StikyPad:

blair1q:

Difference: the PC Pro article is being used to say what consumers in general want and what proportion of them want that. This /. post and discussion is analysis of the PC Pro article. /. doesn't need to be representative for the analysis to be sound (or unsound). PC Pro does need to be representative for this use of its survey to be sound.

This may be true, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that it is the rapture. Just like aliens or crazy 9/11 conspiracies, I'm not going to entertain the thought of the rapture without some good evidence.

Where any country on earth = Belarus; China; Ecuador; Egypt; India; Iran; Iraq; Israel; Japan; Malaysia; Mongolia; North Korea; Pakistan; Saudi Arabia; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan; Tonga; United States.
Here in Australia as well as most of the world he would not be put to death.

"The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been ‘great changes’."

There is evidence, and there is a discussion happening in the research community. It's just that hacks like Mark Prensky get the attention instead. For a discussion of the evidence, I recommend:

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The 'digital natives' debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), 775-786.

I agree that it is a marketing problem. Technically it is Rudd vs Abbot vs Brown vs ... but we all know that it isn't. Even if we switched to proportional representation I doubt we would get anything other than generic centre-left/centre-right parties winning the election.

In Australia we use a similar system: preferential voting.

You may find it interesting to read about cognitive load theory. I think there is a case to be argued that music without lyrics will have little impact on primarily linguistic tasks such as programming.

I believe Slashdot has an entire type of story dedicated to this: reviews. I agree that multiple data points would be better, but there is a bit of a tradition around this "review" thing.

It is a strange, slightly pretentious way to write Ian. I think it is from Gaelic.

Thanks for the information about the US legal system. The Australian system is quite different. Maybe an Australian lawyer (or law student) could give us help with this too?

I agree with you that we need to measure the success of the filter in terms of some positive social benefit. I think there is an assumption that successfully blocking content has some inherent social benefit; I think this is debatable as it depends on one's beliefs. As an Australian who voted for the current government (after preferencing others - we use preferential voting here) I think Australia is divided in its attitudes towards censorship. Filtering should not be the outcome we measure; it should be some positive social gain eg a decrease in some crime.

As the tools of content creation become more accessible, I worry that we'll miss out on a lot of great art because it is about modern wars, drugs, crime or sex. If we sanitized the rest of art like this then we'd lose a lot of great movies, books, documentaries and paintings.

Implementing an encryption algorithm is one thing; a whole secure system is another. Any competent programmer can use an RSA or 3DES library, but implementing an entire system securely is another thing. One of the scary things is that people hear an algorithm is being used but forget about things like remote buffer overrun vulnerabilities caused by poor programming.

No fancy algorithm, even one written by Bruce, can make up for insecure code.