There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.
-- President James Madison. 1751-1836
"Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they hide is vital."
- unknown
And also funny but buried under low moderation in tht same thread:
So I was just surfing around Google news, and stumbled into the Taipei Times website for some news stories.
But the pleasantly surprising thing I find at the bottom of the page: "Best view in Mozilla". Nice! Anyone else have any links to mainstream media sites that actively recognize and advertise Mozilla?
In this Globe & Mail article, "The security provisions the RCMP invoked to probe an alleged leak to an Ottawa journalist are so sweeping they might be struck down as unconstitutional".
In this Globe&Mail article, and this Ottawa Citizen article , Mounties spent hours searching the home and office of a reporter who has written about the Maher Arar case, looking for evidence of a possible breach of the Security of Information Act. The Security of Information Act is a Patriot Act -like legislation passed after 9/11, to combat terrorism.
I saw this link somewhere in Slashdot, and added it to my "to read" list. But I have unfortnately forgotten which post (or the poster) that I got this from.
Anyways, here's an interesting and well written article regarding the educational and performance gap between boys and girls. Though not a peer-reviewed publication itself, it's still an interesting read.
I find myself, too, wondering about the issues raised in this article. As far back as I can remember, I always remember girls being smarter than most of us boys. It was to the point that they were generally considered the smarter sex. That trend appears to continue past high-school, since the vast majority of students at my undergraduate university were females, and here at graduate school, almost 60% of the incoming graduate students were female.
So why is it that males are still considered dominant? A good question. I find myself torn on this issue, since looking around my computer science classes and groups, I still see more males. But is this a crisis? Is there a "Men in Psychology" group in the same way there is a "Women in Computing" group?
I must admit that I feel disdain for the idea. It's fine to have a group, but to have scholarships and workshops available only to women for "women in computing"?
To me, this issue is even more powerful than that of race.
Ah well.. but I ramble on. Time to stop.
Here's a quote from the article... it felt very close to me, since I have often been placed to feel this way when it came to girls and computer science.
A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of shortchanging girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be the superior student. She is probably more articulate, more mature, more engaged, and more well-balanced. The boy may be aware that she is more likely to go on to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he is uncomfortably aware that he is considered to be a member of the favored and dominant gender.
oh man... for shits and giggles, here's the poem he wrote:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my, lump in the bed
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.
"In India, Asok has an intern...
quite an interesting post by pi_rules. Just wanted to save a pointer to it here.
For a long list of reasons, my father uses a Windows machine for his home busines computer, which I got and set up for him. We got the system about a year ago, and I installed the Chinese version of Windows XP (yes it's legit). When it works, it works okay. Enough for my dad to use from day-to-day for his computing needs.
What's good is that he can read, write, and print Chinese, and explore the system by himself. But on the downside, WindowsXP (atleast the chinese version) has had a strange habbit of dying about once every three months or so.
And I mean totally die. I don't know what the problem is... sometimes it's a corrupted registry, bad pagefile, windows-update-gone-wrong-killing-the-installation, you name it..... And I know it's not the hardware. They've been tested, re-tested, and replaced multiple times. To be safe, I've even underclocked his gigahertz machine to make sure it never over-heats.
So here I was, spending about a whole day trying to recover this computer of his. The damn computer was set to auto-reboot whenever there's a kernel panic (or whatever they call it in Windows land). And since this latest problem actually prevented windows from fully starting, it would be stuck in a continuous cycle of rebooting!
Talk about lame! The system recovery disk didn't work and the "fix windows installation" option didn't work. Boy what I wouldn't have given for a bootable rescue disc with a shell and text readable configuration files. But I digress...
Anyways, that's when I decided to just re-install the damn machine. Luckily, we had a very recent backup of his data. This is when it gets REALLY frustrating.
Now, in an attempt to install over the old installation, the install process blue-screens half-way through. Even after doing the suggested changes from google, the install still crashes.
And so, I decided to wipe the drive and start over.
Same results.
Over and over again.... I tried every combination of BIOS settings and pulling out unnecessary hardware that I could think of.
And still the install crashes. This must've happened about a dozen times.
Finally, I decided that I would install RedHat 9 on it instead. I'd have to work a little harder to try and customize the box and re-educate my father on how to use the computer, but it'd be worth it to save myself from the current Winblows hell.
So, I put the WinXP disc in one last time, and got it installing... again... while I ran off to download and burn a set of RedHat discs.
Upon returning, with RedHat/GNU/Linux discs in hand, I saw, in amazement, WindowsXP installed (albeit barebones) and running on my dad's computer.
*sigh*
So, I know that this whole SCO thing has been flogged to death on Slashdot, and many of you are sick of getting an O.J. style play-by-play.
But one thing which has really made me curious, is why there have been no insider leaks from SCO?
Now assume that these alleged code fragments came from some developer instead of management trying to play with diff. Surely other developers would know (or have an idea) of what the similar passages are.
And I have to believe that atleast one of these developers has enough of a conscience to leak something. I mean, c'mon! I know SCO is trying to do a last minute ditch to raise its stock prices or get bought, and I know how much it sucks to have options worth nothing. But are there really no developers or IT staff at SCO that have the moral guidance to not play along with this sick charade?
After all, the really huge winners in this for SCO are going to be the top executives and the lawyers.
One possible reason that things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan in the first place.
