Well, I was looking at the Scratch link given in the original article and all I found was Windows/Mac installers, but no hint of source code and no Linux version.
This seems to suck in several ways: no Linux version, no source code, no smooth path from simple concepts and direct graphical programming to the full range of what a modern programming language can do and the libraries and power available for modern programming languages.
Rather than invent a new language, I'd like to see an approach that implements high-level abstraction layer using some existing language, e.g. Ruby and create an easy to use IDE for it. That would make programming easy and fun when kids/beginners start with it and would still be productive and fun when they have worked for a longer time with the language.
That happens when you have laws that allow anyone with the money to patent every trivial little algorithm. I wouldn't really blame MS for this: if you give somebody a nice weapon the legally kill off competitors, why shouldn't that weapon be used? It was obvious that this would happen years ago, it was obvious how every little patent of how to convert a binary number to an ASCII hex string (I think that one belongs to IBM, incidentally) could eventually turn into a weapon against any programmer who just does his normal job: writing pograms. Give credit to the assholes who are responsible for this: the lawyers and the lobby from the patent organizations who obviously and with good reason see a paradise of high-paid jobs and endless trials open up before them.
From how the article argues, there should be some correlation between the skin pigment and cancer rate: the darker the skin the higher the cancer rate because darker skin will produce less vitamin D when exposed to the same average level of sunlight. Such a study should not be too hard to do with available data and should of course give *some* hint about how absurd the theory really could be. Of course there could be other hidden factors that could cancel out the effect, but still, before somebody makes such a claim, I would have expected him to run an analysis on this kind of data and report it.
So is there anything known on the correlation between cancer rate and skin color of people living in the same region and having the same average sun exposure?
Everyone is entitled to have their own favorite extensions but there is nothing really in the cited article that makes Sal Cangeloso's selection special in any way. Personally I find Enigmail and Spamato4Thunderbird essential for my own personal use, but I would not expect this to be more of a universally valid recommendation than anyone else's.
and the number of cases where the intention of the voter is not clear is extremely low and usually can be made even lower by making the voting system easier still (e.g. have different voting papers for each vote and just let the voter put the apropriate paper in the envelope). Not a big deal at all.
As the original article and many others show, there are lots of disadvantages though.
But there is one big advantage to the traditional paper and pencil voting that nearly never is mentioned: Everyone can immediately understand how it works. Everyone is directly and without additional knowledge able to understand the procedure, to control it or take part in its control, and to immediately understand any tinkering or irregularities that could happen. This is not at all the case with ANY electronic system. Nearly nobody of the voters will understand the ways how the system could fail, could be manipulated etc.
I think that the traditional system where many many helpers are needed to make elections work is an actual plus: all these people are witnesses of and active contributors to the democratic process, and they are actively supporting it (at least in my country, those "election helpers" are all working on a voluntary basis). If you replace these people by a black box, you take away an important democractic element.
does that thing come back to where it belongs after I am awake or do I have to find it everyday to put it back on the nightstand? In other words: does this thing more than any wind-up toy would be capable of?
The stupidity of schools and teachers is sometimes truly amazing. Bad luck that it is idiots like these who are supposed to actually teach others.
But thanks for asking, asking even the most stupid question is a beginning: no you should not block Wikipedia. No you should not encourage using it. No you should, in general, not give the impression that everything can be solved by a simple rule.
You should do what teachers are supposed to do: give students the means and ability, the knowledge and the judgment to decide by and for themselves on a case to case basis when it might be a good idea and when not -- and why. Maybe work that into your biology and politics classes. Demonstrate. Discuss.
There is no future that would allow everyone on this planet to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and tons of meat at will at the same cost and with equal or less ecological impact as/than now.
This is simply not possible, mathematically. Either we want to utilize some renewable energy, then the sheer area of land needed to grow the apropriate crop would not be ecologically acceptable. Or we find a better and cheaper way to exploit still more fossile energy: that would further increase the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere. Finally, even with some "magic" endless form of energy the future looks dim: if e.g. fusion or something similar would finally work then the cheap and endless supply of energy would make it possible to sustain an even larger number of people and give them the means to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and meat at will which would in turn indirectly lead to the exploitation and destruction of an even bigger part of the environment (all these people living in luxury need natural resources, produce waste, produce toxic substances, need their own houses, roads etc.)
So, in order for people living on this planet without eating it up, destroying most of their fellow species, and totally covering it with artefacts and trash at some point, the only chance really is that energy gets more expensive and more precious. The only way to prevent utter destruction is that energy is costly and not available to everyone in huge quantities.
As far as I can see, with a more long term vision of "future", nothing can be the future except precious, expensive energy.
I just wonder if they make this sufficiently clear before one buys the hardware. However, this practice is really only possible in countries with rather lax customer protection laws. At least in most European countries, this practice would very likely be illegal since the customer has a legally granted right to get faulty hardware replaced within a certain time (usually 12 months). This cannot be legally made dependent on what software the customer chooses to run on his computer.
I disagree. In a democracy that is worth its name, not only are voters responsible for which of the candidates gets elected, but they also can influence who becomes candidate, or become candidates themselves. That most people are not interested and let the crooks and liars become candidates is, again, not the fault of the crooks and liars.
What I meant are alternatives that are not piracy or illegal. I do not see why or how the system would prevent artists from selling their music through other channels, or prevent investors from creating an alternative infrastructure for marketing and selling music. Or prevent customers from using those alternatives.
My suspicion is that people just take the stolen music and run and any alternative that would require people to buy instead of steal music would not be that much more attractive than the traditional system.
What I find strange about the whole music marked situation is that despite the evilness of the RIAA, despite the high CD prices, despite the fact that there is still no user friendly way to buy music cheap and effective without getting locked in to some vendor and/or deprived of even the most minimal rights -- despite all this, people are NOT turning to alternatives. There is practically no significant market that would show how to make it better. There is no significant number of users who would simply ignore the RIAA and go for artists who directly sell their music or other channels. Except piracy.
In my opinion that says more about the customers than about the RIAA. If people are too dumb to exploit the weakness of the traditional music market -- both as customers or as startup companies -- they deserve exactly this RIAA.
That is not much different from people in a democracy deserving their Bush or Berlusconi. I never quite understand why all the people then go and blame Bush or Berlusconi instead of the idiots who voted for them.
So -- why blame the RIAA instead of all the people who keep them in power by STILL buying their stuff and abide by their rules?
The guy who helped spread misconceptions about what AI is and is supposed to be in the first place. I remember him giving a talk where he fantasized about downloading his brain on a "floppy disk" (still in use back then) and transferring it to a robot so he could live eternally on some other planet. I would not have expected a person who has shown his bright intellect in the past to come forward with such utter nonsense. This was nearly as embarrassing as the "visions" of a certain Moravec.
People who seriously work in the fields that are traditionally subsumed under "AI" - like machine learning, computer vision, computational linguistics, and others - know that AI is a term that is used traditionally for "hard" computer problems but has practically nothing to do with biological/human intelligence. Countless papers have been published on the technical and philosophical reasons why this is so and a few of them even get it right.
That does not prevent the general public to still expect or desire something like a Star-Trek Data robot or some other Hollywood intelligent robot. Unfortunately, people like Minsky help to spread this misconception about AI. It is boring, it is scientifically useless, but on the plus side, this view of AI sometimes helps you to get on TV with your project or get some additional funding.
no not this one, but the ones where children eat all the sugary crap stuff... or the ones where children eat all the junk food... or the ones where children spend their time doing useless and boring stuff like playing with totally idiotic toys. Can I get pulled those ads too, please?
Being from a different region of the world, I do not know the ad mentioned, but whatever they show: why do those concerned parents let their children watch TV at "8:30 pm or later" where they can see those ads in the first place?
I am most concerned about these concerned parents.
where MS secretly has violated opensource licenses by taking open source code and including it in their closed source code. How is the opensource community to check this? How could one ever find out with closed source software?
Patents have always been good ammunition when companies engage in a battle. The way to reach agreements is to trade patents and pay money until an equilibrium of power is reached or until one of the two is crushed.
MS has identified Linux as a worthy opponent and is just engaging in its standard procedure. I really do not blame MS -- blame your idiotic patent laws that allow companies like MS (but also others, e.g. IBM) to patent every little trivial function in order to pile up ammunition. In a democracy, laws, and that includes patent laws, should be the result of what people want. Obviously the majority of people want a capitalism where big companies can crush small competitors by playing - among others - the pile of insane patents card.
He who can afford the better lawyers and the bigger number of simultanously ongoing trials wins. People, you voted for the guys who made these laws.
I would assume, 99.9% of the people gulp that down and there will be no decline in people using Amazon. Why should Amazon not do this when people just suck up to whatever Amazon does? Amazon is not the only large company that benefits from the sheepish attitude of customers: before these people will abstain from buying they will accept a lot of things.
I thought there is no need to point out that this is not about somebody owing anything to anybody. It is about what is or would be reasonable to make Linux successful. As I said, it is sad to see how Linux does not have the popularity it could have because some fundamentalists think they will make earth a better and free place with their idea of what Linux should be. Something that is not going to happen and something that will just hinder Linux to become an alternative to Linux.
You are provably wrong though when it comes to hardware support under Linux in comparison to Windows (unfortunately). I have worked a lot with Linux and much less with XP, but already the hardware I use is much easier and better supported under XP. Many common and less common kinds of hardware (FAX/scanner/Printer combos, many wlan cards, many GDI printers, special hardware, certain scanners, certain graphic tablets and all even more exitic hardware) is only very limited and buggy or not at all supported under Linux. This is in *addition* to the usual lag-behind (e.g. Edgy not installing from the PATA DVD drive connected to my newer Intel Mobo).
Some people want Linux to be a vehicle for their political and world views, but most just do not want to suffer the quasi-monopoly of Windows. Again, this is not about anybody owing anything, it is expressing the sadness that with the attitude voiced here, Linux is very unlikely to become relevant as a mainstream - OS.
In the end, it is about me, being sad that with this kind of strategy, my favorite OS has no chance to get more mainstream, to get taught in my childrens' school, to get used in my friends' companies etc.
That is all nice and fine in theory, but 99% of the users would happily give up some of those freedoms (and maybe even pay) to just get the freedom to use some hardware with an OS other than Windows. I am one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I was looking at the Scratch link given in the original article and all I found was Windows/Mac installers, but no hint of source code and no Linux version.
This seems to suck in several ways: no Linux version, no source code, no smooth path from simple concepts and direct graphical programming to the full range of what a modern programming language can do and the libraries and power available for modern programming languages.
Rather than invent a new language, I'd like to see an approach that implements high-level abstraction layer using some existing language, e.g. Ruby and create an easy to use IDE for it. That would make programming easy and fun when kids/beginners start with it and would still be productive and fun when they have worked for a longer time with the language.
That happens when you have laws that allow anyone with the money to patent every trivial little algorithm. I wouldn't really blame MS for this: if you give somebody a nice weapon the legally kill off competitors, why shouldn't that weapon be used?
It was obvious that this would happen years ago, it was obvious how every little patent of how to convert a binary number to an ASCII hex string (I think that one belongs to IBM, incidentally) could eventually turn into a weapon against any programmer who just does his normal job: writing pograms. Give credit to the assholes who are responsible for this: the lawyers and the lobby from the patent organizations who obviously and with good reason see a paradise of high-paid jobs and endless trials open up before them.
From how the article argues, there should be some correlation between the skin pigment and cancer rate: the darker the skin the higher the cancer rate because darker skin will produce less vitamin D when exposed to the same average level of sunlight. Such a study should not be too hard to do with available data and should of course give *some* hint about how absurd the theory really could be. Of course there could be other hidden factors that could cancel out the effect, but still, before somebody makes such a claim, I would have expected him to run an analysis on this kind of data and report it.
So is there anything known on the correlation between cancer rate and skin color of people living in the same region and having the same average sun exposure?
Everyone is entitled to have their own favorite extensions but there is nothing really in the cited article that makes Sal Cangeloso's selection special in any way. Personally I find Enigmail and Spamato4Thunderbird essential for my own personal use, but I would not expect this to be more of a universally valid recommendation than anyone else's.
and the number of cases where the intention of the voter is not clear is extremely low and usually can be made even lower by making the voting system easier still (e.g. have different voting papers for each vote and just let the voter put the apropriate paper in the envelope). Not a big deal at all.
I do not see the advantage.
As the original article and many others show, there are lots of disadvantages though.
But there is one big advantage to the traditional paper and pencil voting that nearly never is mentioned:
Everyone can immediately understand how it works. Everyone is directly and without additional knowledge able to understand the procedure, to control it or take part in its control, and to immediately understand any tinkering or irregularities that could happen. This is not at all the case with ANY electronic system. Nearly nobody of the voters will understand the ways how the system could fail, could be manipulated etc.
I think that the traditional system where many many helpers are needed to make elections work is an actual plus: all these people are witnesses of and active contributors to the democratic process, and they are actively supporting it (at least in my country, those "election helpers" are all working on a voluntary basis).
If you replace these people by a black box, you take away an important democractic element.
Again I ask: what for?
does that thing come back to where it belongs after I am awake or do I have to find it everyday to put it back on the nightstand? In other words: does this thing more than any wind-up toy would be capable of?
Just asking.
respect - nice scheme to have a free post-it ad presented to a crowd the size of the /. audience.
The stupidity of schools and teachers is sometimes truly amazing. Bad luck that it is idiots like these who are supposed to actually teach others.
But thanks for asking, asking even the most stupid question is a beginning: no you should not block Wikipedia. No you should not encourage using it. No you should, in general, not give the impression that everything can be solved by a simple rule.
You should do what teachers are supposed to do: give students the means and ability, the knowledge and the judgment to decide by and for themselves on a case to case basis when it might be a good idea and when not -- and why.
Maybe work that into your biology and politics classes. Demonstrate. Discuss.
In a word: use your brain, for a change.
that article tells us that obviously, many officers do not know the laws very well. So? Why should the ./ crowd be bothered?
There is no future that would allow everyone on this planet to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and tons of meat at will at the same cost and with equal or less ecological impact as/than now.
This is simply not possible, mathematically. Either we want to utilize some renewable energy, then the sheer area of land needed to grow the apropriate crop would not be ecologically acceptable. Or we find a better and cheaper way to exploit still more fossile energy: that would further increase the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere. Finally, even with some "magic" endless form of energy the future looks dim: if e.g. fusion or something similar would finally work then the cheap and endless supply of energy would make it possible to sustain an even larger number of people and give them the means to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and meat at will which would in turn indirectly lead to the exploitation and destruction of an even bigger part of the environment (all these people living in luxury need natural resources, produce waste, produce toxic substances, need their own houses, roads etc.)
So, in order for people living on this planet without eating it up, destroying most of their fellow species, and totally covering it with artefacts and trash at some point, the only chance really is that energy gets more expensive and more precious. The only way to prevent utter destruction is that energy is costly and not available to everyone in huge quantities.
As far as I can see, with a more long term vision of "future", nothing can be the future except precious, expensive energy.
I just wonder if they make this sufficiently clear before one buys the hardware.
However, this practice is really only possible in countries with rather lax customer protection laws.
At least in most European countries, this practice would very likely be illegal since the customer has a legally granted right to get faulty hardware replaced within a certain time (usually 12 months). This cannot be legally made dependent on what software the customer chooses to run on his computer.
I disagree. In a democracy that is worth its name, not only are voters responsible for which of the candidates gets elected, but they also can influence who becomes candidate, or become candidates themselves. That most people are not interested and let the crooks and liars become candidates is, again, not the fault of the crooks and liars.
What I meant are alternatives that are not piracy or illegal.
I do not see why or how the system would prevent artists from selling their music through other channels, or prevent investors from creating an alternative infrastructure for marketing and selling music. Or prevent customers from using those alternatives.
My suspicion is that people just take the stolen music and run and any alternative that would require people to buy instead of steal music would not be that much more attractive than the traditional system.
What I find strange about the whole music marked situation is that despite the evilness of the RIAA, despite the high CD prices, despite the fact that there is still no user friendly way to buy music cheap and effective without getting locked in to some vendor and/or deprived of even the most minimal rights -- despite all this, people are NOT turning to alternatives. There is practically no significant market that would show how to make it better. There is no significant number of users who would simply ignore the RIAA and go for artists who directly sell their music or other channels. Except piracy.
In my opinion that says more about the customers than about the RIAA. If people are too dumb to exploit the weakness of the traditional music market -- both as customers or as startup companies -- they deserve exactly this RIAA.
That is not much different from people in a democracy deserving their Bush or Berlusconi. I never quite understand why all the people then go and blame Bush or Berlusconi instead of the idiots who voted for them.
So -- why blame the RIAA instead of all the people who keep them in power by STILL buying their stuff and abide by their rules?
No decent support for a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 - none of the usual tv apps like kdetv, zapping, tvtime etc. work.
Heh, I can understand your wife. But I cannot understand what you want to say here otherwise.
The guy who helped spread misconceptions about what AI is and is supposed to be in the first place. I remember him giving a talk where he fantasized about downloading his brain on a "floppy disk" (still in use back then) and transferring it to a robot so he could live eternally on some other planet.
I would not have expected a person who has shown his bright intellect in the past to come forward with such utter nonsense. This was nearly as embarrassing as the "visions" of a certain Moravec.
People who seriously work in the fields that are traditionally subsumed under "AI" - like machine learning, computer vision, computational linguistics, and others - know that AI is a term that is used traditionally for "hard" computer problems but has practically nothing to do with biological/human intelligence. Countless papers have been published on the technical and philosophical reasons why this is so and a few of them even get it right.
That does not prevent the general public to still expect or desire something like a Star-Trek Data robot or some other Hollywood intelligent robot. Unfortunately, people like Minsky help to spread this misconception about AI. It is boring, it is scientifically useless, but on the plus side, this view of AI sometimes helps you to get on TV with your project or get some additional funding.
no not this one, but the ones where children eat all the sugary crap stuff ... or the ones where children eat all the junk food ... or the ones where children spend their time doing useless and boring stuff like playing with totally idiotic toys. Can I get pulled those ads too, please?
Being from a different region of the world, I do not know the ad mentioned, but whatever they show: why do those concerned parents let their children watch TV at "8:30 pm or later" where they can see those ads in the first place?
I am most concerned about these concerned parents.
where MS secretly has violated opensource licenses by taking open source code and including it in their closed source code. How is the opensource community to check this? How could one ever find out with closed source software?
Patents have always been good ammunition when companies engage in a battle. The way to reach agreements is to trade patents and pay money until an equilibrium of power is reached or until one of the two is crushed.
MS has identified Linux as a worthy opponent and is just engaging in its standard procedure. I really do not blame MS -- blame your idiotic patent laws that allow companies like MS (but also others, e.g. IBM) to patent every little trivial function in order to pile up ammunition. In a democracy, laws, and that includes patent laws, should be the result of what people want. Obviously the majority of people want a capitalism where big companies can crush small competitors by playing - among others - the pile of insane patents card.
He who can afford the better lawyers and the bigger number of simultanously ongoing trials wins.
People, you voted for the guys who made these laws.
I would assume, 99.9% of the people gulp that down and there will be no decline in people using Amazon. Why should Amazon not do this when people just suck up to whatever Amazon does?
Amazon is not the only large company that benefits from the sheepish attitude of customers: before these people will abstain from buying they will accept a lot of things.
I thought there is no need to point out that this is not about somebody owing anything to anybody. It is about what is or would be reasonable to make Linux successful. As I said, it is sad to see how Linux does not have the popularity it could have because some fundamentalists think they will make earth a better and free place with their idea of what Linux should be. Something that is not going to happen and something that will just hinder Linux to become an alternative to Linux.
You are provably wrong though when it comes to hardware support under Linux in comparison to Windows (unfortunately). I have worked a lot with Linux and much less with XP, but already the hardware I use is much easier and better supported under XP. Many common and less common kinds of hardware (FAX/scanner/Printer combos, many wlan cards, many GDI printers, special hardware, certain scanners, certain graphic tablets and all even more exitic hardware) is only very limited and buggy or not at all supported under Linux. This is in *addition* to the usual lag-behind (e.g. Edgy not installing from the PATA DVD drive connected to my newer Intel Mobo).
Some people want Linux to be a vehicle for their political and world views, but most just do not want to suffer the quasi-monopoly of Windows. Again, this is not about anybody owing anything, it is expressing the sadness that with the attitude voiced here, Linux is very unlikely to become relevant as a mainstream - OS.
In the end, it is about me, being sad that with this kind of strategy, my favorite OS has no chance to get more mainstream, to get taught in my childrens' school, to get used in my friends' companies etc.
That is all nice and fine in theory, but 99% of the users would happily give up some of those freedoms (and maybe even pay) to just get the freedom to use some hardware with an OS other than Windows. I am one of them.