I don't know how Hulu would be profitable if sold off by its current owners. Part of the reason it has been profitable is because its owners are also the owners of the shows that are streamed on Hulu. If it's no longer in the hands of Comcast, News Corp and Disney, how could it survive if it also has to pay licensing fees to the IP owners? Hulu being sold can only be bad for their users, I think. Either the range of shows must be cut to avoid the licensing fees, or more ads, or bigger paywalls/subscriptions or any multitude of things to balance out the suddenly appearing higher cost of obtaining the shows.
As primarily an iPhone user, I'm probably going to stick with whatever's built in, because the last thing that I want to do is to actively change my convenience-gadget to match someone's fancy website; the same reason that I'll never change my DNS servers to a random root server set just to access a.ihateicann domain. Sorry, don't care - your content is actually not that important to me.
Well, you really don't have much of a choice, do you? Apple cripples all other third-party browsers (for example, by not allowing it to be used as default browser when clicking on links - see Skyfire or Opera, or by just not allowing it into the marketplace, see Firefox).
You know, I'm a big sucker for futurism as anybody, but Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of predictions about future tech every couple of years, most of which never pan out anywhere near what he predicted. And each time Kurzweil makes a prediction, many of which are just way too optimistic or just play goofy in retrospect, the tech-minded people like slashdot lap it up.
Can't tech futurists find a better spokesman than Ray Kurzweil?
Back when I was getting my CS degree, I've always noticed that the cleanest coders are also the guys who didn't shower for days at a time and always wore the same clothes.
1) Legos seem to have a bit of a revival lately, especially with the Lego series of video games. If anything, they're very much mainstream now, which is a good thing. Anything that helps kids use their imaginations to build stuff with is good.
2) Rummicube - Eh, did anyone actually play this? Or was it even part of Geek culture?
3) Star Wars/Star Trek - Star Trek and Star Wars have had something of a revival recently with the reboot and Episodes 1-3 and Clone Wars. Okay, the Star Wars stuff has kinda sucked recently, but Star Trek can still cool to a modern audience without being nostalgic.
4) Soviet Russia - Did anyone actually use this outside of some seriously dated Yakov Smirnoff materials in the 80s and 90s? You hear it nowadays, but it's so rare, I wouldn't put it with the rest.
5) Netcraft - Such a tiny tiny minority of "geek culture" shouldn't qualify this to the whole.
6) Bill Gates - Bill Gates and his foundation have done so much good recently, I'm loath to make fun of him. He's improved education and vaccination in the developing world, saving lots of lives and giving prospect to a lot of children who had none before. That's pretty much the context I see him in now - rarely the "Bill Gates is Evil" meme now. Update your Meme, man.
7) Desktop Linux - Eh, so what? Linux is improving on the desktop all the time, and Linux has come to dominate phones (and to a lesser degree) succeeded on tablets, so it's not really that farfetched.
8) PACMAN - The only time I see this is when Google brings out the doodle.
9) Tron - Maybe it's a little nostalgic, but it just had a big movie come out a few months ago. That's not nostalgia, man, that's new and cool.
If he says that he is Christ, then he's clearly publicly disclosed his "invention" 2000 years ago. The one year statutory bar prevents him from receiving a patent on this. Thus, the powers of Christ is in the public domain.
While I agree with Stallman that eBook and eBook DRM have really destroyed our freedoms with respect to books, I am having a lot of trouble understanding his tax fund proposal.
Doesn't distributing a tax fund to authors by popularity mean that I, as a person, lost the freedom to vote with my pocketbook not to pay certain authors? I have no desire for my tax dollars to go to the author of the Twilight books when I would much rather get my money to a deserving less known author who puts out a much superior work. For that matter, how do you measure popularity anyway? If the funding for authors are from a tax-payer fund, then it kind of means that people have no real direct costs to buy books, right? You can't measure it by downloads because people would download all sorts of stuff if they don't have to directly pay for it and not necessarily read it. The voluntary funding may be a good idea and has shown to work in the past - however, each of those successful voluntary funding schemes were aimed towards a rather small demographic who is passionate enough to donate - I have no idea if this idea is scalable or feasible when it's put to the market at large.
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers and did a pretty good job at explaining fundamentals of programming to a bunch of high school sophomores and making it understandable. As I recall, you can probably go through several chapters per class because it's not so dense and impenetrable that you need bash your way through.
Here's a link to the 7th edition: http://www.amazon.com/How-Program-7th-Paul-Deitel/dp/0136117260 However, there are plenty of copies of 6th editions floating around for pretty cheap. If I recall correctly, copies of the 5th edition are even available for download for free, which makes the curriculum that much more cost-effective.
C'mon, Google Wallet is the end of anonymous shopping? No, if you don't want to be tracked by Google Wallet, just don't use Google Wallet. If you want to stay anonymous, use cash.
For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.
Gah, what is with Mozilla following Google's every example, no matter how stupid or not? There's a good reason to keep the URL bar - it's a quick and easy way to check for phishing 2 out of 3 times. Hiding the URL bar is just dumb, because now we're reliant on Google or Mozilla or other third-party maintained lists to protect us from phishing, or we have to jump through hoops to check the URL. No, thank you!
Plus, what is wrong with keeping the URL bar where it is? I use the Omnibar addon and it adds the ability to do all sorts of query commands into the URL bar already. It works well and it's convenient to use, and best of all, I keep my URL bar (albeit it's now a long address bar that incorporates the search bar into it). Why not go that direction? Why follow Google towards stupid design decisions? Just making it look nifty is not a good reason to change something or to remove functionality and features.
The reason they don't give customer matte LCDs is because shiny screens look nicer on photographs and on showroom floors because they look perfect and pristine and oh-so-high-tech. The customer will go to the showroom (with their nice, bright, and diffuse lighting) or see the photos online and they'll think: "Wow, that's shiny, it must be new and sleek" and then whip out their credit cards.
When they take it home, they'll complain about the glare, but that doesn't matter to the manufacturers and retailers because they already had your money at that point and they know that you probably wouldn't go to the trouble of returning the laptop just because there's a bit of glare on the screen. Meanwhile, you're stuck with your crappy super-specular screen and you're going to go through any sort of mental gymnastics necessary to justify not returning it. And then, the next time you need a new computer, the same process will begin anew because we, as consumers, are idiots.
I can't quite listen to the Chinese audio since I'm at work, but based on the video alone, is it really against American troops? I only saw very generic urban warfare tactics in a very generic Chinese city and a very generic set of bunkers and pillboxes. The only "indication" that it was against American troops was a very fuzzy helicopter that might be an Apache or might be something else entirely.
In any case, so what? We in the US has been playing games where the Chinese Army was the antagonist for ages. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and Battlefield 2 are two that I can name off the top of my head.
Look, the compensation that Sony is giving out in the aftermath of the PSN attack is peanuts. It doesn't cost them a hell of a whole lot to set up. The free two games? Sony already has deals set up with developers to provide "free" games to PSN plus subscribers, the additional cost of a few extra free games to all subscribers (who might not even take advantage of it, since most of these games are ancient and they probably already have it) is marginal, at best. The one month of free PSN+ for subscribers doesn't cost much, either, since it's only a small minority with PSN+ accounts. I'd doubt that the compensation would cost them much more than a few million dollars at best.
Even if it doesn't restore full mobility, I think this is a great advancement that allows a paralyzed patient to stave off or to recover from the muscle atrophy or blood clots caused by lack of motion that occurs after the accident.
I don't know how to really respond to this except to say: "No, it won't have as much force as law (or, realistically, any force whatsoever)."
Would my request for a billion dollars in the car accident hypothetical also have the same effect as law? Would it also be operative as a legal precedent?
Before Slashdot goes into immediate outrage mode (although, by noting this, I might already be too late) over this, please note one very important thing:
This is a PROPOSED INJUNCTION BY THE PLAINTIFFS.
In our adversarial judicial system, plaintiffs will try to ask the court for as much relief as they can get away with. The courts will either accept it, accept part of it or laugh it out of court. However, merely a request for this amount of relief has zero effect on the law whatsoever. If I was injured in a minor car accident with you, I'd be well within my rights to ask the court for a billion dollars in compensation and relief. However, this doesn't mean the court will give it to me, nor does it have any real implications beyond the fact that I might come off sounding like a litigious dick.
300,000 years would be longer than there have been anatomically modern humans on Earth. If we make it, by the time we get there, we'll be a whole new species.
You know, of course, that to Microsoft and Facebook (and pretty much every other major company on the internet that dabbles in social networking), agreeing and knowing are mutually exclusive concepts.
Re:If I were to change the US educational system..
on
Let Them Eat Khan Academy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Awesome dude. For the last 14 years, he's given the annual Faraday Christmas Children's Lecture where he messes around with physics experiments like jetting around on rollerblades and a 50 pound fire extinguisher and having a cinder block broken on his chest while laying on a bed of nails.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how Hulu would be profitable if sold off by its current owners. Part of the reason it has been profitable is because its owners are also the owners of the shows that are streamed on Hulu. If it's no longer in the hands of Comcast, News Corp and Disney, how could it survive if it also has to pay licensing fees to the IP owners? Hulu being sold can only be bad for their users, I think. Either the range of shows must be cut to avoid the licensing fees, or more ads, or bigger paywalls/subscriptions or any multitude of things to balance out the suddenly appearing higher cost of obtaining the shows.
As primarily an iPhone user, I'm probably going to stick with whatever's built in, because the last thing that I want to do is to actively change my convenience-gadget to match someone's fancy website; the same reason that I'll never change my DNS servers to a random root server set just to access a .ihateicann domain. Sorry, don't care - your content is actually not that important to me.
Well, you really don't have much of a choice, do you? Apple cripples all other third-party browsers (for example, by not allowing it to be used as default browser when clicking on links - see Skyfire or Opera, or by just not allowing it into the marketplace, see Firefox).
You know, I'm a big sucker for futurism as anybody, but Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of predictions about future tech every couple of years, most of which never pan out anywhere near what he predicted. And each time Kurzweil makes a prediction, many of which are just way too optimistic or just play goofy in retrospect, the tech-minded people like slashdot lap it up.
Can't tech futurists find a better spokesman than Ray Kurzweil?
Er, 2051.
They should've waited another 40 years to release this, so we can have a time capsule in 2030 of popular culture in the late 80s to mid 90s.
Back when I was getting my CS degree, I've always noticed that the cleanest coders are also the guys who didn't shower for days at a time and always wore the same clothes.
1) Legos seem to have a bit of a revival lately, especially with the Lego series of video games. If anything, they're very much mainstream now, which is a good thing. Anything that helps kids use their imaginations to build stuff with is good.
2) Rummicube - Eh, did anyone actually play this? Or was it even part of Geek culture?
3) Star Wars/Star Trek - Star Trek and Star Wars have had something of a revival recently with the reboot and Episodes 1-3 and Clone Wars. Okay, the Star Wars stuff has kinda sucked recently, but Star Trek can still cool to a modern audience without being nostalgic.
4) Soviet Russia - Did anyone actually use this outside of some seriously dated Yakov Smirnoff materials in the 80s and 90s? You hear it nowadays, but it's so rare, I wouldn't put it with the rest.
5) Netcraft - Such a tiny tiny minority of "geek culture" shouldn't qualify this to the whole.
6) Bill Gates - Bill Gates and his foundation have done so much good recently, I'm loath to make fun of him. He's improved education and vaccination in the developing world, saving lots of lives and giving prospect to a lot of children who had none before. That's pretty much the context I see him in now - rarely the "Bill Gates is Evil" meme now. Update your Meme, man.
7) Desktop Linux - Eh, so what? Linux is improving on the desktop all the time, and Linux has come to dominate phones (and to a lesser degree) succeeded on tablets, so it's not really that farfetched.
8) PACMAN - The only time I see this is when Google brings out the doodle.
9) Tron - Maybe it's a little nostalgic, but it just had a big movie come out a few months ago. That's not nostalgia, man, that's new and cool.
If he says that he is Christ, then he's clearly publicly disclosed his "invention" 2000 years ago. The one year statutory bar prevents him from receiving a patent on this. Thus, the powers of Christ is in the public domain.
While I agree with Stallman that eBook and eBook DRM have really destroyed our freedoms with respect to books, I am having a lot of trouble understanding his tax fund proposal.
Doesn't distributing a tax fund to authors by popularity mean that I, as a person, lost the freedom to vote with my pocketbook not to pay certain authors? I have no desire for my tax dollars to go to the author of the Twilight books when I would much rather get my money to a deserving less known author who puts out a much superior work. For that matter, how do you measure popularity anyway? If the funding for authors are from a tax-payer fund, then it kind of means that people have no real direct costs to buy books, right? You can't measure it by downloads because people would download all sorts of stuff if they don't have to directly pay for it and not necessarily read it. The voluntary funding may be a good idea and has shown to work in the past - however, each of those successful voluntary funding schemes were aimed towards a rather small demographic who is passionate enough to donate - I have no idea if this idea is scalable or feasible when it's put to the market at large.
Sorry, not your mother, icknay, but the person who Asked Slashdot.
Don't Forget MIT's OpenCourseWare Intro to Computer Science lectures. It might move at a faster pace than for a high school student, but it should give your mother some idea as to how to structure the lessons and concepts.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/video-lectures/
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers and did a pretty good job at explaining fundamentals of programming to a bunch of high school sophomores and making it understandable. As I recall, you can probably go through several chapters per class because it's not so dense and impenetrable that you need bash your way through.
Here's a link to the 7th edition: http://www.amazon.com/How-Program-7th-Paul-Deitel/dp/0136117260
However, there are plenty of copies of 6th editions floating around for pretty cheap. If I recall correctly, copies of the 5th edition are even available for download for free, which makes the curriculum that much more cost-effective.
Anyway, best of luck, hope that helps.
C'mon, Google Wallet is the end of anonymous shopping? No, if you don't want to be tracked by Google Wallet, just don't use Google Wallet. If you want to stay anonymous, use cash.
And wear a hat.
And gloves.
And a fake mustache.
As of earlier today, the law's main sponsor, Dan Patrick, R-Houston, said the law is dead after support for the law collapsed.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/28032459/detail.html
For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.
Gah, what is with Mozilla following Google's every example, no matter how stupid or not? There's a good reason to keep the URL bar - it's a quick and easy way to check for phishing 2 out of 3 times. Hiding the URL bar is just dumb, because now we're reliant on Google or Mozilla or other third-party maintained lists to protect us from phishing, or we have to jump through hoops to check the URL. No, thank you!
Plus, what is wrong with keeping the URL bar where it is? I use the Omnibar addon and it adds the ability to do all sorts of query commands into the URL bar already. It works well and it's convenient to use, and best of all, I keep my URL bar (albeit it's now a long address bar that incorporates the search bar into it). Why not go that direction? Why follow Google towards stupid design decisions? Just making it look nifty is not a good reason to change something or to remove functionality and features.
The reason they don't give customer matte LCDs is because shiny screens look nicer on photographs and on showroom floors because they look perfect and pristine and oh-so-high-tech. The customer will go to the showroom (with their nice, bright, and diffuse lighting) or see the photos online and they'll think: "Wow, that's shiny, it must be new and sleek" and then whip out their credit cards.
When they take it home, they'll complain about the glare, but that doesn't matter to the manufacturers and retailers because they already had your money at that point and they know that you probably wouldn't go to the trouble of returning the laptop just because there's a bit of glare on the screen. Meanwhile, you're stuck with your crappy super-specular screen and you're going to go through any sort of mental gymnastics necessary to justify not returning it. And then, the next time you need a new computer, the same process will begin anew because we, as consumers, are idiots.
I can't quite listen to the Chinese audio since I'm at work, but based on the video alone, is it really against American troops? I only saw very generic urban warfare tactics in a very generic Chinese city and a very generic set of bunkers and pillboxes. The only "indication" that it was against American troops was a very fuzzy helicopter that might be an Apache or might be something else entirely.
In any case, so what? We in the US has been playing games where the Chinese Army was the antagonist for ages. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and Battlefield 2 are two that I can name off the top of my head.
Look, the compensation that Sony is giving out in the aftermath of the PSN attack is peanuts. It doesn't cost them a hell of a whole lot to set up. The free two games? Sony already has deals set up with developers to provide "free" games to PSN plus subscribers, the additional cost of a few extra free games to all subscribers (who might not even take advantage of it, since most of these games are ancient and they probably already have it) is marginal, at best. The one month of free PSN+ for subscribers doesn't cost much, either, since it's only a small minority with PSN+ accounts. I'd doubt that the compensation would cost them much more than a few million dollars at best.
Even if it doesn't restore full mobility, I think this is a great advancement that allows a paralyzed patient to stave off or to recover from the muscle atrophy or blood clots caused by lack of motion that occurs after the accident.
I don't know how to really respond to this except to say: "No, it won't have as much force as law (or, realistically, any force whatsoever)."
Would my request for a billion dollars in the car accident hypothetical also have the same effect as law? Would it also be operative as a legal precedent?
Before Slashdot goes into immediate outrage mode (although, by noting this, I might already be too late) over this, please note one very important thing:
This is a PROPOSED INJUNCTION BY THE PLAINTIFFS .
In our adversarial judicial system, plaintiffs will try to ask the court for as much relief as they can get away with. The courts will either accept it, accept part of it or laugh it out of court. However, merely a request for this amount of relief has zero effect on the law whatsoever. If I was injured in a minor car accident with you, I'd be well within my rights to ask the court for a billion dollars in compensation and relief. However, this doesn't mean the court will give it to me, nor does it have any real implications beyond the fact that I might come off sounding like a litigious dick.
300,000 years would be longer than there have been anatomically modern humans on Earth. If we make it, by the time we get there, we'll be a whole new species.
You know, of course, that to Microsoft and Facebook (and pretty much every other major company on the internet that dabbles in social networking), agreeing and knowing are mutually exclusive concepts.
Incidentally, here's the professor:
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~croft/FARADAY.HTML
Awesome dude. For the last 14 years, he's given the annual Faraday Christmas Children's Lecture where he messes around with physics experiments like jetting around on rollerblades and a 50 pound fire extinguisher and having a cinder block broken on his chest while laying on a bed of nails.