Given that the airport is in West Virginia, it seems at least more probable than usual that the woman may have come into contact with explosives from living near or visiting a mine.
Just think what this device could do for politics!
Morbo: "Morbo demands an answer to the following question. If you saw a delicious candy in the hands of a small child. Would you seize and consume it?"
John Jackson: "Unthinkable."
Jack Johnson: "I wouldn't think of it."
Morbo: "What about you, Mr. Nixon? I remind you that you are under a truth-o-scope."
Nixon [sweating]: "The question is vague. You don't say what kind of candy and whether anyone is watching. And anyway I certainly wouldn't harm the child."
I'm dead serious -- I'm not implying that it will get used, but there's certainly enough talent out there that an open-source video disc specification could be authored. Just as some DVD player manufacturers began to support Divx video playback in their machines, it might get included and gain some mindshare.
Really, why not? There's already an open video codec (Theora) and people around here seem to have a pretty good idea of what they want (no DRM, as high-definition as possible).
About two years ago, I tried to induce this sleeping pattern. I made it about 36 hours before crashing, having basically not slept at all in that length of time. I slept for 14 hours after that. My understanding is that it takes another few days to get past that, but there's a chance you'll begin hallucinating. Choose carefully, and, most importantly, make sure that you don't have to do anything -- or drive anywhere -- for about a week after you start.
Here's an overview of the topics I'm covering this semester in an OSS course I'm co-teaching. The audience is undergrads at a major university...
Note that we were also trying to improve the general technical literacy of some of the CS students.
1) Open-source Projects -- History, Present, and Future 2) Unix Philosophy -- ESR's "Art of Unix Programming" was incredibly useful here 3) Using the Unix Toolchain 4) Using the classic text editors (Vim/Emacs) 5) Learning Python / Programmatically Manipulating Text 6) Source Control Management Systems 7) Bug-tracking 8) Open-source team communication 9) Licensing your OSS (the intention is to have a working project completed by the class in Python by this point)
Right now we've just passed #4 and have settled on a simple project (a Web app) that the class can work together on in Python. That way, we can use it to demonstrate how to use the tools we talk about in topics 5-9.
The ADV people did two panels at Otakon this year. I'm not sure why they didn't have a large booth in the industry section, but they were definitely not ignoring the convention.
Most of the stuff they showed at their first panel was, as they mentioned, available on their Bittorrent pilot program.
Not to mention that this Slashdot story is a dupe and ADV has been doing this for months now.
You have to remember -- when considering education for the Chinese people, the Communist Party has been a godsend. Under the communist government literacy has increased over a thousand percent.
How exactly can literacy increase by "over a thousand percent?" Did they give up on teaching math?
Chinese culture, as the father of all East Asian cultures...
Sounds to me like you've bought into Chinese authoritarian propaganda. Many groups of people think education is important -- and in the United States, you are free to say what you want in the classroom. Clearly, any government that can raise people to believe such jingoistic, generalizing statements is a threat to the nations around it and to the rights of its citizens.
The author of this article explicitly recommends *not* installing critical Windows 2000 security updates or Service Packs at all. Somehow, he claims, this will improve speed while reducing bloat.
While that could be (questionably) true, the viruses he's likely to pick up after about 15 minutes on the Internet will likely decrease his laptop's speed by a far more significant amount...
Is it even responsible for Slashdot to post such an unprofessional article?
Even so, my school (Duke University) has had tremendous success by making it clear that all students get an outbound data allotment of 5GB/day and leaving it up to students to control their own use.
If you go over the limit, you get a warning email. Get a few warning emails, and you get your outbound connection throttled or even cut off for the remainder of the semester. Works great, keeps the geeks happy, and is simple for people to understand.
From the article:
In the UK, Sasser forced staff at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to return to manual map reading because computer systems were made unusable by the worm.
Check-in for some British Airways flights was also delayed thanks to Sasser.
Around the world, the Australian Railcorp trains stopped running because computer problems caused by Sasser made it impossible for drivers to talk to signalmen.
In Taiwan, more than 400 branches of the post office were forced to use pen and paper because Sasser crashed desktop PCs.
These are not mere annoyances to "soulless" corporations (which, by the way, employ lots of real people -- perhaps even yourself!). The failure of the UK Coast Guard's system or the train dispatching system in Australia could have easily killed people.
I would say that the Danger Hiptop, otherwise known in the US as the T-Mobile Sidekick, is an excellent cell phone for the deaf. I tried to get my deaf 80-year-old grandmother to learn how to use it last year, but she was just too old.
In fact, you can even buy a plan from T-Mobile that has no voice minutes built in -- only data.
This court ruling makes hardly any sense at all in the larger context of software development. Open-source, GPL p2p software like eMule seems to be just as liable under this ruling as any commercial entity -- but there is no "owner" of the program and, moreover, it is still quite likely that programming languages are considered protected speech under the First Amendment.
So let's make a case study of eMule. If someone -- not an original eMule developer -- posts a message linking to the eMule source, saying "you can share files for free on this network, potentially including copyrighted material," are they now liable? It hardly seems that they should be, and yet Grokster's promotional campaign hardly extended past this level.
More dangerously, can this argument be extended to other areas of traditionally protected speech, like, for instance, security researchers trading information and exploits that could potentially be used to cause damage to computer systems?
Not to mention that the roofs of the White House and the Executive Office Buildings have been discreetly covered with brown in Photoshop.
What makes this so ridiculous is that DC gift shops almost certainly sell higher-resolution flyover posters of these same locations -- I saw one in a public restroom recently!
Not true. I have 3 USB CueCats. I believe they were introduced a little later after they realized what a horrendously bad idea it was asking people to unplug their mouse or keyboard to free up a PS2 port!
Anyway, they show up under XP as a standard "Human Input Device," like a USB keyboard. I imagine they would work on Macs too.
ATTENTION ALL!
A collaboration between the might of Fark and Something Awful is pushing for a write-in video to get to #1...and what better song than Whip It, by the almighty Devo! So what the hell are you waiting for? It's easy and takes only a few minutes. Go to TRL's online voting thing and go to the write-in portion, and vote for Whip It by Devo. That's it! If you can, call in to MTV to request it over the phone (the number and info is in the Something Awful thread linked above), as to phone votes count for more. Perhaps if the whole anti-MTV internet community works together, we call all make history!
There are a hundred emails in my inbox right now. Most of them are communications from my various classes, formal inquiries, mailing lists, and invoices.
All of these things are very important. I would say that email is meant for more permanent, longer purposes. I wouldn't want to get any of these messages over IM or SMS. I have had delays of up to 20 minutes receiving SMS messages, as well. Why on earth would I want to use a phonen keypad to type a letter?
Instant Messenger also has its place, but not for this kind of deliberate correspondence. Not to mention that I can't receive IMs when my home computer isn't turned on!
One thing that hasn't been pointed out much is that it will cost Russia virtually nothing to enforce Kyoto.
Basically, the treaty stipulates that pollution levels cannot rise above their level about fifteen years ago.
Fifteen years ago, Russia was still Soviet and had a lot more heavy industry. They were a massive polluter. These days, they don't have as much industry anyway, so they won't have to institute controls to meet targets.
This makes me seriously concerned for a number of reasons.
First, these computer problems were blamed on the Internet connection used to access the registered-voter database. No voting system, even if it uses a VPN, should be connected to the Internet. If remote data is necessary, do it over a telephone connection. That's worked for credit card companies for many, many years.
Second, the article references the general apathy of workers running the poll stations. It seems that democracy may end in this country, or at least in Florida, from this more than from any of our elected leaders.
Third, and most speculatively, what happens if a more serious error occurs on Election Day and a large portion of ballots get lost? Four years ago, we could go back and read hanging chads. What will the courts decide this year if an entire state's ballots go missing?
By all accounts, this election could be more dangerous to the future of the nation than 2000.
It is interesting to note that Gordon Cooper alleged in a book he wrote a few years ago, "Leap of Faith," that he encountered 'flying saucers' landing and flying while working as a military test pilot in the early 1950s, and that footage he had taken of these saucers was confiscated from him.
I don't know anything else. Would someone else care to comment on this?
First, the US Senate voted *unanimously* not to sign the Kyoto Protocol, as it was recognized that it would be devastating to the economy. The only thing that Bush did differently than Clinton was actually admit that it was a lost cause.
Second, most if not all signatory countries have not implemented the reforms required by Kyoto. This is because a certain number of nations (a "trigger" number) must ratify the treaty before it becomes binding. So Europe and other countries can go on complaining about the US not signing, while at the same time not having any plans themselves to implement the treaty.
Third, it seems unlikely that Russia will sign. This would be the "trigger" that brings the protocols into effect, and would create an economic environment for Europe making it much harder to compete with the (clearly non-ratifying) US.
To put it shortly, the problem is not Bush but rather the US Congress. You know, those people who actually *make* the laws? To change the system, change them.
Nothing can make education better than getting rid of it can. Hands on experience will always be superior. Not books.
I'm a history/computer science double major. The problem is that history, as a discipline, is about books, not "hands-on experience." There is a lot more to school than simply learning "skills" -- writing skills, reading skills, math skills, Cisco Networking skills, map reading (they teach that in schools now? Is it that hard?) skills. There is, or should be, a lot more to school than this. With the disclaimer again that I went to a private school for the gifted, we got the "skills" part out of the way early and focused not just on refining those but trying to find *why* we were learning them. When I wrote papers on how Dante's Divine Comedy applied to the Christmas episode of the Simpsons where Lisa converts to Buddhism, it was because I cared about the whole idea: the clash of religions, logical fallacies in the Simpsons episode, and so forth. There's a lot more to life than "skills" -- like what happens and what you get when you apply them.
Incidentally, "superiorly" probably isn't a word. Way to fall into the trap of irony. Also, you would have probably acquired more spatial-visualization skills if you hadn't turned the map with each turn of the car: the game was only a means, after all. Then again, humility isn't a skill but a quality.
I'm sorry that that's been your experience. I guess that going to private school biased me.
I assume that you're saying that you left high school. Consider going back, no matter how bad your particular place may be. Your criticism of math games betrays a lack of maturity:
I'm sure most of us have used those lame maths games at some point. Personally, I didnt learn jack from them, not only were they uneducational, they sucked really bad. Crap graphics, crap sound, no storyline, etc.
Now, the last math games I used were rote-method arithmetic tutors on the Apple II back in elementary school, which were certainly not exciting (They were challenging). But if you think everything in the world is exciting at the start, you need to rethink what you've done. Math has a lot of uses, some of which you probably want to understand for more useful things: but math is hard, and boring, and requires the student to yoke himself to the task.
You also can't expect teachers to teach you; this is a two-way street. For instance, although the basic tenets of grammar and a wide vocabulary were *given* me in middle school, most other people I know who also received it have lost it. You can't place blame on teachers. In college, I've found this to be even more the case, as I am in classes with seventy-five or more people; even so, it is still entirely possible for me to have a personal experience with the professor -- if I make the effort.
Even Einstein couldn't have gotten his low-level job at the Swiss Patent Office without a high-school diploma. If he didn't have that job, he couldn't have supported himself well enough to have time to come up with the Special Theory of Relativity. Unless you have a really great business plan and a lot of money you can throw at it, go back to school and make the best of it until you graduate. If you're really too good for school, then prove it by winning at the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the airport is in West Virginia, it seems at least more probable than usual that the woman may have come into contact with explosives from living near or visiting a mine.
Just think what this device could do for politics!
Morbo: "Morbo demands an answer to the following question. If you saw a delicious candy in the hands of a small child. Would you seize and consume it?"
John Jackson: "Unthinkable."
Jack Johnson: "I wouldn't think of it."
Morbo: "What about you, Mr. Nixon? I remind you that you are under a truth-o-scope."
Nixon [sweating]: "The question is vague. You don't say what kind of candy and whether anyone is watching. And anyway I certainly wouldn't harm the child."
I'm dead serious -- I'm not implying that it will get used, but there's certainly enough talent out there that an open-source video disc specification could be authored. Just as some DVD player manufacturers began to support Divx video playback in their machines, it might get included and gain some mindshare.
Really, why not? There's already an open video codec (Theora) and people around here seem to have a pretty good idea of what they want (no DRM, as high-definition as possible).
I wrote a journal entry about it at the time.
How does this piece of legislation relate to the FEC's attempt to restrict campaign speech on political blogs, previously covered here:
/ 23/1226250&tid=153&tid=95&tid=219
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09
?
(Note that Slashdot got the summary of the bill entirely wrong -- it was actually designed to amend the FEC Act of 1971 to exempt the Internet)
Here's an overview of the topics I'm covering this semester in an OSS course I'm co-teaching. The audience is undergrads at a major university...
Note that we were also trying to improve the general technical literacy of some of the CS students.
1) Open-source Projects -- History, Present, and Future
2) Unix Philosophy -- ESR's "Art of Unix Programming" was incredibly useful here
3) Using the Unix Toolchain
4) Using the classic text editors (Vim/Emacs)
5) Learning Python / Programmatically Manipulating Text
6) Source Control Management Systems
7) Bug-tracking
8) Open-source team communication
9) Licensing your OSS (the intention is to have a working project completed by the class in Python by this point)
Right now we've just passed #4 and have settled on a simple project (a Web app) that the class can work together on in Python. That way, we can use it to demonstrate how to use the tools we talk about in topics 5-9.
The ADV people did two panels at Otakon this year. I'm not sure why they didn't have a large booth in the industry section, but they were definitely not ignoring the convention.
Most of the stuff they showed at their first panel was, as they mentioned, available on their Bittorrent pilot program.
Not to mention that this Slashdot story is a dupe and ADV has been doing this for months now.
How exactly can literacy increase by "over a thousand percent?" Did they give up on teaching math?
Chinese culture, as the father of all East Asian cultures...
Sounds to me like you've bought into Chinese authoritarian propaganda. Many groups of people think education is important -- and in the United States, you are free to say what you want in the classroom. Clearly, any government that can raise people to believe such jingoistic, generalizing statements is a threat to the nations around it and to the rights of its citizens.
The author of this article explicitly recommends *not* installing critical Windows 2000 security updates or Service Packs at all. Somehow, he claims, this will improve speed while reducing bloat.
While that could be (questionably) true, the viruses he's likely to pick up after about 15 minutes on the Internet will likely decrease his laptop's speed by a far more significant amount...
Is it even responsible for Slashdot to post such an unprofessional article?
Even so, my school (Duke University) has had tremendous success by making it clear that all students get an outbound data allotment of 5GB/day and leaving it up to students to control their own use.
If you go over the limit, you get a warning email. Get a few warning emails, and you get your outbound connection throttled or even cut off for the remainder of the semester. Works great, keeps the geeks happy, and is simple for people to understand.
In the UK, Sasser forced staff at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to return to manual map reading because computer systems were made unusable by the worm.
Check-in for some British Airways flights was also delayed thanks to Sasser.
Around the world, the Australian Railcorp trains stopped running because computer problems caused by Sasser made it impossible for drivers to talk to signalmen.
In Taiwan, more than 400 branches of the post office were forced to use pen and paper because Sasser crashed desktop PCs.
These are not mere annoyances to "soulless" corporations (which, by the way, employ lots of real people -- perhaps even yourself!). The failure of the UK Coast Guard's system or the train dispatching system in Australia could have easily killed people.
In fact, you can even buy a plan from T-Mobile that has no voice minutes built in -- only data.
Positive: extremely high speeds.
Negative: no scenery.
So let's make a case study of eMule. If someone -- not an original eMule developer -- posts a message linking to the eMule source, saying "you can share files for free on this network, potentially including copyrighted material," are they now liable? It hardly seems that they should be, and yet Grokster's promotional campaign hardly extended past this level.
More dangerously, can this argument be extended to other areas of traditionally protected speech, like, for instance, security researchers trading information and exploits that could potentially be used to cause damage to computer systems?
Not to mention that the roofs of the White House and the Executive Office Buildings have been discreetly covered with brown in Photoshop.
What makes this so ridiculous is that DC gift shops almost certainly sell higher-resolution flyover posters of these same locations -- I saw one in a public restroom recently!
Not true. I have 3 USB CueCats. I believe they were introduced a little later after they realized what a horrendously bad idea it was asking people to unplug their mouse or keyboard to free up a PS2 port!
Anyway, they show up under XP as a standard "Human Input Device," like a USB keyboard. I imagine they would work on Macs too.
ATTENTION ALL! A collaboration between the might of Fark and Something Awful is pushing for a write-in video to get to #1...and what better song than Whip It, by the almighty Devo! So what the hell are you waiting for? It's easy and takes only a few minutes. Go to TRL's online voting thing and go to the write-in portion, and vote for Whip It by Devo. That's it! If you can, call in to MTV to request it over the phone (the number and info is in the Something Awful thread linked above), as to phone votes count for more. Perhaps if the whole anti-MTV internet community works together, we call all make history!
Oooh, my karma's gonna burn for this one.
There are a hundred emails in my inbox right now. Most of them are communications from my various classes, formal inquiries, mailing lists, and invoices.
All of these things are very important. I would say that email is meant for more permanent, longer purposes. I wouldn't want to get any of these messages over IM or SMS. I have had delays of up to 20 minutes receiving SMS messages, as well. Why on earth would I want to use a phonen keypad to type a letter?
Instant Messenger also has its place, but not for this kind of deliberate correspondence. Not to mention that I can't receive IMs when my home computer isn't turned on!
One thing that hasn't been pointed out much is that it will cost Russia virtually nothing to enforce Kyoto.
Basically, the treaty stipulates that pollution levels cannot rise above their level about fifteen years ago.
Fifteen years ago, Russia was still Soviet and had a lot more heavy industry. They were a massive polluter. These days, they don't have as much industry anyway, so they won't have to institute controls to meet targets.
This makes me seriously concerned for a number of reasons.
First, these computer problems were blamed on the Internet connection used to access the registered-voter database. No voting system, even if it uses a VPN, should be connected to the Internet. If remote data is necessary, do it over a telephone connection. That's worked for credit card companies for many, many years.
Second, the article references the general apathy of workers running the poll stations. It seems that democracy may end in this country, or at least in Florida, from this more than from any of our elected leaders.
Third, and most speculatively, what happens if a more serious error occurs on Election Day and a large portion of ballots get lost? Four years ago, we could go back and read hanging chads. What will the courts decide this year if an entire state's ballots go missing?
By all accounts, this election could be more dangerous to the future of the nation than 2000.
I don't know anything else. Would someone else care to comment on this?
Amazon link to the book:/ qid=1096943403/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_2_1/002-2236212-76 16055
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061098779
Gross misrepresentation of the facts.
First, the US Senate voted *unanimously* not to sign the Kyoto Protocol, as it was recognized that it would be devastating to the economy. The only thing that Bush did differently than Clinton was actually admit that it was a lost cause.
Second, most if not all signatory countries have not implemented the reforms required by Kyoto. This is because a certain number of nations (a "trigger" number) must ratify the treaty before it becomes binding. So Europe and other countries can go on complaining about the US not signing, while at the same time not having any plans themselves to implement the treaty.
Third, it seems unlikely that Russia will sign. This would be the "trigger" that brings the protocols into effect, and would create an economic environment for Europe making it much harder to compete with the (clearly non-ratifying) US.
To put it shortly, the problem is not Bush but rather the US Congress. You know, those people who actually *make* the laws? To change the system, change them.
Well, it is my birthday...
I'm a history/computer science double major. The problem is that history, as a discipline, is about books, not "hands-on experience." There is a lot more to school than simply learning "skills" -- writing skills, reading skills, math skills, Cisco Networking skills, map reading (they teach that in schools now? Is it that hard?) skills. There is, or should be, a lot more to school than this. With the disclaimer again that I went to a private school for the gifted, we got the "skills" part out of the way early and focused not just on refining those but trying to find *why* we were learning them. When I wrote papers on how Dante's Divine Comedy applied to the Christmas episode of the Simpsons where Lisa converts to Buddhism, it was because I cared about the whole idea: the clash of religions, logical fallacies in the Simpsons episode, and so forth. There's a lot more to life than "skills" -- like what happens and what you get when you apply them.
Incidentally, "superiorly" probably isn't a word. Way to fall into the trap of irony. Also, you would have probably acquired more spatial-visualization skills if you hadn't turned the map with each turn of the car: the game was only a means, after all. Then again, humility isn't a skill but a quality.
I assume that you're saying that you left high school. Consider going back, no matter how bad your particular place may be. Your criticism of math games betrays a lack of maturity:
I'm sure most of us have used those lame maths games at some point. Personally, I didnt learn jack from them, not only were they uneducational, they sucked really bad. Crap graphics, crap sound, no storyline, etc.
Now, the last math games I used were rote-method arithmetic tutors on the Apple II back in elementary school, which were certainly not exciting (They were challenging). But if you think everything in the world is exciting at the start, you need to rethink what you've done. Math has a lot of uses, some of which you probably want to understand for more useful things: but math is hard, and boring, and requires the student to yoke himself to the task.
You also can't expect teachers to teach you; this is a two-way street. For instance, although the basic tenets of grammar and a wide vocabulary were *given* me in middle school, most other people I know who also received it have lost it. You can't place blame on teachers. In college, I've found this to be even more the case, as I am in classes with seventy-five or more people; even so, it is still entirely possible for me to have a personal experience with the professor -- if I make the effort.
Even Einstein couldn't have gotten his low-level job at the Swiss Patent Office without a high-school diploma. If he didn't have that job, he couldn't have supported himself well enough to have time to come up with the Special Theory of Relativity. Unless you have a really great business plan and a lot of money you can throw at it, go back to school and make the best of it until you graduate. If you're really too good for school, then prove it by winning at the system.