Slashdot

sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.' But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."

mi writes "The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts has won a judgment compelling Craigslist to reveal the identity of 'Daniel,' who tried to sell two tickets to the Oscar ceremony recently. The plaintiff's argument against such sales is scary and can be taken very far very quickly: 'If you don't know who's inside the theater, it's very difficult to provide security.' Craigslist's handling of the case may be even scarier, however — instead of fighting tooth-and-nail for the user's privacy, as we expect Google, Yahoo, and AOL, and even credit-card issuers to do, Craigslist simply did not show up in court and lost by default."

So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies? Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience.

I work with propriety technology ATM. Didn't stop me from opting for CruiseControl.Net and NAnt over the proprietary build systems that were vying for our business. There are plenty of technologies we're using that I'd switch to OSS alternatives in a heartbeat (goddamn ClearCase...). Yeah, some of my coworkers have drunk vendor kool-aid, but plenty others are open to the OSS side of things too.

I would say that putting that kind of arbitrary restriction on your hiring process may be cutting you off from some valid talent. That is unless you're looking for someone religious about it, then I guess it would be perfectly valid. Just some food for thought though.

spam kills

It's the fundamental problem with being institutionalized in America: it's all about vengeance, not social rehabilitation.

This is discussed in the article. There is nothing that requires there be a "traffic control" or that you tell it where you are going, but there will be people who want to build such a system, and we must create the technology with care to discourage such architectures.

passionfingers writes "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail — even commercial offerings like UltraEdit32 don't offer such a feature. Likewise on the OSS side of the fence, where I expected a Notepad++ plugin or the like, it appears that the requirements to a) open a file containing a large volume of text data and b) track changes to the data, are mutually exclusive. Does anyone in the Slashdot community already have such a beast in their menagerie? Perhaps there is there a commercial offering I've missed, or could someone possibly point me to their favorite (stable) OSS project that might measure up?"

Do you think they used Perl?

Many readers are sending in word that Randy Pausch has died at 47. The charismatic young college professor celebrated life despite a death sentence from pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely known as the "Last Lecture." The video went viral and has been downloaded by over 10 million people.

> This wasn't a normal father. He was a criminal.

That's not fair. There are many criminals, who are also fathers, who love and don't harm their children.

No, I'm saying that someone who's demonstrated this kind of self-centeredness is more likely to kill additional people as opposed to only killing himself.

-jcr

He got tired of having his box filled with unsolicited male?

(Shamelessly stolen from Fark)

51mon writes "Austrian CERT used data from one of their authoritative DNS server to measure the rate at which the latest DNS patch (source port randomization) is being rolled out to larger recursive name servers. While about half the traffic (PDF) they receive is now using source port randomization, their data suggest that this is due to ISPs who roll out such fixes immediately. The rate of patching has fallen to disappointingly low levels since. If your ISP isn't patched, perhaps it is time to switch." After details of the DNS vulnerability leaked, researchers |)ruid and HD Moore released attack code; ZDNet's security blog has an analysis.

I can't tell you how many machines I've built for myself and others, and the one thing I never cheap out on is the MoBo. You've got to have a solid foundation if you want to build a nice house and this is no different. Foxconn was never a brand I considered to be high quality, but it's even farther down on my list now.

"It's the fundamental problem with being institutionalized in America: it's all about vengeance, not social rehabilitation."

That's right - the US penal system killed that little girl and her mother.

Asshole.