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Submission + - Microsoft To Teachers: Using Pens And Paper Not Fair To Students

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom. And chalkboards? They should be banished from our schools too. That’s what Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada, told the Georgia Straight ahead of the Microsoft Summit 2015 in Vancouver, which is set to be attended by around 200 teachers. “When was the last time you used a piece of chalk to express yourself?” De Cicco Remu, a former teacher, asked by phone from Toronto. “Kids don’t express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text.” Given the Microsoft Study Finds Technology Hurting Attention Spans story posted to Slashdot in the last 2 days it would seem that Redmond's Marketing and R&D people are at cross-purposes.

Submission + - Google and Facebook hypocrisy concerning the Verizon-AOL merger (forbes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Their friends in Washington want the FCC to start interfering in Internet privacy issues. Convincing the FCC to issue new rules prohibiting Internet service providers (ISPs) from tracking consumers online would keep Verizon out of their markets and could have the effect of killing the deal even if antitrust regulators approve it.

If these groups(Google and Facebook) were serious about protecting consumer privacy on the Internet, they wouldn't be running to the FCC for special rules aimed only at Verizon. They would take their complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is the primary agency responsible for consumer privacy issues and has been dealing with online tracking issues for years. The FCC has comparatively little experience in the area and a poor track record of enforcing and complying with privacy laws.

It appears these groups are complaining about Verizon at the FCC rather than the FTC in order to help their friends at Google and Facebook maintain their competitive lead in mobile marketing. It is no coincidence that these same groups pushed for the FCC to assume jurisdiction over Internet privacy issues during the net neutrality fight. The FCC could have adopted net neutrality rules without impinging on the FTC's jurisdiction over online privacy.

Comment Re:watermelons (Score 1) 18

by Marxist Hacker 42 (#49718333) Attached to: "The UN is using climate change as a tool not an issue"

I fully comprehend the positive concept behind libertarian thinking, even if I have become almost as disillusioned with liberty as I am with Marxism.

The one point that libertarians and distributists agree on is that more competition is always good; Net Neutrality, by forcing an even playing field for all bits/second, fosters a truly free market in cyberspace where the cost of participation is and should be low. If we're going to live in a capitalistic society, the least we can do is remove barriers to entry into estate ownership, so that all may at least have the dream of becoming an owner someday. Cyberspace offers us the opportunity to expand that a huge amount, even the children's game Minecraft has a space that if mapped onto the real world, would fill several planets.

Submission + - Gates, Zuckerberg Promising Same Jobs to US Kids and Foreign H-1B Workers? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg-bankrolled Code.org, they're using the number of open computing jobs in each state to convince parents of the need to expand K-12 CS offerings so their kids can fill those jobs. Sounds good, right? But at the same time, the Gates and Zuckerberg-bankrolled FWD.org PAC has taken to Twitter, using the number of open "STEM" jobs in each state to convince politicians of the need to expand the number of H-1B visas so foreign workers can fill those jobs. While the goal of Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy is to kill two birds [K-12 CS education and H-1B visas] with one crisis, is it cool for organizations backed by many of the same wealthy individuals to essentially promise the same jobs to U.S. kids and foreign H-1B workers?

Submission + - Banks Conspire 2

Submitted by Jim Sadler
Jim Sadler writes: I'll keep it short. Why do banks, charge cards and others have such lousy password software? My bank allows twenty letters or numbers but not all combinations of letters and numbers. Then on top of that one can not use symbols or ASCI symbols in ones password. Needless to say pass phrases are also banned. For example "JackandJillwentupthehilltofetch1394pounds of worms." would be very hard to crack and very easy to recall.
              I can't imagine why such passwords would be so hard to handle for financial institutions and they have everything in the world to lose from sloppy security. So just why, considering that these institutions complain of mega money being lost, do they not have a better password system? Do they somehow gain when money goes missing?

Submission + - Has Mark Shuttleworth gone overboard? 3

Submitted by Linux Torvalds
Linux Torvalds writes: From the article on softpedia which qoutes "Mark Shuttleworth Asks Devs from Different Desktop Environments to Work Together" from Ubuntu Online Summit 2015, which begs us to ask "is he paying attention to any open source development outside of the kingdom of Canonical ?"
Canonical has already started work on making Snappy Package Manager (a replacement for apt based dpkg package manager) and Mir (a replacement for the X window server system) for Ubuntu. But since features promised by Snappy Package Manager are already available in Nix Package Manager, so essentially there is no need to make new one. Similarly Canonical could contribute to make X windows better but instead they are making a new one.
Which makes me wonder has Mark Shuttleworth gone overboard? What do you think?

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