It's a trick question. Though any system of justice should strive to minimize it, collateral damage is unavoidable. Your only choice is whether it's caused by action or inaction.
Better to let a thousand guilty go free than to imprison even one innocent...
Of course none of us want to be the innocent guy in jail for a murder he didn't commit, but also of course, none of us want to be the victim of the thousand serial murderers you let free.
There's a reason for a standard of "reasonable doubt".
Then watch the entire footage those "clips" the Daily Show edits. I'm a Daily Show and Colbert fan, but please don't take them as real journalists. Even they themselves say that.
True and yet... an awful lot of journalists don't even make it to that low bar.
On one hand, it's a little bad to forever hold politicians accountable to everything they've ever said, in that it rewards rigidity of thinking and punishes the kind of intellectual and political honesty it takes to be able to admit publically that you were wrong and you've changed your mind.
On the other hand, it's a lot bad to not hold them accountable at all to their past statements.
It should be someone's job to do that research and, when relevant, put the positions into context. Is this not the job of a political journalist? Should not some real journalist be able to carve out a niche for themselves by doing the Daily Show style job of saying, "Wait a minute, here's Rudy '9/11' Giuliani claiming that there were no domestic terrorist attacks during the Bush Administration, and he almost can't complete a sentence without referencing one..."?
I think you'd be able to do that job pretty well even in a non-partisan way -- politicians of every stripe and creed walk into those situations constantly.
Journalists no longer have to beat the other local journalists to the punch, they have to beat _every_ journalist to the punch. Welcome to the internet.
Expounding a bit on that:
We also have a 24-hour constant news cycle now, rather than having (more or less) a single daily window, either the nightly news if you were a broadcast journalist or the morning paper if you were a print journalist. In other words, previously you were only racing the other local journalists, and if you all managed to get the story on the same day, it was essentially a tie.
I wouldn't consider myself an expert on this issue, but I have done a few years of development work for the travel industry in the past, including direct interface with the GDSs (basically, the central systems such as Worldspan or Sabre which provide airfare pricing/availability information for the flights on most airlines). The article (probably unintentionally) misses a few important things:
1) ITA's software is, by far, not the only way to get at the flight/reservation information from the GDSs. So, yeah, maybe Google has the power to analyze your data and say, "Hmmm... this guy just bought a luxury car, I'm going to mark up all the flights I offer him by an extra $100", but there still will be a bunch of other people willing to sell it to you for something closer to the "real" price.
2) Some carriers opt out of the GDS system entirely. For example, as far as I know, Southwest is still opting out of it, which is why you typically can't find Southwest flights for sale on most travel sites. There are some big advantages to being part of the GDS system, mainly in that it puts your product out for sale in a lot more venues -- but even if all the providers of GDS data somehow colluded to artificially raise fares, it would only make the fares of non-GDS airlines even mroe attractive.
I'm not someone who believes in the power of the free market to solve all problems, but in this case, barring the growth of some kind of ridiculous super-monopoly that the government would almost certainly break up, it really can correct for almost any kind of insidiousness on the part of Google or anyone else that I can imagine.
Assuming these are not purely rhetorical questions...
Are you OK with Amazon's ability to remove books from your eReader - without your consent?
I don't love it, but if push comes to shove, arrr, there be ways to be carvin' out me fair use rights in international waters.
How do you back up your reader?
Option #1: Via USB.
Option #2: Amazon (I have a Kindle) will let me download as many copies of the books I've bought that I wish to any reader associated with my account.
When it dies, would you lose your books?
Nope. Well, unless I had no other devices to read them on and was unwilling to buy another.
Would you take it with you to the beach, read it in the bath? Have it go repeatedly through the X-ray machines at airports?
Yes, yes, yes. In fact, one of the biggest draws for me is not trucking a dozen books with me on vacation.
I lend books occasionally to friends. How do you do that with your reader?
You generally can't, unless you have B&N's Nook, in which case you sometimes can do so in a limited way. Or unless you're willing to loan the reader.
Personally, I hate loaning books, because I like mine in fairly pristine condition and almost everyone I've ever let borrow one has beat the shit out of it. YMMV.
On the other hand, because both my Kindle and my wife's Kindle are associated with the same Amazon account, I can buy one copy of a book and we both can read it at the same time. That's one nice feature over dead trees, if not one that's helpful to everyone.
Short of using physical force, I can read my paper books any time I choose, privately and without restriction.
Sure -- but you have to plan ahead about what you want to read. In most cases, for me, that isn't at all an issue, but any time I'll be away from home for more than a couple days (vacations, business travel, etc.) it's really nice to know that anything I can easily carry everything I want to read in one hand. No more buying some trashy paperback in an airport bookstore because a flight delay has left me stuck in a strange airport overnight with nothing left to read, etc.
Overall -- yes, e-books are a trade-off: you lose some freedom, you gain some different freedom and convienience; whether that's a good trade or not depends on you.
Even if Amazon's selling 180 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers, not every one of those ebook sales was a choice between an ebook and a hardcover; many are a choice between an ebook and a paperback.
Obviously, ebook sales are still growing, but even limiting that number to just Amazon (which is naturally pushing the Kindle), it's still a little misleading.
Insightful as hell. If I had mod points I'd toss you one.
It does make you wonder what other kinds of jobs are disillusioning -- certainly I'd put government jobs that are actually public-facing in that bin, if in a slightly different way. I recently did some contract work for a city government and the people I worked with there had an unreal collection of stories in which they were shot at, otherwise attacked, or inappropriately urinated on or near by people. As someone who still believed that, if not exactly that people are basically good, that they didn't generally do things like that, I found it a little horrifying -- but you could tell that these people had just become desensitized to the fact that someone who was angry at something wholly unrelated to them might just walk into their office with a gun or piss on their desk.
I've also heard it claimed a number of times that software testers tended to have high divorce rates because their job forces them to be so exacting at finding fault, but I've never tried to hunt down data to confirm or refute that.
On the other hand they should use Windows if they need specialist software that is not available for Linux: this could be anything from a Reuters terminal (they do install it on your own PC these days) to an app for running a clinic.... or if they want to run Office.
Obviously, not everyone is in front of a computer most of the day at work, but people who do -- whether or not we'd like to argue that it's rational -- mostly don't want to try anything else. (My handful of friends who do factory work also do enough PC-based gaming that you're not getting them off a Windows machine, either.) Microsoft has a program that makes it dirt cheap (less than $10) to buy a home copy of Office if you use it at work, so price isn't even really a factor there either.
It's often been said that Office is the life preserver keeping Windows afloat, and I don't see that changing very soon. Probably you need something like a generation of people to come up using OpenOffice or something that isn't Office in school to start a sea change there.
Ever since I started reading slashdot parents have been used to portray the computer user with no knowledge of computers at all. I wonder for how long this will stay like that. I mean, at some point even slashdot-readers will get children.
I think it's always going to be like that, for the most part.
I mean, yeah, if down the road my kids are posting to slashdot, they can't use their father as an example of someone who's relatively clueless about computers, but they still have a mom.:)
Some people have jobs that force them to learn about computers (and most of the people I know who are at a computer full-time for work are not in that group), and some people like to figure out computer stuff as a hobby. Most people will remain mostly ignorant, and you know? That's okay. We live in a world full of lots of complex systems and machinery, and no one has the time and interest to dig deeply into all of them, nor should they.
Or to put it another way, I have family who know a ton about the inner workings of cars and not so much about the inner workings of computers, and I'm the opposite -- and there's nothing wrong with either.
Windows' dominance comes from the fact that damned near every PC sold has it preinstalled. Were all PCs shipped with Linux preinstalled, it would be dominant and MS would be dying.
That's technically true and yet misses the point completely.
Windows, whether you think it merits it or not or was simply coasting on application offerings / inertia, was what people mostly wanted. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be on damned near every PC. Microsoft would have had zero power to strongarm OEMs if they didn't have a product that was in such high demand, most consumers didn't consider there to actually be an alternative.
Silverlight is just a fancy term for a mobile version of.NET these days (well, that is my take on it)
Close -- it's essentially a subset. (At least, that's my take on it, and I also think you're probably right that at some point it essentially replaces the compact framework.)
Pornography is not created as "art". Its sole purpose is for people to look at it and then self-abuse themselves into a climax. That is not sex. Sex requires two people.
Because multiple people never watch pornography together, right?
It's fine that you prefer to have a puritanical worldview, but let's not pretend it's held by everyone or in some way rationally based.
So it's not so much Desktop compatibility, as it is trying to simply move the existing UI conventions to mobile (unless that is what you meant by compatibility).
It wasn't, but that's a really interesting observation.
I kind of hate touchscreens (especially on something like an mp3 player -- buttons I can operate without looking at decreases my chance of dying while driving or running) but I have to agree that on something like today's incarnation of a smartphone, there isn't any other form of UI that's even competitive in terms of its appropriateness, and it makes sense that whoever "gets" that first is really who has the headstart.
Is this a release that, purely on quality/merit (let's not talk about mindshare or openness -- presumably both are lost causes), is at all competitive with the alternatives?
In a sense it's amazing to me, given how much longer Microsoft's been trying to get something done in the Mobile arena, that they have been completely unable to gain any traction so far. Were Windows CE etc. trying too hard to be compatible with Desktop Windows? I don't know, but it's baffling that a company with so much of a headstart over would now be its chief competitors managed so little.
It's hard to point to openness as the reason with Apple's walled garden as a ready counterpoint, but what did go wrong?
You said they did not own up to a problem, that's false, they did.
I don't really consider admitting to a problem while attempting to make a case that all other phones have the same problem (which is true up to a point for some phones, but mostly is just misleading because it's not as nearly as severe an issue for other phones) to be owning up to the problem. At best, it's weaselly.
It's a lot like saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" rather than "I'm sorry for what I did." -- the first is technically an apology but isn't an expression of remorse.
That's a great solution unless you, say, got rid of your iPhone n-such-that-n-is-less-than-4 and signed a new contract to get a 4. Even if you get a full refund and out of the new contract, there isn't really any way to go back to 'previous phone and no longer stuck in a contract.'
That won't be everyone who bought an iPhone 4, but I bet it's a lot of people.
A person who doesn't know shit won't learn enough to do the job you want by getting a certificate, true. You should not take possession of a cert as evidence that a person is qualified to do a job without further investigation, also true.
However, a person who mostly knows how to do the job you want will usually learn a little something by getting the relevant cert -- if only a basic understanding of the pieces of the technology or framework in question that haven't yet been relevant to the work they've done with it. They might learn about easier or cleaner ways to solve problems that they already can deal with in a less efficient way. They might learn about some unintended or hidden consequences of an approach they usually take to a problem. These are the kinds of things a person with genuine experience with a technology will pick up in the process of prepping for a cert exam.
Often employers will also pay for their employees to become certified and/or provide other incentives. If that's not you or your employer, sorry, but don't hate on other developers for having had jobs that were actually willing to put money on the line for their employees to keep up with evolving technology.
I'm familiar with OpenLayers. I don't think it's as trivial to get running (and certainly won't look as smooth, if for some reason you care -- I don't, but maybe for a marketing campaign or something it could be seen as important) as the equivalent in SilverLight.
YMMV.
Frankly, there are about a million things a JavaScript-based solution will do better than SilverLight. You don't have to get your panties in a twist about the small, small number of things it currently does better.
Meaning that they have already got a library for this build in?
Essentially, yeah -- this kind of zooming is a built-in function of Silverlight. They call it Deep Zoom and here's a bit of an article about it with some code/markup examples linked if you're curious.
Here's another interesting example of the concept in action -- obviously you'd need Silverlight or Moonlight to view it.
None of this is anything you couldn't do with another technology -- it's just that Silverlight makes it fast/easy to throw together as a developer. I've never had a project that would make a particularly good use of this feature (or Silverlight at all, actually), but a giant map of the sky is pretty much the perfect case for it.
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash
on
Recomputing the Sky
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.
Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"
For one reason or another, this news is worrisome to me. In a hundred years this may be considered a mistake. If a million people die from malaria annually, that's an extra metropolis we're adding to the world each year.
In a vacuum that might be true, but in practice, as societies move beyond the need for (on average) each couple to have a bunch of children just to get a couple to survive to breed, birth rates go way down, one way or another. It's possible this trend would not hold true for malaria-stricken countries, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. I don't doubt you, but I'm surprised to hear it. Out of curiousity, do you have any idea when that happened?
(I've been out of travel for a few years now, so I'm not as informed anymore as I could be.)
It's a trick question. Though any system of justice should strive to minimize it, collateral damage is unavoidable. Your only choice is whether it's caused by action or inaction.
From a security perspective, they really are.
From a "getting your actual work done with a minimum of hassle" perspective, not so much.
Unfortunately, these are competing concerns.
Better to let a thousand guilty go free than to imprison even one innocent...
Of course none of us want to be the innocent guy in jail for a murder he didn't commit, but also of course, none of us want to be the victim of the thousand serial murderers you let free.
There's a reason for a standard of "reasonable doubt".
Then watch the entire footage those "clips" the Daily Show edits.
I'm a Daily Show and Colbert fan, but please don't take them as real journalists. Even they themselves say that.
True and yet... an awful lot of journalists don't even make it to that low bar.
On one hand, it's a little bad to forever hold politicians accountable to everything they've ever said, in that it rewards rigidity of thinking and punishes the kind of intellectual and political honesty it takes to be able to admit publically that you were wrong and you've changed your mind.
On the other hand, it's a lot bad to not hold them accountable at all to their past statements.
It should be someone's job to do that research and, when relevant, put the positions into context. Is this not the job of a political journalist? Should not some real journalist be able to carve out a niche for themselves by doing the Daily Show style job of saying, "Wait a minute, here's Rudy '9/11' Giuliani claiming that there were no domestic terrorist attacks during the Bush Administration, and he almost can't complete a sentence without referencing one..."?
I think you'd be able to do that job pretty well even in a non-partisan way -- politicians of every stripe and creed walk into those situations constantly.
Journalists no longer have to beat the other local journalists to the punch, they have to beat _every_ journalist to the punch. Welcome to the internet.
Expounding a bit on that:
We also have a 24-hour constant news cycle now, rather than having (more or less) a single daily window, either the nightly news if you were a broadcast journalist or the morning paper if you were a print journalist. In other words, previously you were only racing the other local journalists, and if you all managed to get the story on the same day, it was essentially a tie.
I wouldn't consider myself an expert on this issue, but I have done a few years of development work for the travel industry in the past, including direct interface with the GDSs (basically, the central systems such as Worldspan or Sabre which provide airfare pricing/availability information for the flights on most airlines). The article (probably unintentionally) misses a few important things:
1) ITA's software is, by far, not the only way to get at the flight/reservation information from the GDSs. So, yeah, maybe Google has the power to analyze your data and say, "Hmmm... this guy just bought a luxury car, I'm going to mark up all the flights I offer him by an extra $100", but there still will be a bunch of other people willing to sell it to you for something closer to the "real" price.
2) Some carriers opt out of the GDS system entirely. For example, as far as I know, Southwest is still opting out of it, which is why you typically can't find Southwest flights for sale on most travel sites. There are some big advantages to being part of the GDS system, mainly in that it puts your product out for sale in a lot more venues -- but even if all the providers of GDS data somehow colluded to artificially raise fares, it would only make the fares of non-GDS airlines even mroe attractive.
I'm not someone who believes in the power of the free market to solve all problems, but in this case, barring the growth of some kind of ridiculous super-monopoly that the government would almost certainly break up, it really can correct for almost any kind of insidiousness on the part of Google or anyone else that I can imagine.
Assuming these are not purely rhetorical questions...
Are you OK with Amazon's ability to remove books from your eReader - without your consent?
I don't love it, but if push comes to shove, arrr, there be ways to be carvin' out me fair use rights in international waters.
How do you back up your reader?
Option #1: Via USB.
Option #2: Amazon (I have a Kindle) will let me download as many copies of the books I've bought that I wish to any reader associated with my account.
When it dies, would you lose your books?
Nope. Well, unless I had no other devices to read them on and was unwilling to buy another.
Would you take it with you to the beach, read it in the bath? Have it go repeatedly through the X-ray machines at airports?
Yes, yes, yes. In fact, one of the biggest draws for me is not trucking a dozen books with me on vacation.
I lend books occasionally to friends. How do you do that with your reader?
You generally can't, unless you have B&N's Nook, in which case you sometimes can do so in a limited way. Or unless you're willing to loan the reader.
Personally, I hate loaning books, because I like mine in fairly pristine condition and almost everyone I've ever let borrow one has beat the shit out of it. YMMV.
On the other hand, because both my Kindle and my wife's Kindle are associated with the same Amazon account, I can buy one copy of a book and we both can read it at the same time. That's one nice feature over dead trees, if not one that's helpful to everyone.
Short of using physical force, I can read my paper books any time I choose, privately and without restriction.
Sure -- but you have to plan ahead about what you want to read. In most cases, for me, that isn't at all an issue, but any time I'll be away from home for more than a couple days (vacations, business travel, etc.) it's really nice to know that anything I can easily carry everything I want to read in one hand. No more buying some trashy paperback in an airport bookstore because a flight delay has left me stuck in a strange airport overnight with nothing left to read, etc.
Overall -- yes, e-books are a trade-off: you lose some freedom, you gain some different freedom and convienience; whether that's a good trade or not depends on you.
Even if Amazon's selling 180 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers, not every one of those ebook sales was a choice between an ebook and a hardcover; many are a choice between an ebook and a paperback.
Obviously, ebook sales are still growing, but even limiting that number to just Amazon (which is naturally pushing the Kindle), it's still a little misleading.
Insightful as hell. If I had mod points I'd toss you one.
It does make you wonder what other kinds of jobs are disillusioning -- certainly I'd put government jobs that are actually public-facing in that bin, if in a slightly different way. I recently did some contract work for a city government and the people I worked with there had an unreal collection of stories in which they were shot at, otherwise attacked, or inappropriately urinated on or near by people. As someone who still believed that, if not exactly that people are basically good, that they didn't generally do things like that, I found it a little horrifying -- but you could tell that these people had just become desensitized to the fact that someone who was angry at something wholly unrelated to them might just walk into their office with a gun or piss on their desk.
I've also heard it claimed a number of times that software testers tended to have high divorce rates because their job forces them to be so exacting at finding fault, but I've never tried to hunt down data to confirm or refute that.
On the other hand they should use Windows if they need specialist software that is not available for Linux: this could be anything from a Reuters terminal (they do install it on your own PC these days) to an app for running a clinic. ... or if they want to run Office.
Obviously, not everyone is in front of a computer most of the day at work, but people who do -- whether or not we'd like to argue that it's rational -- mostly don't want to try anything else. (My handful of friends who do factory work also do enough PC-based gaming that you're not getting them off a Windows machine, either.) Microsoft has a program that makes it dirt cheap (less than $10) to buy a home copy of Office if you use it at work, so price isn't even really a factor there either.
It's often been said that Office is the life preserver keeping Windows afloat, and I don't see that changing very soon. Probably you need something like a generation of people to come up using OpenOffice or something that isn't Office in school to start a sea change there.
Ever since I started reading slashdot parents have been used to portray the computer user with no knowledge of computers at all. I wonder for how long this will stay like that. I mean, at some point even slashdot-readers will get children.
I think it's always going to be like that, for the most part.
I mean, yeah, if down the road my kids are posting to slashdot, they can't use their father as an example of someone who's relatively clueless about computers, but they still have a mom. :)
Some people have jobs that force them to learn about computers (and most of the people I know who are at a computer full-time for work are not in that group), and some people like to figure out computer stuff as a hobby. Most people will remain mostly ignorant, and you know? That's okay. We live in a world full of lots of complex systems and machinery, and no one has the time and interest to dig deeply into all of them, nor should they.
Or to put it another way, I have family who know a ton about the inner workings of cars and not so much about the inner workings of computers, and I'm the opposite -- and there's nothing wrong with either.
Windows' dominance comes from the fact that damned near every PC sold has it preinstalled. Were all PCs shipped with Linux preinstalled, it would be dominant and MS would be dying.
That's technically true and yet misses the point completely.
Windows, whether you think it merits it or not or was simply coasting on application offerings / inertia, was what people mostly wanted. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be on damned near every PC. Microsoft would have had zero power to strongarm OEMs if they didn't have a product that was in such high demand, most consumers didn't consider there to actually be an alternative.
Silverlight is just a fancy term for a mobile version of .NET these days (well, that is my take on it)
Close -- it's essentially a subset. (At least, that's my take on it, and I also think you're probably right that at some point it essentially replaces the compact framework.)
Pornography is not created as "art". Its sole purpose is for people to look at it and then self-abuse themselves into a climax. That is not sex. Sex requires two people.
Because multiple people never watch pornography together, right?
It's fine that you prefer to have a puritanical worldview, but let's not pretend it's held by everyone or in some way rationally based.
So it's not so much Desktop compatibility, as it is trying to simply move the existing UI conventions to mobile (unless that is what you meant by compatibility).
It wasn't, but that's a really interesting observation.
I kind of hate touchscreens (especially on something like an mp3 player -- buttons I can operate without looking at decreases my chance of dying while driving or running) but I have to agree that on something like today's incarnation of a smartphone, there isn't any other form of UI that's even competitive in terms of its appropriateness, and it makes sense that whoever "gets" that first is really who has the headstart.
When will the US understand that sex is not bad, evil or something that should be banned from adults?
I figure it'll be about a fortyear after we adopt the metric system.
Of course, since using kilometers is proven to turn you socialist, who knows when that will be?
Is this a release that, purely on quality/merit (let's not talk about mindshare or openness -- presumably both are lost causes), is at all competitive with the alternatives?
In a sense it's amazing to me, given how much longer Microsoft's been trying to get something done in the Mobile arena, that they have been completely unable to gain any traction so far. Were Windows CE etc. trying too hard to be compatible with Desktop Windows? I don't know, but it's baffling that a company with so much of a headstart over would now be its chief competitors managed so little.
It's hard to point to openness as the reason with Apple's walled garden as a ready counterpoint, but what did go wrong?
You said they did not own up to a problem, that's false, they did.
I don't really consider admitting to a problem while attempting to make a case that all other phones have the same problem (which is true up to a point for some phones, but mostly is just misleading because it's not as nearly as severe an issue for other phones) to be owning up to the problem. At best, it's weaselly.
It's a lot like saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" rather than "I'm sorry for what I did." -- the first is technically an apology but isn't an expression of remorse.
That's a great solution unless you, say, got rid of your iPhone n-such-that-n-is-less-than-4 and signed a new contract to get a 4. Even if you get a full refund and out of the new contract, there isn't really any way to go back to 'previous phone and no longer stuck in a contract.'
That won't be everyone who bought an iPhone 4, but I bet it's a lot of people.
That is, no offense, a dumb outlook to have.
A person who doesn't know shit won't learn enough to do the job you want by getting a certificate, true. You should not take possession of a cert as evidence that a person is qualified to do a job without further investigation, also true.
However, a person who mostly knows how to do the job you want will usually learn a little something by getting the relevant cert -- if only a basic understanding of the pieces of the technology or framework in question that haven't yet been relevant to the work they've done with it. They might learn about easier or cleaner ways to solve problems that they already can deal with in a less efficient way. They might learn about some unintended or hidden consequences of an approach they usually take to a problem. These are the kinds of things a person with genuine experience with a technology will pick up in the process of prepping for a cert exam.
Often employers will also pay for their employees to become certified and/or provide other incentives. If that's not you or your employer, sorry, but don't hate on other developers for having had jobs that were actually willing to put money on the line for their employees to keep up with evolving technology.
I'm familiar with OpenLayers. I don't think it's as trivial to get running (and certainly won't look as smooth, if for some reason you care -- I don't, but maybe for a marketing campaign or something it could be seen as important) as the equivalent in SilverLight.
YMMV.
Frankly, there are about a million things a JavaScript-based solution will do better than SilverLight. You don't have to get your panties in a twist about the small, small number of things it currently does better.
Meaning that they have already got a library for this build in?
Essentially, yeah -- this kind of zooming is a built-in function of Silverlight. They call it Deep Zoom and here's a bit of an article about it with some code/markup examples linked if you're curious.
Here's another interesting example of the concept in action -- obviously you'd need Silverlight or Moonlight to view it.
None of this is anything you couldn't do with another technology -- it's just that Silverlight makes it fast/easy to throw together as a developer. I've never had a project that would make a particularly good use of this feature (or Silverlight at all, actually), but a giant map of the sky is pretty much the perfect case for it.
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.
Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"
For one reason or another, this news is worrisome to me. In a hundred years this may be considered a mistake. If a million people die from malaria annually, that's an extra metropolis we're adding to the world each year.
In a vacuum that might be true, but in practice, as societies move beyond the need for (on average) each couple to have a bunch of children just to get a couple to survive to breed, birth rates go way down, one way or another. It's possible this trend would not hold true for malaria-stricken countries, but I wouldn't bet on it.