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Comment Re: "How dare adults have some fun" (Score 1) 353

Especially ironic because âoeValley Girl (1983) actors and their ilk are now over 50. Thank the maker that Next Gen, Millennials, etc. have helped bring down the likes of fast fashionâ(TM)s soul and body crushing manufacturers who sold their trash to the likes of Forever 21 and others.

Comment Re:Government guilty! (Score 1) 422

"The kid was criminally stupid in not reporting the vulnerability through the responsible disclosure contact"
Neither he, you nor I are under any such obligation and how he accessed the data was neither vulnerability nor crime.
"The kid was criminally stupid in archiving the data instead of working towards fixing the problem"
The problem is not his to "fix" and archiving the data is not a crime which could have been done by any number of spiders and bots incl The Wayback Machine.

Stop being an apologist for the criminally stupid authorities and their heavyhanded overreach

It sounds like many people knew of this vulnerability generally. Therefore, that IT group should have known it was an issue from the start. Sounds like this fellow is a collector like the poor sod who glommed the articles from JSTOR (prosecuted under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) U.S. vs. Swarz.) He eventually committed suicide, I believe. JStor ended up releasing its archives to the public, and MIT (as much as corporately and humanly possible) did some heavy duty "soul-searching." see: https://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing/

Comment Re: Any baseball player or fan could tell you that (Score 1) 131

Nuns never hit my hands with a ruler or other object during high school the 70s (the either had given up or the order was more progressive). Neither did my grade school public school teachers harm me in the 60s. But, my dad said his left-handed brother (b. 1927) had his left arm tied behind him to prevent him from writing with his sinister hand. That didn't work and only made him more stubborn. Tending to play ambidextrously (left-handed mits were hard to find so I threw right-handed), I batted left. Ironically, left-handed pitchers always threw me off when playing city league girls fast-pitch softball. But, had no problem hitting of right-handed pitchers.

Comment Re: Obvious Reason (Score 1) 579

Speaking as a woman who has designed and managed content for corporate and personal websites, it is not the pedantic bs, or the "nice things" snark that are the issue to making changes or additions to the Wikipendium as we do maintain WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, and Tumblr sites (and do compose their pages and sites from scratch or modify existing templates). No, you said it in your first sentence before sinking into the low-hanging fruit of female bashing, kidding, or whatever you call it. Simply put, the interface is a fucking nightmare even to make a simple change or addition. And if you must, it's FUGLY too.

Submission + - Anti-surveillance clothing becoming fashionable 1

Earthquake Retrofit writes: The New York Times reports: Flying surveillance cameras, also known as drones, are increasingly in the news. So are advances in facial-recognition technology. And wearable devices like Google Glass — which can be used to take photographs and videos and upload them to the Internet within seconds — are adding to the fervor. Then there are the disclosures of Edward Snowden, the fugitive former government contractor, about clandestine government surveillance. It’s enough to make countersurveillance fashion as timely and pertinent as any seasonal trend, like midriff tops or wedge sneakers.
Tinfoil hats are so passe'.

Submission + - Australia Air Force uses math puzzle for job ad that was unsolvable (nydailynews.com) 1

KernelMuncher writes: Australia's Royal Air Force has been left red-faced after a job ad asked applicants to solve a complex math problem was revealed to be unsolvable. The service posted the puzzle in a bid to attract the country's best minds to its ranks. "If you have what it takes to be an engineer in the Air Force call the number below," it read above a complicated formula which candidates had to crack. But there was a slight difficulty. The problem had typos and ended up not giving potential operatives the correct contact information.

Submission + - The Los Angeles Schools buy iPad Trojan Horses for 30,000 students

lpress writes: The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million over the next two years on iPads for 30,000 students. Coverage of the announcement has focused on Apple winning over other tablets, but that is not the key point. The top three proposals each included an app to deliver Pearson's K-12 Common Core System of Courses along with other third-party educational apps.

The Common Core curriculum is not yet established, but many states are committed to it, starting next year. The new tablets and the new commitment to the Common Core curriculum will arrive around the same time, and busy faculty (and those hired to train them) will adopt the Pearson material. The tablets will be obsolete in a few years and the hardware platform may change, but lock-in to Pearson's default curriculum may last for generations.

Comment Re:I Think This is Good (Score 1) 264

EmotionToilet said: Besides, I don't think it's right that richer people are able to buy their way through college and then act the part of a trained professional.

ET is on the right track because for the most part, currently only "richer people" get into higher ed these days ---- at least when it comes to "elite" and "prestigious" colleges and universities, as reviewed in Scandals of Higher Education from the March 29, 2007 issue of New York Review of Books. In it, William Bowen, co-author of Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, one of six books reviewed for the article, states that:

the sense of democratic legitimacy is undermined if people believe that the rich are admitted to selective colleges and universities regardless of merit while able and deserving candidates from more modest backgrounds are turned away.
But why do students pay for papers in the first place? Maybe part of it is lack of time, interest, and the fact that too many students attend college with no good reason for being there in the first place. However, according to Andrew Delbanco, who reviewed the books, that fact remains that, "[...] there are very few poor students at America's top colleges, and a large and growing number of rich ones." In addition, Delbanco includes a quintessential anecdote regarding the issue of what amounts to pay for parchment:

To make his case, he (Golden) has assembled an anthology of sordid stories intended to show how the rich rig the system to get what they want. It all reminds me of a story I have on good authority about a meeting at a New York City private school of high school seniors with their college counselor. The counselor, trying to help them prepare for their college interviews, asked what they would say about what special contribution they would bring to the college of their choice. "I'm very outgoing," said one. "I'm passionate about community service," said another. The discussion took an unexpected twist when one young man said, simply, "a library." "What do you mean, a library?" asked the counselor, a little taken aback. "Well, my dad said he'd give a library to whatever school I want to go to." Golden's book amounts to the charge that colleges are lining up to take Dad up on his offer.
Meanwhile, maybe the question should be, who doesn't need to pay for papers when all that is needed is for dad or mom to cough up a library or chemistry building? For the most part, a lot of this is trumped by the fact that the founders of Google are graduates of Stanford, a noteworthy university, and one I know that still routinely recruits people of all races and income levels.

While lawyers or doctors would eventually get tripped up with post-graduate competency tests and residency requirements, on the flip side, who audits the merits of those in business beyond the odd CPA examined graduate? Because as we all know now, we need only look at the track record of our 43rd President, and the Enron and Worldcom scandals to get the correct answer to that question.

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