The first three years I was in high school, the school had this ridiculous program going on where they issued every student an iBook. Teachers tried to make us use them, but seriously, how useful is a laptop in high school math? Admittedly, it was nice for language and social studies classes to have something to type/browse Wikipedia on, but the hassle of carrying them around, dealing with the constant breakage, and etc. far outweighed the benefits to the students. And when you look at the $2 mil that the school district spent on the program, the whole thing just seemed like a really bad joke.
Not exactly. The reflected intensity follows the inverse square law. If, however, you're looking directly into a light source (or a direct reflection of a light source), intensity remains constant at any distance: only the apparent size of the light source changes.
Right, and I trust the ability of my fellow humans to program a machine that can do precise calculations at high speeds to perform this kind of maneuver a lot more than I would trust them to guestimate those calculations and attempt it themselves...
I believe your problem is that you don't understand the concept of "cognitive dissonance" in general. I'll just put aside for now the fact that "software should be free" and "I should get paid to work on that free software for you" don't have to conflict at all. Cognitive dissonance is a feeling you experience when you realize that you hold two contradictory views; it is not some kind of mental condition that makes you hold contradictory views. You seem to have the whole cause and effect thing a little mixed up there...
You're kind of missing the point. Obviously in the real world you're not going to code a linked list from scratch. In school, however, you're there specifically to learn how to do things like coding a linked list from scratch. That's why "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" are two very separate things. Sharing code back and forth between willing parties is perfectly reasonable and common in real life. In academia it's forbidden because you're supposed to be learning how to do things on your own.
Did you even read the press release? The parent company is going to have their developers working on it still after the code is released. I'm guessing you also haven't taken a look at the list of recent productions this editor has been used for, if you're under the impression that they "consider the tool to be dead."
Similar case here. In the fourth grade on the state standardized tests I scored in the 99th percentile for language, but only the 70th for math. Fast-forward to high school, and my SAT math score was almost as high as reading and writing (within 50 points, iirc). Now I'm working on a CS degree, and I'm still a little better with language than math, but I generally find math more enjoyable...
When I left High School, I'd built up almost exactly two years worth of college credit from AP and dual enrollment classes (would have been over 2 years worth, if they hadn't lost one of my AP tests). Now I'm in my second year at University, and with only four classes a semester I'll still be set up to graduate before the end of my senior year, with a couple of graduate credits to boot. Sure, I could have accomplished the same thing by graduating two years early and going to a CC, but I would have had to pay for (or find scholarships for) that, while my high school paid for my AP tests and dual enrollment tuition. Not to mention the fact that going straight to a 4-year university got me a nice little bunch of scholarships...
I like to think that no one out there will be quite stupid enough to confuse the availability of paid in-memory updates with the availability of free normal updates. And if they are, are we really that concerned about whether or not they're using Linux?
Once again, not even remotely the same. The limitations of a Segway are the inherent limitations of the hardware and assembly. The iPad, on the other hand, has limitations deliberately built into it to forbid operation that should be perfectly reasonable given the device's composition.
If Apple were just trying to build a device that was convenient for the user, they're welcome to include their "friendly" locked-down OS with exclusive app store and etc. When they prohibit any alternative software from competing, however, they've gone well beyond the scope of giving the users what they want. No one wants to have any choice over the software their device runs taken away. At very most they're apathetic, but the only party that would suffer from the device accepting software updates other than Apple's own is Apple.
No, it's nothing like saying that the Segway is a major step backward because it can't fly, because a Segway is very clearly incapable of flight. It is, however, fully capable of roving about as a user commands it, and it does that to the fullest extent the user asks it too.
The iPad, on the other hand, is a general-purpose computing device, and a reasonably powerful one at that. It has a general purpose processor, a significant amount of memory, and it's perfectly capable of loading and running user-supplied code. The only reason you can't do anything with it that you could do with a similarly powerful laptop (more, really, given the multi-touch display capabilities) is because of Apple's arbitrary software restrictions. To follow your analogy (which is really flawed from the beginning), the iPad is more like a jet aircraft with controls that only allow you to taxi back and forth on the ground. And that is most certainly a step backwards.
Yes, and of course those dirty rotten users need to be kept on a short leash, because if they weren't --- oh noes! --- it would be more difficult for app developers to make money. Clearly, the control of a device should go to those who stand to profit from it; not those who, you know, own the device in question.;
Because a book can be cut up, scanned, and OCR'd as most school disability services departments will do for free. Then it's just a matter of using your choice of screen reader. The proprietary DRM that the kindle uses, on the other hand, allows you no such access to data that you've ostensibly purchased, despite the fact that it would be far easier for them to provide an accessible system than traditional books.
Your analogy is pretty heavily flawed. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about a blind person going through school and receiving an education. Reading is an activity that we have centuries of experience in making accessible, and with ebooks it could be as simple as including a non-braindead text-to-speech system in your ebook reader.
I don't know about high school, but at both colleges my (blind) girlfriend has been to, the standard is that the student buys the paper textbook, and then the school's disability services department cuts the book up and scans and OCRs it so that they can view the book with a screen-reader. It's just as cheap as it is for all the other students, and they get the ability to resell the book just like everyone else (in fact, used book buyers apparently prefer books that have been rebound the way disability services at her current school does it).
Of course, ebooks theoretically improve this whole situation a lot by giving you an already (perfectly) digitized copy of the text. In practice, the DRM that all the publishing companies are so fond of turn what could be a huge win for accessibility into a nightmare.
Why stop at 10? Since we're pulling numbers out of the air anyways, why not take a conservative estimate of 100 for the ratio of PHP to C++ execution, so they could run the whole thing on just 250 servers!
The industry is moving to BSD-style licenses because they're just now finding out that they can and will be sued if they blatantly violate the terms of the licenses on other persons' code? Is this seriously a revelation to anyone, and do you honestly believe that it's changing anything? I'd really like to see some backing to the statement "The GPL is dead," because last I checked there was a pretty immensely large body of GPL code still in use, and there's no indication of any significant portion of it fading into obscurity because ZOMG IT'S UNDER TEH EVIL GPL.
Reading the article, you'd think the guy was some deranged tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist devilishly enlisting the school's resources to justify his own crackpot theories, not just some guy using the school's computers to help a scientific organization crunch data. Did he do something wrong? Quite possibly. There's no way he could possibly have committed an offense worse than using some variation of the phrase "alien seeking" that many times in a serious news article.
So your definition of "extremist nut," then, is someone who thinks they should actually be allowed to exercise the rights that the license is expressly designed to give them. I fail to see how there's anything extremist about requiring that you not distribute software under the license if the hardware directly prevents the users from using the software in a manner that the license explicitly says they can...
Correlation is not "well beyond correlation != causation," it's a pretty basic principle of statistics. Correlation can certainly suggest causation, but without a controlled experiment taking place that's all it can do. Otherwise, both correlated variables could easily be responding to a third, unconsidered variable.
For instance, suppose the areas in which lithium is prescribed most frequently have the lowest levels of suicide, because of the number of patients being successfully treated. As a consequence of that much lithium being prescribed, more of it would end up in the water supply when discarded improperly and so on.
I'm graduating this year, and I've got a heap of both AP and dual enrollment credit going into university. The trick to dual enrollment is, if you're dual enrolling a class that's also offered as an AP at your high school, admissions folk aren't going to like it, because the AP courses are generally going to be harder, and if nothing else, they at least know how hard they are, whereas they know nothing about your local community college. I had to do an awful lot of work to get my 5 in BC calculus junior year, but senior year I'm dual enrolling Calc III (BC, equivalent to Calc II, is as high as AP will take you) and I'm passing no problem with a high 'A': haven't done a shred of homework, spent maybe a half hour outside class studying all semester. So, no, dual enrollment credits won't carry the same weight for admissions decisions. They may award the same credit, but you have to get in for that to count;)
Slashdot Mirror
The first three years I was in high school, the school had this ridiculous program going on where they issued every student an iBook. Teachers tried to make us use them, but seriously, how useful is a laptop in high school math? Admittedly, it was nice for language and social studies classes to have something to type/browse Wikipedia on, but the hassle of carrying them around, dealing with the constant breakage, and etc. far outweighed the benefits to the students. And when you look at the $2 mil that the school district spent on the program, the whole thing just seemed like a really bad joke.
Not exactly. The reflected intensity follows the inverse square law. If, however, you're looking directly into a light source (or a direct reflection of a light source), intensity remains constant at any distance: only the apparent size of the light source changes.
Right, and I trust the ability of my fellow humans to program a machine that can do precise calculations at high speeds to perform this kind of maneuver a lot more than I would trust them to guestimate those calculations and attempt it themselves...
I believe your problem is that you don't understand the concept of "cognitive dissonance" in general. I'll just put aside for now the fact that "software should be free" and "I should get paid to work on that free software for you" don't have to conflict at all. Cognitive dissonance is a feeling you experience when you realize that you hold two contradictory views; it is not some kind of mental condition that makes you hold contradictory views. You seem to have the whole cause and effect thing a little mixed up there...
You're kind of missing the point. Obviously in the real world you're not going to code a linked list from scratch. In school, however, you're there specifically to learn how to do things like coding a linked list from scratch. That's why "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement" are two very separate things. Sharing code back and forth between willing parties is perfectly reasonable and common in real life. In academia it's forbidden because you're supposed to be learning how to do things on your own.
Did you even read the press release? The parent company is going to have their developers working on it still after the code is released. I'm guessing you also haven't taken a look at the list of recent productions this editor has been used for, if you're under the impression that they "consider the tool to be dead."
I don't think privacy is the only reason not to run your business code in a browser...
Similar case here. In the fourth grade on the state standardized tests I scored in the 99th percentile for language, but only the 70th for math. Fast-forward to high school, and my SAT math score was almost as high as reading and writing (within 50 points, iirc). Now I'm working on a CS degree, and I'm still a little better with language than math, but I generally find math more enjoyable...
When I left High School, I'd built up almost exactly two years worth of college credit from AP and dual enrollment classes (would have been over 2 years worth, if they hadn't lost one of my AP tests). Now I'm in my second year at University, and with only four classes a semester I'll still be set up to graduate before the end of my senior year, with a couple of graduate credits to boot. Sure, I could have accomplished the same thing by graduating two years early and going to a CC, but I would have had to pay for (or find scholarships for) that, while my high school paid for my AP tests and dual enrollment tuition. Not to mention the fact that going straight to a 4-year university got me a nice little bunch of scholarships...
I like to think that no one out there will be quite stupid enough to confuse the availability of paid in-memory updates with the availability of free normal updates. And if they are, are we really that concerned about whether or not they're using Linux?
Once again, not even remotely the same. The limitations of a Segway are the inherent limitations of the hardware and assembly. The iPad, on the other hand, has limitations deliberately built into it to forbid operation that should be perfectly reasonable given the device's composition. If Apple were just trying to build a device that was convenient for the user, they're welcome to include their "friendly" locked-down OS with exclusive app store and etc. When they prohibit any alternative software from competing, however, they've gone well beyond the scope of giving the users what they want. No one wants to have any choice over the software their device runs taken away. At very most they're apathetic, but the only party that would suffer from the device accepting software updates other than Apple's own is Apple.
No, it's nothing like saying that the Segway is a major step backward because it can't fly, because a Segway is very clearly incapable of flight. It is, however, fully capable of roving about as a user commands it, and it does that to the fullest extent the user asks it too. The iPad, on the other hand, is a general-purpose computing device, and a reasonably powerful one at that. It has a general purpose processor, a significant amount of memory, and it's perfectly capable of loading and running user-supplied code. The only reason you can't do anything with it that you could do with a similarly powerful laptop (more, really, given the multi-touch display capabilities) is because of Apple's arbitrary software restrictions. To follow your analogy (which is really flawed from the beginning), the iPad is more like a jet aircraft with controls that only allow you to taxi back and forth on the ground. And that is most certainly a step backwards.
How wonderful! For only $99, I can purchase the privilege of running my own code on my own hardware? Where can I sign up for one?
Yes, and of course those dirty rotten users need to be kept on a short leash, because if they weren't --- oh noes! --- it would be more difficult for app developers to make money. Clearly, the control of a device should go to those who stand to profit from it; not those who, you know, own the device in question.;
Because a book can be cut up, scanned, and OCR'd as most school disability services departments will do for free. Then it's just a matter of using your choice of screen reader. The proprietary DRM that the kindle uses, on the other hand, allows you no such access to data that you've ostensibly purchased, despite the fact that it would be far easier for them to provide an accessible system than traditional books.
Your analogy is pretty heavily flawed. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about a blind person going through school and receiving an education. Reading is an activity that we have centuries of experience in making accessible, and with ebooks it could be as simple as including a non-braindead text-to-speech system in your ebook reader.
I don't know about high school, but at both colleges my (blind) girlfriend has been to, the standard is that the student buys the paper textbook, and then the school's disability services department cuts the book up and scans and OCRs it so that they can view the book with a screen-reader. It's just as cheap as it is for all the other students, and they get the ability to resell the book just like everyone else (in fact, used book buyers apparently prefer books that have been rebound the way disability services at her current school does it). Of course, ebooks theoretically improve this whole situation a lot by giving you an already (perfectly) digitized copy of the text. In practice, the DRM that all the publishing companies are so fond of turn what could be a huge win for accessibility into a nightmare.
Why stop at 10? Since we're pulling numbers out of the air anyways, why not take a conservative estimate of 100 for the ratio of PHP to C++ execution, so they could run the whole thing on just 250 servers!
The industry is moving to BSD-style licenses because they're just now finding out that they can and will be sued if they blatantly violate the terms of the licenses on other persons' code? Is this seriously a revelation to anyone, and do you honestly believe that it's changing anything? I'd really like to see some backing to the statement "The GPL is dead," because last I checked there was a pretty immensely large body of GPL code still in use, and there's no indication of any significant portion of it fading into obscurity because ZOMG IT'S UNDER TEH EVIL GPL.
Reading the article, you'd think the guy was some deranged tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist devilishly enlisting the school's resources to justify his own crackpot theories, not just some guy using the school's computers to help a scientific organization crunch data. Did he do something wrong? Quite possibly. There's no way he could possibly have committed an offense worse than using some variation of the phrase "alien seeking" that many times in a serious news article.
Now my phone can give me two small objects to misplace.
So your definition of "extremist nut," then, is someone who thinks they should actually be allowed to exercise the rights that the license is expressly designed to give them. I fail to see how there's anything extremist about requiring that you not distribute software under the license if the hardware directly prevents the users from using the software in a manner that the license explicitly says they can...
So what? Hippos are responsible for fewer human deaths than heart disease, but we don't take action against hippopotamuses.
See? I can make false analogies too.
Correlation is not "well beyond correlation != causation," it's a pretty basic principle of statistics. Correlation can certainly suggest causation, but without a controlled experiment taking place that's all it can do. Otherwise, both correlated variables could easily be responding to a third, unconsidered variable. For instance, suppose the areas in which lithium is prescribed most frequently have the lowest levels of suicide, because of the number of patients being successfully treated. As a consequence of that much lithium being prescribed, more of it would end up in the water supply when discarded improperly and so on.
I'm graduating this year, and I've got a heap of both AP and dual enrollment credit going into university. The trick to dual enrollment is, if you're dual enrolling a class that's also offered as an AP at your high school, admissions folk aren't going to like it, because the AP courses are generally going to be harder, and if nothing else, they at least know how hard they are, whereas they know nothing about your local community college. I had to do an awful lot of work to get my 5 in BC calculus junior year, but senior year I'm dual enrolling Calc III (BC, equivalent to Calc II, is as high as AP will take you) and I'm passing no problem with a high 'A': haven't done a shred of homework, spent maybe a half hour outside class studying all semester. So, no, dual enrollment credits won't carry the same weight for admissions decisions. They may award the same credit, but you have to get in for that to count ;)