Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:just Turing? (Score 1) 653

This is quite interesting. I had heard of the concept in Muslim law - that the fact that a person is a Muslim gives him quasi-legal authority to act as police, courts, and executioner. I don't know the case-specific details (IIRC, they vary from law to law, and the individual authority granted therein), but I'm familiar with the attitude. Could you provide some reference for the idea in Hindu law?

Comment Re:I think this problem was solved years ago... (Score 1) 252

If the university is treating students as children it's probably because, on average, they are.

If this is the way they are treated, how will they ever grow up?

The correct way for them to treat these kids is first of all to make it clear that this point marks a discontinuity in their education - earlier, the system was responsible. Now, as a student, you are. Give them both freedom and responsibility. Let them face the consequences of their actions. Maybe they will crash and burn - in the first semester. After that, they're damn well going to start studying and start attending, because then they'll know what happens if they don't.

Comment Re:I don't know... (Score 1) 252

You obviously have no teaching experience yourself, especially if you are teaching something as dry as computer science or mathematics..When you have a large amount of work to get through, it is not easy to make it exciting.

I must say one thing about this - isn't it assumed that by the time you hit university, you actually want to be there? That the people who come to get the Computer Science or Mathematics degree are the ones who are interested in the subject matter, and excited by the subject, to begin with?

This view may sound rather naive in this day and age, when real education has been replaced with job training, but isn't the solution to this to make the system better, not to cave in further?

Space

Submission + - Chandrayan 1, India's mission to moon launched

William Robinson writes: The Chandrayaan-1, literally "Lunar Craft", was launched today from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on the southeastern coast of India. The spacecraft will orbit the Moon for two years, charting its mineral composition, searching for ice, and helium-3, all three fundamental for the establishment of a lunar outpost. It is carrying 2 NASA instruments, The Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which will assess mineral resources, and the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar, or Mini-SAR, which will map the polar regions and look for ice deposits. Apart from these two NASA instruments and three European Space Agency instruments, the Chandrayaan-1 is carrying the C1XS, an X-ray Spectrometer to get high-quality, X-ray spectroscopic mapping of the Moon, a near infrared spectrometer called SIR-2 to study the chemical composition of the Moons crust and mantle, and SARA, the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyser which will study plasma-surface interactions in space for the first time. The picture gallery and videos of Chandrayan 1.
The Matrix

Submission + - Humans a are "hard-wired" for hierarchy? (go.com)

solidex writes: "ABC News is reporting a series of experiments done by scientists that shows humans are "hard-wired" for social hierarchy; however, the article seems to suggest that the respective parts of the brain that deal with hierarchies do not create social hierarchies, but rather that they "prime" humans to respond to hierarchies. But what isn't clear is whether this is a natural feature of the brain or the result of years of being taught to act this way. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=4712859&page=1"
Microsoft

What is Bill Gates Learning From Open Source? 194

christian.einfeldt writes "In the world of Free Open Source Software communities, Microsoft is often viewed as the very epitome of the Cathedral-style model of software production. But is Bill Gates learning from the software development phenomenon that he once compared loosely to communism? In commenting on the results of a Microsoft-commissioned survey of approximately 500 board-level executives about the importance of interpersonal skills versus raw IT coding skills, Gates starts to sound a bit more like a member of the Apache Foundation than the take-no-prisoners king of cut-throat competition: 'Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.'."
Google

Submission + - Indian law to make Google accountable (deelip.com)

deelip writes: "The recommendation of an Indian parliamentary committee threatens to change the wording in proposed legislation that would hold Google and other service providers accountable for content traversing their system. This should be interesting because Google turns a blind eye to the rampant software piracy being carried out on Orkut Communities and Google hosted blogs, inspite of them being reported using its "Report Abuse" feature."
Security

Most Users Think They Have AntiVirus Protection, While Only Half Do 294

SkiifGeek writes "A survey carried out by McAfee and the NCSA found that while more than 90% of users believed that they were protected by antivirus or antimalware products that were updated at least once a week, only 51% actually were. 'Even with significantly growing awareness by everyday users of the need for efficient and effective antivirus / antimalware software, and the increasing market penetration achieved by the security industry, the nature of rapidly evolving Information Security threats means that the baseline of protection is outstripping the ability of users to keep up (without some form of extra help).' The study is available online in PDF format. What sort of an effect does this sort of thinking, and practice, have on the overall security of your systems, networks, and efforts to educate?"
Graphics

Content-Aware Image Resizing 174

An anonymous reader writes "At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Woman offers herself in exchange for WoW gold

aneeshm writes: A Spanish website writes about a woman who offered sexual services to any man who would give her 5,000 gold in World of Warcraft. The woman, a female Night Elf, Level 70 (the highest level), offered one night of sex to any guy who would give her the gold necessary to purchase the new Epic Flying Mount of the expansion The Burning Crusade. The woman finally accepted one guy's offer, and after the transaction was completed, he gave her the WoW money.
Debian

Two Major Debian Releases In One Day 189

AndyCater writes "If all goes according to plan, Debian should release both an update to Debian Sarge (3.1r6, henceforth to be oldstable) and a new stable release (Debian 4.0, which was codenamed Etch) — and announce the results of the election for Debian Project Leader — all within 12 hours. Sarge was updated late on April 7th UTC, Sam Hocevar was announced as DPL at about 00:30 UTC, and preparations for the release of Debian Etch are ongoing and look good for later on the 8th."
Programming

Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot 154

Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."
The Courts

Illinois Ban On Explicit Video Games Is Unconstitutional 195

An anonymous reader writes, "A federal court has struck down an Illinois law that criminalized the sale of 'sexually explicit' video games to minors. In reaching this decision, the court held that the Illinois law was too broad, because it could be read to encompass any game which displayed a female breast, even for a brief second. Interestingly, the court chose the game God of War as the model of gaming art which must be protected. As the court explained, 'Because the SEVGL potentially criminalize the sale of any game that features exposed breasts, without concern for the game considered in its entirety or for the game's social value for minors, distribution of God of War is potentially illegal, in spite of the fact that the game tracks the Homeric epics in content and theme. As we have suggested in the past, there is serious reason to believe that a statute sweeps too broadly when it prohibits a game that is essentially an interactive, digital version of the Odyssey.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds

Working...