To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
I think you mean "imply", not "infer".
Here's what the article says: "The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests." How does that suggest a "nation wide crackdown"? The article merely states what actually happened; i.e., many journalists were arrested. I don't see anything misleading about that.
The parent is right on. The entire article reads like little more than a big advertisement for Apple. Here's a small sample.
"...there is very little merit to the physical textbook, and the education industry has been waiting for a viable solution like this for some time."
Says who? No evidence is provided to substantiate either of these claims, other than a few quotes from "a teacher" taken from an Apple promotional video(!).
"Now that there's a device that can trump the textbook in every way -- the iPad -- it's possible for us to enjoy textbooks the way they were meant to be..."
What about the iPad is the major breakthrough that uniquely positions it to "trump the textbook"? Again, nothing substantive in the article about this.
"...it's incredible that nobody had attempted to digitize textbooks before."
That would be incredible, if it were true. How long has Amazon been selling textbooks for their Kindle, as just one example?
This could go on and on, but you get the point. This iArticle is total garbage and should have never been front page material on Slashdot.
I should have mentioned also that I don't know specifically how PostGIS stacks up in comparison to Microsoft's offerings. I can tell you, though, that for the sort of thing you describe (e.g., find out how many objects lie within a given radius of some other object), PostGIS works great.
I would recommend checking out PostGIS, which works with PostgreSQL. PostGIS adds functions, data types, and projection definitions to PostgreSQL that turn PostgreSQL into a powerful spatially-enabled database server. I'ved used this combination for a number of projects, and they work great. Both are fully open sourced.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
The second half of the article, while not explicitly saying it, does suggest that if a person spends a little time learning to code they'll magically get an awesome ("high-paying", in the words of the author) job. This is a major oversimplification, at least. The author provides no convincing evidence that this is true, except for a quote from his CEO friend.
I'm going to take the plunge this summer when I can safely back up all my data and take a few days to play with it...
So you have yet to even use Ubuntu on the desktop, yet you can confidently declare it "has no chance of being a serious player". That conclusion is premature at best. Never mind that you have no idea what their tablet implementation will ultimately look/feel like.
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
Not only that, but I didn't see anything about how the study subjects were selected or how balanced the numbers of subjects in each category were. And there appeared to be no real statistical analysis of the results at all. Without a lot more information, I don't see how this qualified as front page material on Slashdot.
The answer to "How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?" is not, "by using an optical drive." Sorry. Your "external USB burner" is still an optical drive.
While I find the whole "let's escape our problems on Earth by migrating to space" fantasy interesting, I think it's worth remembering that, at our present rate of consumption, we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else. For details, I'd suggest reading this excellent post from physicist Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog. It was featured on Slashdot a while back.
The basic point is that, given our current situation, proposing a future in space is essentially a distraction that ignores the problems we will absolutely have to solve here on Earth. Hawking is probably right in that, if we manage to survive long enough, we will eventually establish colonies on other worlds. But if we can't focus on immediate challenges here, we'll never get there.
The article gets started by claiming that, because of the App Store, programming "is now one of the most stylish and dramatically lucrative jobs in the world." The author's evidence? The "the two cousins who made Angry Birds" and "the brothers who made Doodle Jump". Right. There were no outlier cases of a few lucky people getting ridiculously rich off of software until Apple came along with their App Store.
The rest of the article goes more or less downhill from there. No real evidence for anything, just a few anecdotes, lots of baseless speculation, and unfettered fawning over Apple.
I could accept this if it were categorized in the "humor" section.
I will echo the support for the open-source statistics package R. R is incredibly powerful, and in the natural sciences it is fast becoming the standard statistics software.
I will also echo the sentiment that, by itself, R is fairly low-level and typically requires at least some simple programming to get what you want.
However, there is a very nice graphical front end for R called RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net/). With RKWard, importing and exporting data, running basic analyses on it (descriptive statistics, linear regression, t-tests, etc.), and producing basic graphs is very straightforward and does not require detailed knowledge of the R language. Plus, RKWard is also a nice development environment for writing R code, so if you want to take your project further, you can easily do so. So, I'd recommend giving RKWard + R a look.
I was just about to post something similar. I totally agree -- we've basically heard one side of the story at this point. Plus, I find it unlikely that the University would refuse to release the video if Haught's protests were absolutely baseless. In the absence of any evidence for some sort of pro-Christian agenda on the part of the University, attributing the decision to "cowardly and intellectually dishonest actions" seems quite premature. It is quite possible that Coyne's perceptions of how the debate played out are not shared by less biased observers.
Concluding, from this bug, "that many eyes don't really make (security) bugs shallow" is absolutely not justified. This is a single anecdote (sample size = 1), and there is no good or easy way to compare this to what would have happened had the code been closed. One could just as easily claim that if the code were not open, it would have been 10 more years before the bug was uncovered.
If you RTFA, it doesn't claim anywhere that "Free Staters" are behind this initiative. Nor does it even mention the Free State Project. The assertion on the Slashdot summary that this is a result of the Free State Project might be correct, but it would be nice to see some evidence backing this up.
I agree with you that skepticism is important in science (and critical thinking in general). However, I think the big problem with this bill is that it explicitly calls evolution a "controversial scientific topic". Evolution is not controversial. Biologists may argue about the details of how evolution happens, but they don't dispute that evolution does happen. Just as bad, this bill lists "human cloning" along with evolution and climate change, which is very misleading. Human cloning is a technology, not a line of scientific inquiry like evolution and climate change are. And it is controversial for ethical and moral reasons, entirely unlike evolution and climate change. So yes, skepticism is good, but the language and assumptions used in this bill seem to me to be rather bad.
Why is 2 hours of flight time an apparent selling point for this thing? Why would anyone need or want to hover a few feet above the surface of a lake for 2 hours nonstop? Granted, you can "fly" much longer than in more traditional jetpacks, but it seems a bit like bragging about a car that can go 600 miles on a single tank but is permanently tethered to the gas station.
I can imagine that some folks who are strongly opposed to "GM" crops and animals might actually be more accepting of this technology. For one thing, there wouldn't be the concern about modified organisms polluting natural populations with their engineered genes or escaping and propagating in the wild. Furthermore, I can see fewer potential ethical arguments against culturing meat-like food in a factory compared to engineering real, live animals and raising them on factory farms.
The headline on this one appears to be quite a stretch. The article is interesting, but claiming that "ski lifts could help get cargo traffic off the road" does not seem remotely realistic in the near future. All of the examples of modern ropeways discussed in the article were systems that spanned less than 10 km, or even less than 1 km (as far as I noted, anyway). To even think about a system that could possibly displace cargo traffic on the roads on a significant scale, you'd probably be talking about hundreds of kilometers. At such short distances, you might consider moving cargo around a large city and its suburbs or something like that, but then the complexity of the distribution network that would be required would likely be a limiting factor, especially when the roads are already there.
I must admit, I'm a bit disappointed to see that Slashdot is still using the "Borg" image to represent Microsoft. Not only has Bill Gates decisively moved on to a very different line of work (e.g., fighting globally devastating diseases), but the industry landscape has changed dramatically since the days when this image was created. It seems a bit silly to single out Microsoft and its former leader as "the Borg" these days, given the behavior, influence, and tactics of other industry giants (e.g., Apple).
It's that simple. NSF's annual budget = $7.4 billion (source: NSF). That's about a week in a half in Iraq, if memory serves.
You're exactly right. Pretending that "let the public identify wasteful NSF grants" is actually a meaningful way to reduce the deficit is beyond ridiculous. Doing some quick calculating using Wikipedia data, it looks like the NSF's entire operating budget, not just grants, is less than 0.2% of federal expenditures. And this "YouCut" initiative is seriously(?) suggesting we reduce the deficit by having the U.S. public haphazardly pick through thousands of proposals, many of which are probably worth a few $100,000 or less. What a colossal waste of time. More than anything else, it looks like a great way to make it seem like action is being taken while completely ignoring the real problems that are burying us in debt.
I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to Chinese authorities leading to the arrest of political dissidents, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in China. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.
The vast majority of the article discusses either cash register security or ATM security. By way of analogy, we're supposed to use this information to conclude that vendor liability for software bugs would be a good idea, too.
However, he never discusses any details of how this would actually be implemented, what the laws might look like, how it might work in contracts, what exceptions there might be, what constitutes a "critical" (i.e., liability-worthy) bug, etc. Consequently, it's virtually impossible to answer the question of how this will impact OSS. We need specific ideas to actually try to tackle that one.
I agree -- $390 is too expensive for an extremely limited-functionality thin client. Especially one like this that locks you into Windows CE and IE. Blah.
A better option, in my opinion, is to use cheap, old hardware (e.g. PIIs), get rid of everything but the network card, and net-boot PXES or similar Linux-based thin client software. This is a truly inexpensive, low-maintenance (no moving parts on the machine) option.
A tiered internet would be the same as keeping the peasants out of libraries. It's a huge step *backwards*.
I'm not quite sure about your analogy. Under a two-tiered Internet, the content providers pay extra, not the "peasants" who are merely browsing in the "library." In other words, you have to have more resources to publish information, which is how existing print media has always worked.
Slashdot Mirror
To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
I think you mean "imply", not "infer".
Here's what the article says: "The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests." How does that suggest a "nation wide crackdown"? The article merely states what actually happened; i.e., many journalists were arrested. I don't see anything misleading about that.
The parent is right on. The entire article reads like little more than a big advertisement for Apple. Here's a small sample.
"...there is very little merit to the physical textbook, and the education industry has been waiting for a viable solution like this for some time."
Says who? No evidence is provided to substantiate either of these claims, other than a few quotes from "a teacher" taken from an Apple promotional video(!).
"Now that there's a device that can trump the textbook in every way -- the iPad -- it's possible for us to enjoy textbooks the way they were meant to be..."
What about the iPad is the major breakthrough that uniquely positions it to "trump the textbook"? Again, nothing substantive in the article about this.
"...it's incredible that nobody had attempted to digitize textbooks before."
That would be incredible, if it were true. How long has Amazon been selling textbooks for their Kindle, as just one example?
This could go on and on, but you get the point. This iArticle is total garbage and should have never been front page material on Slashdot.
I should have mentioned also that I don't know specifically how PostGIS stacks up in comparison to Microsoft's offerings. I can tell you, though, that for the sort of thing you describe (e.g., find out how many objects lie within a given radius of some other object), PostGIS works great.
I would recommend checking out PostGIS, which works with PostgreSQL. PostGIS adds functions, data types, and projection definitions to PostgreSQL that turn PostgreSQL into a powerful spatially-enabled database server. I'ved used this combination for a number of projects, and they work great. Both are fully open sourced.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
The second half of the article, while not explicitly saying it, does suggest that if a person spends a little time learning to code they'll magically get an awesome ("high-paying", in the words of the author) job. This is a major oversimplification, at least. The author provides no convincing evidence that this is true, except for a quote from his CEO friend.
I'm going to take the plunge this summer when I can safely back up all my data and take a few days to play with it...
So you have yet to even use Ubuntu on the desktop, yet you can confidently declare it "has no chance of being a serious player". That conclusion is premature at best. Never mind that you have no idea what their tablet implementation will ultimately look/feel like.
Apple is firmly established as the tablet giant right now, there is no doubt about that. However, despite the huge variety of android tablets on the market, none of them have really been all that successful in gaining market share. I think Silber is probably right that there is room for a new player, and if they can enter the market soon with a good product, they might have a chance. I wish them luck!
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
Not only that, but I didn't see anything about how the study subjects were selected or how balanced the numbers of subjects in each category were. And there appeared to be no real statistical analysis of the results at all. Without a lot more information, I don't see how this qualified as front page material on Slashdot.
The answer to "How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?" is not, "by using an optical drive." Sorry. Your "external USB burner" is still an optical drive.
While I find the whole "let's escape our problems on Earth by migrating to space" fantasy interesting, I think it's worth remembering that, at our present rate of consumption, we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else. For details, I'd suggest reading this excellent post from physicist Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog. It was featured on Slashdot a while back.
The basic point is that, given our current situation, proposing a future in space is essentially a distraction that ignores the problems we will absolutely have to solve here on Earth. Hawking is probably right in that, if we manage to survive long enough, we will eventually establish colonies on other worlds. But if we can't focus on immediate challenges here, we'll never get there.
The article gets started by claiming that, because of the App Store, programming "is now one of the most stylish and dramatically lucrative jobs in the world." The author's evidence? The "the two cousins who made Angry Birds" and "the brothers who made Doodle Jump". Right. There were no outlier cases of a few lucky people getting ridiculously rich off of software until Apple came along with their App Store.
The rest of the article goes more or less downhill from there. No real evidence for anything, just a few anecdotes, lots of baseless speculation, and unfettered fawning over Apple.
I could accept this if it were categorized in the "humor" section.
I will echo the support for the open-source statistics package R. R is incredibly powerful, and in the natural sciences it is fast becoming the standard statistics software.
I will also echo the sentiment that, by itself, R is fairly low-level and typically requires at least some simple programming to get what you want.
However, there is a very nice graphical front end for R called RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net/). With RKWard, importing and exporting data, running basic analyses on it (descriptive statistics, linear regression, t-tests, etc.), and producing basic graphs is very straightforward and does not require detailed knowledge of the R language. Plus, RKWard is also a nice development environment for writing R code, so if you want to take your project further, you can easily do so. So, I'd recommend giving RKWard + R a look.
I was just about to post something similar. I totally agree -- we've basically heard one side of the story at this point. Plus, I find it unlikely that the University would refuse to release the video if Haught's protests were absolutely baseless. In the absence of any evidence for some sort of pro-Christian agenda on the part of the University, attributing the decision to "cowardly and intellectually dishonest actions" seems quite premature. It is quite possible that Coyne's perceptions of how the debate played out are not shared by less biased observers.
Concluding, from this bug, "that many eyes don't really make (security) bugs shallow" is absolutely not justified. This is a single anecdote (sample size = 1), and there is no good or easy way to compare this to what would have happened had the code been closed. One could just as easily claim that if the code were not open, it would have been 10 more years before the bug was uncovered.
If you RTFA, it doesn't claim anywhere that "Free Staters" are behind this initiative. Nor does it even mention the Free State Project. The assertion on the Slashdot summary that this is a result of the Free State Project might be correct, but it would be nice to see some evidence backing this up.
I agree with you that skepticism is important in science (and critical thinking in general). However, I think the big problem with this bill is that it explicitly calls evolution a "controversial scientific topic". Evolution is not controversial. Biologists may argue about the details of how evolution happens, but they don't dispute that evolution does happen. Just as bad, this bill lists "human cloning" along with evolution and climate change, which is very misleading. Human cloning is a technology, not a line of scientific inquiry like evolution and climate change are. And it is controversial for ethical and moral reasons, entirely unlike evolution and climate change. So yes, skepticism is good, but the language and assumptions used in this bill seem to me to be rather bad.
Why is 2 hours of flight time an apparent selling point for this thing? Why would anyone need or want to hover a few feet above the surface of a lake for 2 hours nonstop? Granted, you can "fly" much longer than in more traditional jetpacks, but it seems a bit like bragging about a car that can go 600 miles on a single tank but is permanently tethered to the gas station.
That said, it sure looks fun to try.
I can imagine that some folks who are strongly opposed to "GM" crops and animals might actually be more accepting of this technology. For one thing, there wouldn't be the concern about modified organisms polluting natural populations with their engineered genes or escaping and propagating in the wild. Furthermore, I can see fewer potential ethical arguments against culturing meat-like food in a factory compared to engineering real, live animals and raising them on factory farms.
The headline on this one appears to be quite a stretch. The article is interesting, but claiming that "ski lifts could help get cargo traffic off the road" does not seem remotely realistic in the near future. All of the examples of modern ropeways discussed in the article were systems that spanned less than 10 km, or even less than 1 km (as far as I noted, anyway). To even think about a system that could possibly displace cargo traffic on the roads on a significant scale, you'd probably be talking about hundreds of kilometers. At such short distances, you might consider moving cargo around a large city and its suburbs or something like that, but then the complexity of the distribution network that would be required would likely be a limiting factor, especially when the roads are already there.
I must admit, I'm a bit disappointed to see that Slashdot is still using the "Borg" image to represent Microsoft. Not only has Bill Gates decisively moved on to a very different line of work (e.g., fighting globally devastating diseases), but the industry landscape has changed dramatically since the days when this image was created. It seems a bit silly to single out Microsoft and its former leader as "the Borg" these days, given the behavior, influence, and tactics of other industry giants (e.g., Apple).
It's that simple. NSF's annual budget = $7.4 billion (source: NSF). That's about a week in a half in Iraq, if memory serves.
You're exactly right. Pretending that "let the public identify wasteful NSF grants" is actually a meaningful way to reduce the deficit is beyond ridiculous. Doing some quick calculating using Wikipedia data, it looks like the NSF's entire operating budget, not just grants, is less than 0.2% of federal expenditures. And this "YouCut" initiative is seriously(?) suggesting we reduce the deficit by having the U.S. public haphazardly pick through thousands of proposals, many of which are probably worth a few $100,000 or less. What a colossal waste of time. More than anything else, it looks like a great way to make it seem like action is being taken while completely ignoring the real problems that are burying us in debt.
I think you're right -- "compliance with local law" could be a very dangerous euphemism.
I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to Chinese authorities leading to the arrest of political dissidents, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in China. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.
The vast majority of the article discusses either cash register security or ATM security. By way of analogy, we're supposed to use this information to conclude that vendor liability for software bugs would be a good idea, too.
However, he never discusses any details of how this would actually be implemented, what the laws might look like, how it might work in contracts, what exceptions there might be, what constitutes a "critical" (i.e., liability-worthy) bug, etc. Consequently, it's virtually impossible to answer the question of how this will impact OSS. We need specific ideas to actually try to tackle that one.
I agree -- $390 is too expensive for an extremely limited-functionality thin client. Especially one like this that locks you into Windows CE and IE. Blah. A better option, in my opinion, is to use cheap, old hardware (e.g. PIIs), get rid of everything but the network card, and net-boot PXES or similar Linux-based thin client software. This is a truly inexpensive, low-maintenance (no moving parts on the machine) option.
A tiered internet would be the same as keeping the peasants out of libraries. It's a huge step *backwards*. I'm not quite sure about your analogy. Under a two-tiered Internet, the content providers pay extra, not the "peasants" who are merely browsing in the "library." In other words, you have to have more resources to publish information, which is how existing print media has always worked.