[Tschechow] “You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance and Germany doesn’t want to go to war”
This year Maine gave laptops to all it’s seventh graders, and told them that they would keep them until graduation (at which I’m sure the state would get smart and just let them have them, they wouldn’t be worth much to others). Now it plans to take them away year after next. I see two things happening:
They even have WiFi in the classroom… Now I want to go back to 7th grade.
This great summary of M$’s current actions, written from the perspective of a small biz consultant (found via /.), has some great little snippets. On billg’s mug shot:
The smiling Bill Gates mug shot from 1977 exemplifies this attitude. Microsoft claims it was for a traffic violation, but the laws of New Mexico say otherwise - mug shots are reserved for more serious offenses. What was the offense? Microsoft’s money has caused that to vanish from the record. As long as money buys “justice” Microsoft will respect neither law nor justice.
On security:
If you have criminal intent, or antisocial tendencies, I suppose you already know what to do and are probably already doing it.
Just found a url to this article by Clay Shirky: In-Room Chat as a Social Tool. Super intresting. I would have loved something like this at any conf. I’ve been too, but more importantly, every college/high school class I was ever in. I have a idea that I might get to go to PNG and give some classes on Linux. I would really like to take this idea with me, but I have doubts that every student will have a pc.
In this interview with Guido van Rossum he mentioned his declining intresting in Python multimedia stuff in the std lib. I think this is a pity. I could really do with a standard way to output audio in all platforms (libao doesn’t cut it, it’s GPL). Also I would love a standard API for reading, seeking and getting metadata out of audio files.