom.
Sure, if you discount that whole range thing.
A student assaulting a teacher is illegal. The teacher defending themself is legal. This has been ruled on many places. I know that doesn't stop lawsuits from happening, but it sure as hell would stop them from succeeding most of the time.
You'd think so, but you'd be surprised what can succeed in a civil lawsuit. And as everyone here at Slashdot is well aware, a lawsuit doesn't need to be even remotely legitimate in order to cost too much money for the defendant to bother fighting.
Obligatory text editor comparison
He knocked up... the guy that fixes the copier.
I really hope that you live somewhere where "knocked up" means something other than it does in American English.
Wait, there's a file-sharing "industry" now?
The radio station I listen to started doing ads for Bing, and one of the guys doing the ad makes a couple dirty comments about the name. Of course the guy is well-known for making dirty comments, but it's still funny to hear them during a paid ad.
Sure, the computer could handle that kind of environment, but most of the people would probably find it very difficult to work with that much noise around them.
Here's another dictionary link you might want to check out
Hundreds of years ago, black slaves were released due to the civil war.
Which country's civil war was that? The first example of a civil war where slavery was a major issue that comes to my mind is the one in the United States, but that was only 150 years ago.
Or foundational. A knowledge of how computers work at the assembler level will improve performance when they advance to more modern tools.
In your example, though, it's technology that is still being used, even if it isn't being used directly by most programmers. I definitely agree that computer science students should have at least one semester of computer architecture (for me, it was a separate class from my Intel Assembly class). I wouldn't expect every CS student to be an expert in Assembly, but they should come out of the program knowing the basic concepts. If for some bizarre reason processors ever start running Java directly, I could see not teaching Assembly anymore, but details that a programmer doesn't use in their day-to-day work is much different than something like vacuum tubes that for all practical purposes don't even exist anymore.
Or maybe there won't be a massive revolution in input methods in the next few hundred years, so even with touch screens, you're still entering text using small squares with letters on them. The only replacement I can think of would be a wire sticking into your brain, since even flawless voice recognition wouldn't work too well in rooms with multiple people working at the same time.