What? I'm a whackjob that believes in the Illuminati as a secret, nefarious society because I can read and quote the act?
You apparently failed to read beyond the part you emphasized, as the next words show how silly this whole affair is: "as is enjoyed by foreign governments." All your quote says is, INTERPOL is to be treated the same as every foreign government that has an embassy in the US. There is literally nothing to get excited about here.
You make this claim, that terrorists don't attack because they are deterred by the idea of security, with no evidence. Here's some very good evidence why your theory is bunk: there are literally millions of highly visible targets in this country with no security. Anybody who wanted to could attack them trivially, compared to the relative difficulty of attacking an airplane. And yet, nobody does. There have been a handful of attempts over the past decade (most of them prompted or at least significantly helped by FBI informers), but nothing really successful (unless you consider Fort Hood, which clearly is a separate issue). If there really were all of these potential terrorists in the US, why would they just give up after deciding airlines are too hard? Why aren't they attacking all our undefended targets instead?
As a violinist with a ~$5000 instrument, I can confidently say there is a world of difference even between a $5000 instrument and a $10,000 instrument. However, it's important to note that tonal quality is only one, and not necessarily the most weighted, factor in pricing a violin. Others are age, the fame of the maker, the construction of the instrument, and the condition, all of which possibly imply good tonal quality, but don't necessarily ensure it.
In other words, there are huge divergences in quality in violins, and good violins tend to cost a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars). However, inside particular price ranges (say, $20,000-30,000) the more expensive instrument may not necessarily be the better.
While I have great sympathy for the plight of teachers, in this matter it is their fault if things go badly. All the board has done is introduce loopholes through which bad teachers can push malarkey on their students. They have not mandated that ID or creationism be taught (if they did it would be struck down immediately by the courts) and instead are taking the more insidious route of enabling teachers to do it for them.
The point being, if you refuse to teach bad science, the Texas board of education is not forcing you to do so.
Let say our culture eliminates itself, and after 50000 years nearly no traces of us will be left. Still somebody looking at the Genes of the animals *will* find ID. He will find that certain genes were selected far beyond natural selection (actively bred), sometimes different from what you would expect in nature, and that new genes which do not belong to the pool of a species will appear (insulin in bacteria).
What i want to say: there are scientific criteria for ID, but usually proposers of ID just want to justify their superstition and therefore hesitate to define these. Would i be in their place i would also hesitate, because this has the big risk of failing spectacularly.
There's a name for what you're describing: artificial selection. It has nothing to do with "intelligent design," which is the claim that all life on earth was created (more or less in its present form) by some unknowable entity. Artificial selection is part of evolutionary theory and you would find no competent evolutionary biologist who would deny its existence.
It's amazing how adept the media companies are at shooting themselves in the feet. They've come a long way with sites like hulu such that it is now more convenient to watch shows legally than illegally. If they change that by acceding to the cable companies' demands, the only result will be more piracy and less revenue.
Cable companies are going to have to realize at some point that their primary function of providing access to a lot of content that most of their customers aren't interested in isn't going to last much longer, and that they are going to become just another pipe into the home. Attempts like this to forestall the inevitable are going to fail in the long run.
You're ignoring one of the most important jobs of newspapers: investigative reporting. While blogs and news aggregators like Digg and Slashdot do provide a useful service, they don't generate much news. Digg and slashdot primarily link to traditional news sources and would be bereft of content were such organizations to disappear. For an example of the importance of this role, just look at the past few years. If it were not for the investigations carried out by major newspapers (in particular the NY Times and the Washington Post) we would not know about the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo abuses, or the role of the Bush Administration in falsifying pre-war intellegence, just to name a few.
In order for a democracy to truly function, a strong, independent press is necessary (look at Russia for a "democracy" where this element is missing). It's hard to see blogs and TV news stations taking over that role from newspapers any time soon.
While it's possible to write readable code in any language (well, maybe not Brainfuck), and just as possible to write horrible spaghetti code in the same, Perl does not encourage clean, readable code like python or ruby (my preference.) As a result, nearly all of the perl code I've seen has been virtually indecipherable to anybody not a perl veteran. More modern scripting languages like ruby and python not only have "syntactical sugar" that allows complexities to be expressed more simply (and therefore, more readably) but in general discourage things like the perl super variables that radically decrease readability. Additionally, their object-oriented structure allows for more clear code organization, making 100,000+ line programs possible to understand (look at rails, for example; hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but readable for someone without great knowledge of the codebase).
Do we really want to allow the government to move into regulating the internet just so that a few companies can't throttle torrents? Really!? Because when I think of the government regulating the internet, it reminds me of things like the FCC trying to fine CBS over Janet Jackson's boob. Or the fact that you can't say a swearword over the radio without risking a fine.
Yes, we do. This isn't just about torrents; this is about the future of a free and open net. Your "regulation" examples are really about censorship, which if anything net neutrality regulation will prevent. Right now, Comcast could decide to censor the internet, replacing all swear-words in the content you receive with asterisks, and there'd be nothing you could do about it, except, perhaps, switch to AT&T, if they offer service in your area (parts of my reasonably well-populated city in California are just now getting DSL from AT&T). Alternatively (and more likely) Comcast could decide to block Vonage, because it competes with their VoIP service, or block Hulu because it competes with their cable service. Or, more insidiously, merely degrade those services while freeing bandwidth for their own.
Internet is a utility, like phone service or electricity, creating natural monopolies. That only makes sense; it's silly to string five different phone lines to each house. And it's not inherently a problem--as long as it's well-regulated. But when monopolies or duopolies (which are nearly as bad) cease to be regulated, consumers always suffer.
As someone who took the AB exam last year, this makes no sense. While the AB test is pretty easy (except for the somewhat ridiculous time limit on the multiple choice section), the A test is pathetically so. If you look at the topics for the two exams, the A test really just covers basic programming logic. AB adds in data structures, algorithms, and design patterns like OO, which makes it more comparable to a college-level CS class.
In an era of increasing computation fluency amongst high schoolers, it seems strange that the college board would try so hard to dumb down high school level computer science.
(Totally off-topic, but is anybody else not totally thrilled with this redesign?)
The question waiting to be answered is whether or not DRM free music will encourage/facilitate more "illegal" file sharing.
No, there's no question about that, it most certainly will.
That's ridiculous. There will be (or rather is, as DRM-free music is now mainstream) no increase in piracy. Piracy requires that only one DRM-free copy gets out for it to proliferate across the internet. And guess what: every song released by the big-5 labels has been released on CD--without DRM.
DRM is not about piracy and never was. That is how to labels and move studios chose to sell it to the public (artists are going to starve in a digital world without DRM!), but it actually provides no protection against piracy. It may be difficult for someone to get unencrypted data off an HD-DVD disk, but that doesn't matter. As long as one person can do it, the data will proliferate. In other words, if DRM were about piracy in order to be effective it wouldn't have to be merely difficult to break, it would have to be impossible.
But that's not why the content producers have pushed DRM so hard. What it's really about is control. Consumers have traditionally had a great deal of control over their media, but in this digital age the content producers perceived that they could shift the balance back towards themselves, opening up new revenue streams even as they watched their markets fall. After all, if consumers had control over their media, they could put it on any player they wanted, without paying any more money for their content. That won't do. Look at the nice racket they have: do you want to play your iTunes music on linux (or, more commonly, on a non-Apple mp3 player)? Pay more money for the same content in a different form. Want to play your DVDs on your iPod? You have to re-buy it.
Faced with declining interest in their products (a smaller market), there is only two ways to increase their revenue: get more people to buy their content, or get the people that do to pay more money. DRM lets the content producers take the second approach.
You've (like many) completely misunderstood the point of Apple's code signing efforts. It's not to stop unauthorized code from running--Apple is not Microsoft, no matter how you cut it; they don't even have activation, nor any protections on their software besides serial numbers. The real point of code signing is so that when you have a piece of software that claims to be from Company X, you can be sure it's actually from Company X. It's a tool to reduce malware pretending to be legitimate software, not a means for Apple to lock down your computer.
How many people do you know that have their printer within 2 inches of the tower? In my experience: none.
You are, like many, confusing this technology with wireless USB. Which is understandable since the summary somewhat cluelessly calls it a competitor. It really isn't. Instead, it's more of a replacement for some of the more annoying implementations of bluetooth. The idea is if you just want to offload the pictures from your camera, you touch it to your computer and...it does it. No messing with with settings, no trying to get them to pair. Everything automatic. Of course, if it had a range similar to bluetooth, anybody could get your pictures. Instead, it has very good security because it almost requires contact between the sender and receiver.
In all, this is an interesting technology that could find some useful implementations, however it would have to be included in addition to a longer-range wireless technology in many devices.
*ahem* there's no reason why we would need to specifically build artificial life based on DNA or RNA for that matter, there are several analogues that do jsut as well
Yes, there is. Doing so allows synthetic biologists to use all the cellular machinery, vastly simplifying their job. In case you didn't read the article, all the team referenced has done is create an artificial genome which, while still a very important achievement that will open many new doors in synthetic biology (assuming patent protections don't slam them shut), is nowhere near the difficulty of creating an entire organism from scratch, which is what you suggest would require.
Since that's just anecdotal evidence, here's some more.
I upgraded my C2D MacBook in place to Leopard about two hours before the official release date in my time zone (thanks, FedEx). I have had a total of two kernel panics since then relating to my wireless driver, but the problem seems to have been fixed since 10.5.1. Also, Time Machine refused to work with my drive for some reason until 10.5.1. But besides those issues, it's been completely smooth.
And another difference between Vista and Leopard: Leopard is actually faster on my hardware than Tiger was.
Apple wants GSM because it's an international standard and they don't want multiple versions of the iPhone for different countries.
That would appear to not really be true. According to USA Today (as well as the rumor mill around the time of the iPhone announcement) Apple approached Verizon (which uses CDMA) before AT&T, but was turned down.
Do you not realize that more-or-less all of modern Biology is based on Evolution? That the technology used to create antibiotic and antiviral drugs is based wholly on the theory of Evolution? You state that you haven't seen enough facts to support evolution. I would assume, then, that you have some sort of alternate theory. It would seem pretty silly to just ignore a theory that has been evidenced again and again and again for the past couple centuries without some sort of incredible alternative. If that alternative is, as I would imagine if you are an evangelical Christian, some form of creationism, there is a large difference between that and a scientific theory like Evolution. In science, there is the requirement--in order for something to be considered a natural explanation--that it be disprovable. Any sort of supernatural explanation for how things are is inherently unable to be disproved, and therefore does not qualify as science.
At this point, it really is impossible to claim that there isn't enough evidence for evolution. Biologists have been directly observing evolution in action for decades. The modern theory of evolution, meanwhile, has never been found in conflict with findings of Biologists in all this time.
Perhaps at one point--early 19th century or so--one could get away with claiming that there was not enough evidence to accept evolution. But that excuse is a bit outdated in the 21st century.
The question is, is that a bad thing? We have enough problems trying to secure our electoral process without internet voting to make everything even more difficult. In addition to the security concerns (now elections can be hacked from anywhere, Russia, China, Iran) there's also the problems with coercion. With secret balloting, it's more-or-less impossible to coerce voters, because there no way to prove how someone voted. But when you can stand over their should while they vote, it becomes a lot easier.
I think the biggest question is, what problem is this trying to solve? What's wrong with non-internet voting that internet voting will fix? And will whatever that is be worth the consequences? I'm one who feels like the days of a pen-marking-paper ballots should come back (hey, we still have them in my district) and leave behind all of these more modern, more easily hacked systems. Is it really that important that the results of the election be known the of the election? Important enough that we're willing to sacrifice the security of the balloting?
I'm a junior in highschool taking Calculus, and my ti-89 has served me well. It does symbolic calculations (a feature missing on the lower-end TI calculators), which is a real boon. I also find the interface to be much nicer than the TI-83 or 84. Also, it's the most powerful calculator allowed on College Board tests (e.g., the SAT), which could potentially give you an edge.
They're not particularly cheap (I got mine for about 120USD), but I think the investment over a TI-84 is worth it.
Right. So Sprint's network is going down every day because of some poorly written application on my Treo? This kind of absurd argument merely clouds the issues. This is about Jobs' control issues, not anything technical. I would be fine if they just released an sdk saying, essentially, anyone who wants to install 3rd party applications is on their own. The best, most stable programs developed could be accepted into Apple's Special Developer Program, which would make "official" releases.
I have a problem with the status quo as described by Jobs (i.e., where only "approved" applications make it onto the iPhone) because it leaves the fate of potentially very useful applications to the political realities of Apple's relationship with Cingular (this means no VoIP). On my Treo, however, (if it supported WiFi, that is) there would be no way for Sprint or any carrier to stop me from installing a VoIP application; or, more dangerously, an application that allows me to convert an mp3 into a ringtone with out shelling out something ridiculous for the cell phone company's ringtones. It's these sort of applications that are made completely impossible through Jobs' program, and the biggest flaw with it.
Another major flaw is that this sort of thing usually cuts out the small timers. PDA programs do not take an enormous amount development effort, therefore making them perfect for small developers; it's one of the few environments left where big development studios don't have a huge advantage. However, any sort of program (which likely would have a closed, expensive development platform as opposed to the cheap, open PalmOS and Windows Mobile SDKs) would almost certainly be prohibitively priced to anyone but these large development houses.
In any case, much of the glamor of the iPhone has worn off since it has become clear that third-party applications were out. The device itself is beautiful, but it is the unexpected uses that make these devices so powerful and useful. On my Treo, I control my IR utilities using universal remote software, I have an instant-messaging client, a voice-activated launcher. All applications developed by third-parties and probably uses of the phone unexpected by Palm. I can only hope that Jobs realizes that he does not see perfectly into the minds of all consumers and does not know what we all want or need.
You know, I keep hearing this repeated over and over again, but I really don't think it's true. There are plenty of examples of contrary views getting modded up highly. For example, the second comment on the recent story about how Microsoft is abusing personal data is saying that it's fine what Microsoft is doing. This clearly goes against the slashdot "groupthink" as you call it, and yet it's rated a 5. There are plenty more examples in that story and in nearly every other controversial article.
Though it's cute to complain about the dominant subcultures of slashdot directing the discussion when one's dissenting comment gets modded down, many trolls are just that: trolls. I've found that on slashdot people with dissenting views who state them civilly and intelligently tend to get modded highly, while troll moderations seems mostly reserved for those who are determined to make jackasses of themselves, regardless of their views.
Slashdot Mirror
What? I'm a whackjob that believes in the Illuminati as a secret, nefarious society because I can read and quote the act?
You apparently failed to read beyond the part you emphasized, as the next words show how silly this whole affair is: "as is enjoyed by foreign governments." All your quote says is, INTERPOL is to be treated the same as every foreign government that has an embassy in the US. There is literally nothing to get excited about here.
You make this claim, that terrorists don't attack because they are deterred by the idea of security, with no evidence. Here's some very good evidence why your theory is bunk: there are literally millions of highly visible targets in this country with no security. Anybody who wanted to could attack them trivially, compared to the relative difficulty of attacking an airplane. And yet, nobody does. There have been a handful of attempts over the past decade (most of them prompted or at least significantly helped by FBI informers), but nothing really successful (unless you consider Fort Hood, which clearly is a separate issue). If there really were all of these potential terrorists in the US, why would they just give up after deciding airlines are too hard? Why aren't they attacking all our undefended targets instead?
Well, there is also the fact that despite decades of work nobody has been able to come up with a polynomial time solution to an NP problem.
As a violinist with a ~$5000 instrument, I can confidently say there is a world of difference even between a $5000 instrument and a $10,000 instrument. However, it's important to note that tonal quality is only one, and not necessarily the most weighted, factor in pricing a violin. Others are age, the fame of the maker, the construction of the instrument, and the condition, all of which possibly imply good tonal quality, but don't necessarily ensure it.
In other words, there are huge divergences in quality in violins, and good violins tend to cost a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars). However, inside particular price ranges (say, $20,000-30,000) the more expensive instrument may not necessarily be the better.
This is just horrible.
While I have great sympathy for the plight of teachers, in this matter it is their fault if things go badly. All the board has done is introduce loopholes through which bad teachers can push malarkey on their students. They have not mandated that ID or creationism be taught (if they did it would be struck down immediately by the courts) and instead are taking the more insidious route of enabling teachers to do it for them.
The point being, if you refuse to teach bad science, the Texas board of education is not forcing you to do so.
Let say our culture eliminates itself, and after 50000 years nearly no traces of us will be left. Still somebody looking at the Genes of the animals *will* find ID. He will find that certain genes were selected far beyond natural selection (actively bred), sometimes different from what you would expect in nature, and that new genes which do not belong to the pool of a species will appear (insulin in bacteria). What i want to say: there are scientific criteria for ID, but usually proposers of ID just want to justify their superstition and therefore hesitate to define these. Would i be in their place i would also hesitate, because this has the big risk of failing spectacularly.
There's a name for what you're describing: artificial selection. It has nothing to do with "intelligent design," which is the claim that all life on earth was created (more or less in its present form) by some unknowable entity. Artificial selection is part of evolutionary theory and you would find no competent evolutionary biologist who would deny its existence.
It's amazing how adept the media companies are at shooting themselves in the feet. They've come a long way with sites like hulu such that it is now more convenient to watch shows legally than illegally. If they change that by acceding to the cable companies' demands, the only result will be more piracy and less revenue. Cable companies are going to have to realize at some point that their primary function of providing access to a lot of content that most of their customers aren't interested in isn't going to last much longer, and that they are going to become just another pipe into the home. Attempts like this to forestall the inevitable are going to fail in the long run.
You're ignoring one of the most important jobs of newspapers: investigative reporting. While blogs and news aggregators like Digg and Slashdot do provide a useful service, they don't generate much news. Digg and slashdot primarily link to traditional news sources and would be bereft of content were such organizations to disappear. For an example of the importance of this role, just look at the past few years. If it were not for the investigations carried out by major newspapers (in particular the NY Times and the Washington Post) we would not know about the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo abuses, or the role of the Bush Administration in falsifying pre-war intellegence, just to name a few.
In order for a democracy to truly function, a strong, independent press is necessary (look at Russia for a "democracy" where this element is missing). It's hard to see blogs and TV news stations taking over that role from newspapers any time soon.
While it's possible to write readable code in any language (well, maybe not Brainfuck), and just as possible to write horrible spaghetti code in the same, Perl does not encourage clean, readable code like python or ruby (my preference.) As a result, nearly all of the perl code I've seen has been virtually indecipherable to anybody not a perl veteran. More modern scripting languages like ruby and python not only have "syntactical sugar" that allows complexities to be expressed more simply (and therefore, more readably) but in general discourage things like the perl super variables that radically decrease readability. Additionally, their object-oriented structure allows for more clear code organization, making 100,000+ line programs possible to understand (look at rails, for example; hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but readable for someone without great knowledge of the codebase).
Yes, we do. This isn't just about torrents; this is about the future of a free and open net. Your "regulation" examples are really about censorship, which if anything net neutrality regulation will prevent. Right now, Comcast could decide to censor the internet, replacing all swear-words in the content you receive with asterisks, and there'd be nothing you could do about it, except, perhaps, switch to AT&T, if they offer service in your area (parts of my reasonably well-populated city in California are just now getting DSL from AT&T). Alternatively (and more likely) Comcast could decide to block Vonage, because it competes with their VoIP service, or block Hulu because it competes with their cable service. Or, more insidiously, merely degrade those services while freeing bandwidth for their own.
Internet is a utility, like phone service or electricity, creating natural monopolies. That only makes sense; it's silly to string five different phone lines to each house. And it's not inherently a problem--as long as it's well-regulated. But when monopolies or duopolies (which are nearly as bad) cease to be regulated, consumers always suffer.
As someone who took the AB exam last year, this makes no sense. While the AB test is pretty easy (except for the somewhat ridiculous time limit on the multiple choice section), the A test is pathetically so. If you look at the topics for the two exams, the A test really just covers basic programming logic. AB adds in data structures, algorithms, and design patterns like OO, which makes it more comparable to a college-level CS class.
In an era of increasing computation fluency amongst high schoolers, it seems strange that the college board would try so hard to dumb down high school level computer science.
(Totally off-topic, but is anybody else not totally thrilled with this redesign?)
That's ridiculous. There will be (or rather is, as DRM-free music is now mainstream) no increase in piracy. Piracy requires that only one DRM-free copy gets out for it to proliferate across the internet. And guess what: every song released by the big-5 labels has been released on CD--without DRM.
DRM is not about piracy and never was. That is how to labels and move studios chose to sell it to the public (artists are going to starve in a digital world without DRM!), but it actually provides no protection against piracy. It may be difficult for someone to get unencrypted data off an HD-DVD disk, but that doesn't matter. As long as one person can do it, the data will proliferate. In other words, if DRM were about piracy in order to be effective it wouldn't have to be merely difficult to break, it would have to be impossible.
But that's not why the content producers have pushed DRM so hard. What it's really about is control. Consumers have traditionally had a great deal of control over their media, but in this digital age the content producers perceived that they could shift the balance back towards themselves, opening up new revenue streams even as they watched their markets fall. After all, if consumers had control over their media, they could put it on any player they wanted, without paying any more money for their content. That won't do. Look at the nice racket they have: do you want to play your iTunes music on linux (or, more commonly, on a non-Apple mp3 player)? Pay more money for the same content in a different form. Want to play your DVDs on your iPod? You have to re-buy it.
Faced with declining interest in their products (a smaller market), there is only two ways to increase their revenue: get more people to buy their content, or get the people that do to pay more money. DRM lets the content producers take the second approach.
You've (like many) completely misunderstood the point of Apple's code signing efforts. It's not to stop unauthorized code from running--Apple is not Microsoft, no matter how you cut it; they don't even have activation, nor any protections on their software besides serial numbers. The real point of code signing is so that when you have a piece of software that claims to be from Company X, you can be sure it's actually from Company X. It's a tool to reduce malware pretending to be legitimate software, not a means for Apple to lock down your computer.
You are, like many, confusing this technology with wireless USB. Which is understandable since the summary somewhat cluelessly calls it a competitor. It really isn't. Instead, it's more of a replacement for some of the more annoying implementations of bluetooth. The idea is if you just want to offload the pictures from your camera, you touch it to your computer and...it does it. No messing with with settings, no trying to get them to pair. Everything automatic. Of course, if it had a range similar to bluetooth, anybody could get your pictures. Instead, it has very good security because it almost requires contact between the sender and receiver.
In all, this is an interesting technology that could find some useful implementations, however it would have to be included in addition to a longer-range wireless technology in many devices.
Yes, there is. Doing so allows synthetic biologists to use all the cellular machinery, vastly simplifying their job. In case you didn't read the article, all the team referenced has done is create an artificial genome which, while still a very important achievement that will open many new doors in synthetic biology (assuming patent protections don't slam them shut), is nowhere near the difficulty of creating an entire organism from scratch, which is what you suggest would require.
Since that's just anecdotal evidence, here's some more. I upgraded my C2D MacBook in place to Leopard about two hours before the official release date in my time zone (thanks, FedEx). I have had a total of two kernel panics since then relating to my wireless driver, but the problem seems to have been fixed since 10.5.1. Also, Time Machine refused to work with my drive for some reason until 10.5.1. But besides those issues, it's been completely smooth. And another difference between Vista and Leopard: Leopard is actually faster on my hardware than Tiger was.
Do you not realize that more-or-less all of modern Biology is based on Evolution? That the technology used to create antibiotic and antiviral drugs is based wholly on the theory of Evolution? You state that you haven't seen enough facts to support evolution. I would assume, then, that you have some sort of alternate theory. It would seem pretty silly to just ignore a theory that has been evidenced again and again and again for the past couple centuries without some sort of incredible alternative. If that alternative is, as I would imagine if you are an evangelical Christian, some form of creationism, there is a large difference between that and a scientific theory like Evolution. In science, there is the requirement--in order for something to be considered a natural explanation--that it be disprovable. Any sort of supernatural explanation for how things are is inherently unable to be disproved, and therefore does not qualify as science.
At this point, it really is impossible to claim that there isn't enough evidence for evolution. Biologists have been directly observing evolution in action for decades. The modern theory of evolution, meanwhile, has never been found in conflict with findings of Biologists in all this time.
Perhaps at one point--early 19th century or so--one could get away with claiming that there was not enough evidence to accept evolution. But that excuse is a bit outdated in the 21st century.
The question is, is that a bad thing? We have enough problems trying to secure our electoral process without internet voting to make everything even more difficult. In addition to the security concerns (now elections can be hacked from anywhere, Russia, China, Iran) there's also the problems with coercion. With secret balloting, it's more-or-less impossible to coerce voters, because there no way to prove how someone voted. But when you can stand over their should while they vote, it becomes a lot easier.
I think the biggest question is, what problem is this trying to solve? What's wrong with non-internet voting that internet voting will fix? And will whatever that is be worth the consequences? I'm one who feels like the days of a pen-marking-paper ballots should come back (hey, we still have them in my district) and leave behind all of these more modern, more easily hacked systems. Is it really that important that the results of the election be known the of the election? Important enough that we're willing to sacrifice the security of the balloting?
I'm a junior in highschool taking Calculus, and my ti-89 has served me well. It does symbolic calculations (a feature missing on the lower-end TI calculators), which is a real boon. I also find the interface to be much nicer than the TI-83 or 84. Also, it's the most powerful calculator allowed on College Board tests (e.g., the SAT), which could potentially give you an edge.
They're not particularly cheap (I got mine for about 120USD), but I think the investment over a TI-84 is worth it.
Right. So Sprint's network is going down every day because of some poorly written application on my Treo? This kind of absurd argument merely clouds the issues. This is about Jobs' control issues, not anything technical. I would be fine if they just released an sdk saying, essentially, anyone who wants to install 3rd party applications is on their own. The best, most stable programs developed could be accepted into Apple's Special Developer Program, which would make "official" releases. I have a problem with the status quo as described by Jobs (i.e., where only "approved" applications make it onto the iPhone) because it leaves the fate of potentially very useful applications to the political realities of Apple's relationship with Cingular (this means no VoIP). On my Treo, however, (if it supported WiFi, that is) there would be no way for Sprint or any carrier to stop me from installing a VoIP application; or, more dangerously, an application that allows me to convert an mp3 into a ringtone with out shelling out something ridiculous for the cell phone company's ringtones. It's these sort of applications that are made completely impossible through Jobs' program, and the biggest flaw with it. Another major flaw is that this sort of thing usually cuts out the small timers. PDA programs do not take an enormous amount development effort, therefore making them perfect for small developers; it's one of the few environments left where big development studios don't have a huge advantage. However, any sort of program (which likely would have a closed, expensive development platform as opposed to the cheap, open PalmOS and Windows Mobile SDKs) would almost certainly be prohibitively priced to anyone but these large development houses. In any case, much of the glamor of the iPhone has worn off since it has become clear that third-party applications were out. The device itself is beautiful, but it is the unexpected uses that make these devices so powerful and useful. On my Treo, I control my IR utilities using universal remote software, I have an instant-messaging client, a voice-activated launcher. All applications developed by third-parties and probably uses of the phone unexpected by Palm. I can only hope that Jobs realizes that he does not see perfectly into the minds of all consumers and does not know what we all want or need.
You know, I keep hearing this repeated over and over again, but I really don't think it's true. There are plenty of examples of contrary views getting modded up highly. For example, the second comment on the recent story about how Microsoft is abusing personal data is saying that it's fine what Microsoft is doing. This clearly goes against the slashdot "groupthink" as you call it, and yet it's rated a 5. There are plenty more examples in that story and in nearly every other controversial article.
Though it's cute to complain about the dominant subcultures of slashdot directing the discussion when one's dissenting comment gets modded down, many trolls are just that: trolls. I've found that on slashdot people with dissenting views who state them civilly and intelligently tend to get modded highly, while troll moderations seems mostly reserved for those who are determined to make jackasses of themselves, regardless of their views.
Well, I guess that explains this.