> And as a result, no one is banning these books (except conservatives that want to retcon american history).
My (very liberal) local school district banned English teachers from teaching any book that contained the n-word, even at a high-school level, and even when the author was a black person talking about real events that happened to them.
FWIW, this was after complaints involving Of Mice and Men being on the curriculum.
Even more so as the lesson of that story is perhaps the single most important one for people to learn in modern times.
Almost everybody in that book is an awful person, especially the most 'upstanding' of types. Even the protagonist is an awful person. The one and only exception is 'N* Jim' who is the only kind-hearted and genuinely decent person in the book. It's an entire story about how the appearances of people, and the reality of those people, are two very different things.
It being banned for using foul language, as educational outcomes continue to deteriorate, is just so perfectly ironic.
I don't support banning the book, but I think it is hard book to teach because it needs SO much context and a mature audience (lol good luck). Also, there are hundreds of other books from that era that are relevant even from Mark Twain's corpus so being obstinate about that book is a questionable position. I'm ambivalent honestly, but definitely not willing to die on that hill. (I graduated highschool in 1989 from a middle class suburb, we never read it.)
It’s a big country of roughly half a billion people, you’ll always find examples if you look hard enough. It’s ridiculous/wrong that your district did this but frankly it’s the exception in liberal/progressive communities. It’s a very one-sided problem:
A practical issue is the sort of books being banned. Your first link offer examples of one side trying to ban Of Mice and Men, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Dr. Seuss, with the other side trying to ban many books along the lines of Gender Queer. [1] That link is to the book - which is animated, and quite NSFW.
There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy. The irony is that if there was an equal but opposite to that book about straight sex, sexuality, associated kinks, and so forth - then I think both liberals and conservatives would probably be all for keeping it away from schools. It's solely focused on sexuality, is quite crude, illustrated, targeted towards young children, and there's no moral beyond the most surface level writing which is about coming to terms with one's sexuality.
And obviously coming to terms with one's sexuality is very important, but I really don't think books like that are doing much to aid in that - especially when it's targeted at an age demographic that's still going to be extremely confused, and even moreso in a day and age when being different, if only for the sake of being different, is highly desirable. And given the nature of social media and the internet, decisions made today may stay with you for the rest of your life.
So for instance about 30% of Gen Z now declare themselves LGBT. [2] We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations. And in many ways this modern twist is an even more damaging form of the problem from a variety of perspectives - fertility, STDs, stuff staying with you for the rest of your life, and so on. Let alone extreme cases where e.g. somebody engages in transition surgery or 1-way chemically induced changes which they end up later regretting.
Systems containing software fail, and the cause of that failure may originate in software.
And the article you intended to link is just wrong. E.g. the Therac-25 was not designed to output high power when an operator typed quickly; it was built in such a way to do so. This would be analogous to describing an airplane failure due to using bolts that were too weak: "the bolt didn't fail; it broke under exactly the forces you would expect it to break from its size; if they wanted it to not break, they should have used a larger bolt!" Just like in the Therac example, the failure would be consistently reproducible.
It sounds like our main disagreement lies around whether to call it "design error" or "build error" but I do not believe this erases the useful distinction between "error present in the thing from day one" and "unpredictable failure of component suddenly no longer doing what it used to do".
You allude to the difference between requirements and constraints. What you say is true, but also it's true that the Therac-25 was not designed to not output high power when an operator typed quickly.
I thought the 2013 amendment to the VPPA largely defanged it by allowing sharing with customer consent (which is probably one of the clauses in the million-word customer agreement nobody reads).
Non-power-of-two is only really feasible of the total number of inserts will fit in your post/ack counters. Otherwise you have to implement overflow manually which may or may not be possible to do with the available atomic primitives on your architecture.
I first encountered this structure at a summer internship at a company making data switches.
The CCP has killed millions of people, and is working on a genocide of the Uyghurs through forced-sterilization. Their record in the surrounding parts of Asia isn't much better than the US's record in Latin America, and where it is better, it seems to be externally constrained rather than self-constrained.
We're not the good guys here, but if you think China's any better then I have a bridge to sell you in Beijing.
At least with external entities you could deny the parser an internet connection and force it to only load external documents from a cache you prepopulated and vetted. Turing completeness is a bullshit idea in document formats.
Postscript is pretty neat IMHO and it’s Turing complete. I really appreciated my raytraced page finally coming out of that poor HP laser after an hour or so.
With SVGs you can serve them from a different domain. IIUC the issue from TFA was that the SVGs were served from the primary domain; had they been on a different domain, they would have not been allowed to do as much.
You can also use your ssh config to set identities for any "host" you want, and the host doesn't need to be the real hostname. So you can do something like:
My (very liberal) local school district banned English teachers from teaching any book that contained the n-word, even at a high-school level, and even when the author was a black person talking about real events that happened to them.
FWIW, this was after complaints involving Of Mice and Men being on the curriculum.
reply