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Comment Re:Like phones... (Score 5, Insightful) 112

I can only imagine you've never used an e-ink ebook reader. You just cannot compare the experience of the paperwhite e-ink reader to a tablet, both for reading and living with it otherwise. Charging your kindle once a month and being able to read it outdoors as easily as a physical book, you just can't get that with a "full-blown tablet".

Comment Re:Male teachers (Score 1) 148

No, there are still plenty of men working middle-tier jobs in other fields, teaching isn't a special case when it comes to effort vs reward. Where it is a special case is the way it opens men up to gender-based discrimination (because if a man likes kids he's obviously a pedophile! Only women can like kids without it being sexual!) and that living under the constant threat of a single student's unsubstantiated and untrue claim of misconduct can and will cost you your career, your marriage, your friends, and possibly even your freedom.

Men have been teaching kids since teaching became a thing. We didn't just decide last week that we don't want to be teachers any more, we weigh the benefits against the risks and at some point it's just not worth it.

A few articles you may appreciate:
http://www.wsj.com/news/articl...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/edu...

Also, a candid discussion between male teachers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/teachi...

Comment Re:Male teachers (Score 1) 148

Male teachers are getting more and more rare, and discrimination is the reason.

Meanwhile, people are hiring lesser-qualified minorities and H1B workers for half the cost of a better-qualified white american worker, and they get to fly the "DIversity!" flag like they're doing everyone a favor. (not that all minorities are lesser qualified, but the ones willing to work for half the cost likely are)

Comment Re:iPad too fucking expensive (Score 3, Informative) 139

A pi on its own is cheaper, but each student would need a display, keyboard/mouse, SD card, power supply, and presumably a usb wifi stick. If these devices are intended to be left at school, that's still not totally unreasonable and will clearly undercut the price of an ipad.. Certainly the educational capability is much higher, at least for students interested in engineering. But if they are intended to be taken home, they're just not suitable.

Something like a Chromebook could do the job, and still undercut the ipad cost... But if they want to lock these devices down, they'd have to buy the Education models (which also gets them other features such as no hassle replacement if one is broken), and those models cost more.

The scary part to me is the school's efforts to restrict what students can do with these devices, and allowing the school to track and monitor them. Your school's influence should end at the gate. We've already seen a case where a school passed out laptops to students and were then using the laptop's webcam to spy on those students at home. That was totally inappropriate just a few years ago, but now everyone is fine with assigning a pretty gps and internet tracking device to every child? Any smart parent would require their child to leave such a device in their locker, and never bring it home.

Comment Re:Seiki 4k for $500 (Score 2) 186

Really, it's fine for anything this side of gaming. Even Youtube and local media plays just fine. Very little out there has a framerate over that 30hz mark. The only real downside is that you can only fit one of them on your desk at a time.

Comment Re:What is MediaGoblin? (Score 2, Interesting) 22

This will probably be a very unpopular opinion, but I'm going to post it anyway.

I run a site that could be a great fit for MediaGoblin, but I'm not going to use it because it's a Python app. This rather quickly turns it into an app that requires a dedicated server. Even with cheap cloud hosting, the name of the game for smaller sites is to run several on a single instance.

I get that developers often use the language they like, and a lot of developers like Python. The commodity hosting world is still ruled by PHP.

Best of luck with it!

Comment Re:Web sites? End users? (Score 1) 188

This is really the only point that matters in this whole discussion: Is it fair for someone to have this information before someone else. The answer isn't a simple as the question.

If you ask me, I would want to have full immediate disclosure. The suggestion that the person reporting the bug is the first person to have found it is absurd. Black Hat interests are actively looking for these kinds of problems, and finding them is how they make a living. Forget corporations, Governments are the ones who will pay top dollar for undisclosed exploits, and something like this (enabled by default, invisible in system logs, and in software deployed so widely!) would be worth a fortune. Improperly calculating data size is the cause of nearly all of these types of bugs, so you can really save a lot of tie just examinig the lead-up to function calls that include a size parameter (memcpy() was used in heartbleed, but is just one of a group of standard C functions that you would hotlist.). But we're drifting a bit.

Heartbleed has two classes of victims: Application Vendors (include web site owners) and Application Users (including average Joe with a web browser). Is it fair that Vendors would get advanced notice to patch their systems before Users even know a problem exists? Furthermore, is it fair that only a select group of Vendors would be given that notice? I don't really believe so.

I can see how the entity who discovered the issue would selfishly patch their own systems before releasing it. I get it. But the responsible thing to do after that has got to be disclosing to the upstream vendor. Is 11 days the length of time it took to update Google's entire infrastructure? They're a strange beast, and that would be quite impressive if so, particularly on non-linux systems where package management/creation is a little less friendly. Either way, given their size, I can't honestly fault them for 11 day disclosure to OpenSSL. I can fault them for disclosing to their friends first.

Comment Re:No place for 'almost', 'not quite' and 'nearly' (Score 2) 423

Radio Shack used to be a pretty awesome place. Back in the 8 personal computer revolution, they were for sure a force to be reckoned with. Compared to the other guys at the time, they were the only ones who had their own retail distribution channel. They had a variety of models with different capabilities (and little cross-compatibility!), and was a great little shop to visit when you're a nerd kid in the 80s. Beyond computers, they had a "Battery Club" where you would get a free battery every month!

They also had walls of common electronics components... 555 timers, resistors in exactly the impedance you needed, prototype boards, power supplies, lcd numeric displays... Completed products were the exception, components were the rule. Not to mention educational materials and experiment kits! http://imgur.com/XZyJf

Talking about how things were better "back then" can be cliche, but sometimes it's true.

Comment Re:BitCoin has complete record of transactions. (Score 1) 115

Well, 2 notes to this.

First, Satoshi described a method for full validating nodes to purge old data, briefly described here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Sca...
This allows most nodes to operate with a reduced data set, yet still fully participate.

Second, most users don't need to keep their own copy of the full blockchain, and can use a lightweight client such as Electrum instead. Initial sync time goes from hours to about a minute.

Before you balk too much on the size of the transaction history, consider how much data Visa is storing to achieve similar goals. Do you think they have ever deleted a transaction record?

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