http://www.kuro5hin.org/ technology and culture, from the trenches en-us Copyright 1999-2002 - Kuro5hin.org 2005-10-13T08:00:01Z Kuro5hin.org The readers of Kuro5hin.org http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin.png http://www.kuro5hin.org/ http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/7/161233/406 Homeschooling came into focus in the late 20th century but is still a relatively seldom used method of educating children. As of 2003, 1.1 million children in the United States are were homeschooled (2.2% of the school age population), up from approximately 850,000 in 1999 (only 1.7% of the school-age population). Those who have been through the homeschooling experience, however, are usually firm defenders of its educational merits and sometimes even have the documentation to back it up. There are those who oppose the homeschool movement, though. Some argue that a responsible citizen should participate in the improvement of the public school system instead of "taking the easy way out" and abandoning it, while others emphasize the professional qualifications of public school instructors. As both the public/private and homeschool environments implement more of today's technology, which classroom has the upper hand? http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/7/1910/51373 Yesterday I suggested that K5 needed a new FP poll. The subsequent discussion produced an excellent idea: a new "Polls" section. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/6/101832/209 Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/7/55139/2664 George A Romero's Dead trilogy - Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead - were low-budget, low-production value gore-fests dismissed by critics but loved by horror fans. Over the years they wormed their way into popular consciousness and have been re-evaluated, elevated from exploitation B-movies to savage satires on modern American society. With the recent release of sequel Land of the Dead, now is a good time to look back at Romero's films and their cultural impact. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/6/43412/4301 If you look at the Army Field Manual's section on interrogation techniques, you will find an enlightening little passage on the subject of "coercive" interrogation, which says in part: The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. Here is the short version of the article which follows from this point: Early in the "War on Terror", the Bush Administration made a decision that the U.S. military would not be bound by the Geneva Convention in the fights that were to come. When the fights came, the "detainees" that the military picked up were met with treatment that some supporters of the Bush Administration called "coercive" and some other persons called "torture".Yesterday evening, John McCain passed an amendment to the next military appropriations bill which if followed would end such practices by simply requiring the treatment of detainees to be held to the standards in the Army field manual. Bush claims he's going to veto it. This would mean the first, and so far only, veto of Bush's entire presidency would be performed in support of torture. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/4/224434/148 I've got Good News and I've got Bad News. Recently, the government of Florida managed to pull together to pass HB 0249, a law now commonly known as the "Stand Your Ground" law. This law provides for the following: "A person, not engaged in an unlawful activity, who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so, to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself, herself, or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." So, finally, this Christmas, when we all leave our trailer parks and go to line up outside Walmart to score those cheap 40" TVs, and there is a riot when they finally open the doors, I can light you up like 2Pac when you get in my face. Now, on to the bad news. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/3/20856/7891 Many artists are finding their place within contemporary F/OSS (Free/Open Source Software) communities. This is a chance for creativity to flourish unbound by the entrenched commercial software model. Here I use the term 'artist' fairly broadly, including visual artists, experimental musicians and those making software-based installations among others. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/4/142523/084 When entering a Best Buy store, I'm now `greeted' by a guy in a blue shirt. (Lately they've been changing their shirt color to a Best-Buy yellow, but that doesn't matter.) In addition to loudly bellowing out "Hello!" he also mumbles "...howyoudoing?" I've never met this guy before in my life and he knows absolutely nothing about me. I find it strange and somewhat intrusive that he is suddenly concerned about my well-being. Well...almost concerned. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/4/205438/671 Tattooed across his chest was the phrase, "My mean right hook." It was something he talked about all the time. One guy would say, "Says who?" Another would say, "Yeah? You and what army?" A third would say, "How you gonna pull that off?" The answer was always the same. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/30/235124/706 There have been some recent articles here on K5 about Intelligent Design (1), (2), (3), (4). None of them have presented a formal logical approach to the question. One of the foundational ideas behind intelligent design is the that of Irreducible Complexity. What follows is an amateur's attempt at a formal mathematical definition of irreducible complexity and then a brief analysis of a possible refutation of it based on the proposed definition. This work has been done mostly out of interest. (This article was originally published at http://www.berteig.org/mishkin/IrreducibleComplexity.html - it is much nicer to look at there due to the limits of the html allowed here on K5.) string http://www.kuro5hin.org/search/