The liver is used to living at the tail end of the circulatory supply, after all the other organs have gotten their share. Plus, one of its main jobs is detoxifying the blood, so it can put up with higher levels of contaminants in the blood. In other words, if you are testing out an organ-sustaining machine, and you can't guarantee that you can keep the blood pristine, the liver is a pretty good choice for trying things out.
It is good if you can keep it alive, because it keeps it viable for transplant to a dying patient for longer. So keeping the liver alive longer means more people receive transplants, so more people live longer, fuller lives.
the main problem with household LED lighting is they are made as stupid cheap as possible
Simple solution: don't buy cheap shit. There is good, quality consumer LED products out there; it isn't hard to find them. Stick to products from reputable vendors, have extensive reviews, test results, and certifications. Yes, you'll pay perhaps 2x per bulb. But those bulbs will be far more efficient and will last much longer. Spend the money, then stop worrying for the next decade or two.
Yeah, they say that like everyone knows what a "1 GW power plant" is
Everyone who gives a damn about energy - where it comes from, how much it costs, how we use it and how we can use less - damn well better know how much 1 GW, and how large a 1 GW power plant is. On slashdot, it should be assumed that everyone knows the answer to that question. I would even expect a lot of the general, unwashed masses to know the answer to that, just as I would expect them to know what mileage their car gets, what the cost of a gasoline/diesel is, how many kWh of electricity their home consumed last month, and what they paid for that.
I'm not being a snob or an elitist: I just expect people to know stuff.
The rotating chart is a very efficient means of recording one or more readings continuously without using a huge roll of paper
I am familiar with those (see the last sentence of my first paragraph). Yes, they are efficient in terms of the resulting record (a disc of paper with lots of data on it) and the mechanism (a pair of motors), but few would claim they are all that good in terms of readability. And, I'll note, they all have gridlines printed on them, so that you can actually read the data afterwards. For a dashboard such as Facebook is trying to implement, you don't have those same constraints: you can produce a very readable display just as easily as a crap one.
I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.
On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.
Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.
Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?
When he got laid off the Pluto was placed in a box and taken home
I don't condone stealing, but there is a certain justice to this. It's a bit like Milton finally being reunited with his prized red Swingline (pop culture reference).
In general, I would say no: you can't legally block RF on your own property, if by block you mean "actively jam so that radio devices are rendered inoperable". Why? Because you don't own the rights to the airwaves, even those traversing your property. Blocking by actively jamming tramples all over the airwaves, and you don't own them. The airwaves are a public common, and are held in common ownership by the state for the general use of the public. If by "block" you mean Similarly, you don't have the right to block aircraft from traversing the airspace above your property, nor satellites from flying over.
On the other hand, if you can demonstrate damages of injury from either the encroaching RF or aircraft, then you can try to sue to have them blocked from your property. Unless you happen to own a Delaware-sized portion of world, however, I doubt that you'd succeed purely on feasibility grounds.
If by "block RF" you mean "shield so that nothing gets in or out", then the answer is probably yes. You can build Faraday shielding into the walls of your house if you so choose, though be prepared for lots of snark and annoyance from any visitors or neighbors.
The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist.
Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.
There are several additional aspects of space design that make it difficult and expensive compared to these ocean drones:
* Launch costs are so high that you need to make sure, damn sure, that your space probe works reliably. You don't want to a faulty $2 component to ruin a $100 million launch. Also, because launch costs are so high, you want your space probe to last for a looong time in orbit. So you test everything like mad, which costs money, and chose high-reliability components that have also been tested to death and are themselves very expensive, etc. With ocean drones, if there's a problem, you have only lost the hardware itself, not the tremendous ancillary costs as well. In all likelihood, you can probably hop on a boat and go retrieve it for a partial recovery.
* A launch is a rather traumatic event for any piece of equipment. To keep it from shaking itself apart, everything needs to be bolted down. Lots of satellites have parts that are folded up for launch and automagically deployed in orbit. But you also need to be able to release the payload in controlled, automated, and hands-off fashion after launch. Doing this properly requires careful design and lots more testing. An ocean drone, by contrast, can be handled as gently as you please, assembled and set up on site, and deployed by hand.
* Most launches have multiple payloads from multiple people as a way to share cost. As a result, unless you have demonstrated through testing that your payload isn't going to screw another customer's payload up, you can't get a launch slot. For an ocean drone, even if you are sharing a boat to get to your launch site, nothing you do is likely to screw up anyone else's mission. In many cases launching can be as simple as driving down to the pier.
* Some space missions do not require attitude control, orbital control, and other maneuverability. Most space missions do need that, however, and that is really tough and expensive, because you need propellants under pressure, mixing and combustion, all of which need to work in zero-g after being left idle and thermally cycled, sometimes for months or years between actuations. On the ocean, attitude control is just a matter of gravity and buoyancy, and maneuverability can be accomplished with a DC motor.
This doesn't mean that we can't get to cheaper costs through economies of scale, standardization, and learning curve effects as you suggest. But until launch costs are much much lower, the costs associated with long life, testing, and reliability will keep space a very expensive business.
You need to expend a whole lot more energy to get into Europa orbit compared to just Jupiter orbit. Plus, if you are spending all your time in the orbit of a Galilean satellite, you are spending all your time in Jupiter's radiation belts. As mentioned in the article, this would limit your spacecraft life to perhaps 100 days.
Part of the cost is in the lengthy design, development, and testing process. Another huge chunk is the support of the craft during flight. A final huge chunk is the support of the mission once it arrives, and analyzing the data going forward. In other words, you are talking about thousands of man-years of highly skilled labor, which runs $100,000 - $200,000/yr in terms of salary, benefits, overhead, and support staff. $10^5/yr * 10^3 yrs * several gets you up to a decent fraction of a billion dollars in a hurry.
This podcast from IEEE (transcript is included in the link) describes a project that addresses that exact concern. It describes work from the Guardian Project that is developing a handful of (Android) apps for capturing and authenticating photos and video. Their aim is largely journalism and humanitarian work, but would be available to everyone. The apps can, for instance, add a cryptographic signature to photos or video, so that subsequent tampering is easily identified. In other instances, the apps can do everything to thoroughly anonymize data: blur faces, remove metadata, post to the internet using Tor, etc.
As a researcher who has read hundreds, possibly thousands of journal articles, I say bollocks. Maybe Nature Publishing Group journals do a thorough spelling and grammar check, but all the others (in the field of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology at least) do not.
Peer review is supposed to weed out the cranks and trolls.
Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress. If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.
I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by their original publishers.
A better way to fix desertification is to not cut down the rain forests in the first place! The risk to the Amazon basin isn't coming from the presence of the cows per se, but from the fact that a well-established, thriving rainforest ecosystem was there one day, then destroyed for cropland the next.
For the most part, this is a blanket article describing the pitfalls of crowdfunding. When you put a bunch of neophyte entrepreneurs in touch with a bunch of neophyte funding sources, there will be these problems. Are these unique to Kickstarter? No. You will find these same pitfalls in startups funded in a variety of other loosely regulated ways, and even in the more tightly regulated ones. Run of the mill fraud, charlatanism, misappropriation, theft, and a host of other abuses abound in "real" business as well.
Have these problems become more prevalent and widespread recently within the crowdfunding universe? I don't know, and clearly neither do the authors. If the article is asking whether Kickstarter has peaked, then they ought to, just maybe, provide some data illustrating trends in time. What would be great would be to present a graph of some measure, climbing upward over time, and then starting a recent decline, leaving some sort of PEAK in the shape of the graph!
A collection of anecdotes - either of success or failure - is not data.
There are a hundred different, quantitative ways that one might try to gauge whether Kickstarter has peaked, and the author produced not a single one. Has there been a downward trend in the number of new projects, or the total portfolio value of all currently open projects? Has the total value of all funded projects in the last month, quarter, or year gone down? Has Kickstarter's business revenue started to decline? Has there been an increase in the percentage of unfunded projects? Has there been an increase in the number of "fraudulent" projects (however you manage to define it)? What is the mean time from funding to completion, and from completion to the delivery of the rewards? Have those mean times been inching upwards? What percentage of funded projects remain incomplete, i.e., have yet to deliver their rewards? Has that number been trending upwards? Have any lawsuits been filed that present an existential threat to Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general?
And, if any of these potentially negative trends are occurring, are they a sign of Kickstarter being in decline, or simply encountering growing pains are crowdfunding enters the mainstream?
The move means that firms that issue or exchange the increasingly popular online cash will now be regulated in a similar manner as traditional money-order providers such as Western Union Co. WU +0.17%
Sigh. Inline, updating stock quotes in business and finance articles are annoying enough in their own context. When taken out of that context by a lazy and sloppy copy-paste, as had happened with this article summary, is just plain disappointing. Does nobody bother to copy-edit these things before they go live? I thought this was/., not reddit.
It depends on how far you want to take your data collecting abilities. Using the smartphone accelerometer, you can measure running cadence pretty reliably (I don't think Nike+ does that, but other apps do). The next step up would be to incorporate a wireless heart rate monitor, which is a strap that goes around your chest that sends your heart rate (and potentially other information) using ANT+ wireless. Most smartphones don't have a built-in ANT+ receiver, although there are dongles and apps you can buy to add that functionality.
But if you are running, perhaps carrying your smartphone isn't what you want. So then you are looking at a heart rate monitor watch. But if you ditch the smartphone, then you lose your GPS capability (route, speed, maps, etc.). So then you are looking at a GPS watch. Are you a triathlete? Then you'll want to be able to have a device that can do speed, heart rate, etc. for both biking and running (tracking during swimming usually doesn't work, because the water attenuate the radio signals). But if you've got your ANT+ enabled GPS watch on your bike, then you can also use it to track your wheel speed (independent of GPS speed), pedal cadence and, if you've got enough money, instantaneous power supplied to the pedals. You can also add in temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure. I suspect it won't be long before we see earlobe or fingertip pulse oximeters and blood gluscometers added to the mix. Automatic detection of collisions, falls, accidents, and cardiac arrhythmia is also available.
Does anyone else find it slightly ironic that Tesla's charging stations are using direct current
No, insofar as batteries are inherently direct current devices. You can't charge a battery bank from alternating current unless you first rectify it. The motor that drives it is an AC induction motor, which Tesla made the greatest contributions to.
Perhaps this is a result of the author's experience, or how the author structured the review and geared it towards the/. audience, but I find a lot of griping and warnings about the electronics and not so much about the software. For instance:
Regarding electronics:
I think assembly of the Ada Fruit Cobbler kit will be the most intimidating part of the kit for someone new to electronics. The kit calls out that you will need soldering skills and this is as basic a soldering job as you can get, but still some might shy away from it.
In the next paragraph, regarding the Linux install:
The Raspian OS is Lightweight X11 (LXDE) with Openbox. For non-Linux users this may seem a little scary but there is a whole body of work around this and outside of the scope of this review. Configuring and setting up the OS on my home network was typical for a Linux install.
To expend two whole paragraphs explaining how he soldered a bunch of header pins, and sum up that it might be intimidating to newbies, and then to basically say "RTFM" about installing and configuring Linux seems to gloss over an awful lot.
More on the difficulties of hardware:
You should really make sure you have your circuits setup and buffered when working with external experiments. It is also important to understand how a breadboard works and which terminals are tied out. Basically if you aren’t careful and paying attention you can accidentally feed power back to your Pi and end up blowing it out. (Mixing the 3V3 and 5V will do that in an instant.) For a $35 board that isn’t too expensive of a lesson, but would probably cause a newbie to be quickly discouraged.
But software is just fine and dandy, and oh so simple
I was happy to see Python and IDLE in the install as it made writing a simple program to tinker with the system easy. Additional modules can be downloaded and installed easily.
I can understand that the reviewer is relaying their own personal observations, and perhaps the software really is that easy and straightforward compared to the wiring and breadboarding. Not necessarily true in my experience. The reviewer is assuming, or representing, different levels of experience and comfort between hardware and software.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, like the owner of my company, occasionally fly his helicopter from home to office.
The liver is used to living at the tail end of the circulatory supply, after all the other organs have gotten their share. Plus, one of its main jobs is detoxifying the blood, so it can put up with higher levels of contaminants in the blood. In other words, if you are testing out an organ-sustaining machine, and you can't guarantee that you can keep the blood pristine, the liver is a pretty good choice for trying things out.
It is good if you can keep it alive, because it keeps it viable for transplant to a dying patient for longer. So keeping the liver alive longer means more people receive transplants, so more people live longer, fuller lives.
Actually, if they could form Cooper pairs, to the point where it becomes superconductive, it would be f&%$ing awesome!
Simple solution: don't buy cheap shit. There is good, quality consumer LED products out there; it isn't hard to find them. Stick to products from reputable vendors, have extensive reviews, test results, and certifications. Yes, you'll pay perhaps 2x per bulb. But those bulbs will be far more efficient and will last much longer. Spend the money, then stop worrying for the next decade or two.
Everyone who gives a damn about energy - where it comes from, how much it costs, how we use it and how we can use less - damn well better know how much 1 GW, and how large a 1 GW power plant is. On slashdot, it should be assumed that everyone knows the answer to that question. I would even expect a lot of the general, unwashed masses to know the answer to that, just as I would expect them to know what mileage their car gets, what the cost of a gasoline/diesel is, how many kWh of electricity their home consumed last month, and what they paid for that.
I'm not being a snob or an elitist: I just expect people to know stuff.
I am familiar with those (see the last sentence of my first paragraph). Yes, they are efficient in terms of the resulting record (a disc of paper with lots of data on it) and the mechanism (a pair of motors), but few would claim they are all that good in terms of readability. And, I'll note, they all have gridlines printed on them, so that you can actually read the data afterwards. For a dashboard such as Facebook is trying to implement, you don't have those same constraints: you can produce a very readable display just as easily as a crap one.
I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.
On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.
Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.
Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?
I don't condone stealing, but there is a certain justice to this. It's a bit like Milton finally being reunited with his prized red Swingline (pop culture reference).
In general, I would say no: you can't legally block RF on your own property, if by block you mean "actively jam so that radio devices are rendered inoperable". Why? Because you don't own the rights to the airwaves, even those traversing your property. Blocking by actively jamming tramples all over the airwaves, and you don't own them. The airwaves are a public common, and are held in common ownership by the state for the general use of the public. If by "block" you mean Similarly, you don't have the right to block aircraft from traversing the airspace above your property, nor satellites from flying over.
On the other hand, if you can demonstrate damages of injury from either the encroaching RF or aircraft, then you can try to sue to have them blocked from your property. Unless you happen to own a Delaware-sized portion of world, however, I doubt that you'd succeed purely on feasibility grounds.
If by "block RF" you mean "shield so that nothing gets in or out", then the answer is probably yes. You can build Faraday shielding into the walls of your house if you so choose, though be prepared for lots of snark and annoyance from any visitors or neighbors.
The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist.
Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.
This doesn't mean that we can't get to cheaper costs through economies of scale, standardization, and learning curve effects as you suggest. But until launch costs are much much lower, the costs associated with long life, testing, and reliability will keep space a very expensive business.
posting to undo an accidental moderation
You need to expend a whole lot more energy to get into Europa orbit compared to just Jupiter orbit. Plus, if you are spending all your time in the orbit of a Galilean satellite, you are spending all your time in Jupiter's radiation belts. As mentioned in the article, this would limit your spacecraft life to perhaps 100 days.
Part of the cost is in the lengthy design, development, and testing process. Another huge chunk is the support of the craft during flight. A final huge chunk is the support of the mission once it arrives, and analyzing the data going forward. In other words, you are talking about thousands of man-years of highly skilled labor, which runs $100,000 - $200,000/yr in terms of salary, benefits, overhead, and support staff. $10^5/yr * 10^3 yrs * several gets you up to a decent fraction of a billion dollars in a hurry.
Generic drugs made by third parties are sorely needed by everyone across the world!
This podcast from IEEE (transcript is included in the link) describes a project that addresses that exact concern. It describes work from the Guardian Project that is developing a handful of (Android) apps for capturing and authenticating photos and video. Their aim is largely journalism and humanitarian work, but would be available to everyone. The apps can, for instance, add a cryptographic signature to photos or video, so that subsequent tampering is easily identified. In other instances, the apps can do everything to thoroughly anonymize data: blur faces, remove metadata, post to the internet using Tor, etc.
Well, if you guys could please refrain from creating new compounds and substances whose names are 50 characters of gobbledigook, it would be much easier. 18-bromo-12-butyl-11-chloro-4,8-diethyl-5-hydroxy-15-methoxytricos-6,13-diene-19-yne-3,9-dione my ass.
Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress. If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.
I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by their original publishers.
A better way to fix desertification is to not cut down the rain forests in the first place! The risk to the Amazon basin isn't coming from the presence of the cows per se, but from the fact that a well-established, thriving rainforest ecosystem was there one day, then destroyed for cropland the next.
For the most part, this is a blanket article describing the pitfalls of crowdfunding. When you put a bunch of neophyte entrepreneurs in touch with a bunch of neophyte funding sources, there will be these problems. Are these unique to Kickstarter? No. You will find these same pitfalls in startups funded in a variety of other loosely regulated ways, and even in the more tightly regulated ones. Run of the mill fraud, charlatanism, misappropriation, theft, and a host of other abuses abound in "real" business as well.
Have these problems become more prevalent and widespread recently within the crowdfunding universe? I don't know, and clearly neither do the authors. If the article is asking whether Kickstarter has peaked, then they ought to, just maybe, provide some data illustrating trends in time. What would be great would be to present a graph of some measure, climbing upward over time, and then starting a recent decline, leaving some sort of PEAK in the shape of the graph!
A collection of anecdotes - either of success or failure - is not data.
There are a hundred different, quantitative ways that one might try to gauge whether Kickstarter has peaked, and the author produced not a single one. Has there been a downward trend in the number of new projects, or the total portfolio value of all currently open projects? Has the total value of all funded projects in the last month, quarter, or year gone down? Has Kickstarter's business revenue started to decline? Has there been an increase in the percentage of unfunded projects? Has there been an increase in the number of "fraudulent" projects (however you manage to define it)? What is the mean time from funding to completion, and from completion to the delivery of the rewards? Have those mean times been inching upwards? What percentage of funded projects remain incomplete, i.e., have yet to deliver their rewards? Has that number been trending upwards? Have any lawsuits been filed that present an existential threat to Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general?
And, if any of these potentially negative trends are occurring, are they a sign of Kickstarter being in decline, or simply encountering growing pains are crowdfunding enters the mainstream?
Sigh. Inline, updating stock quotes in business and finance articles are annoying enough in their own context. When taken out of that context by a lazy and sloppy copy-paste, as had happened with this article summary, is just plain disappointing. Does nobody bother to copy-edit these things before they go live? I thought this was /., not reddit.
It depends on how far you want to take your data collecting abilities. Using the smartphone accelerometer, you can measure running cadence pretty reliably (I don't think Nike+ does that, but other apps do). The next step up would be to incorporate a wireless heart rate monitor, which is a strap that goes around your chest that sends your heart rate (and potentially other information) using ANT+ wireless. Most smartphones don't have a built-in ANT+ receiver, although there are dongles and apps you can buy to add that functionality.
But if you are running, perhaps carrying your smartphone isn't what you want. So then you are looking at a heart rate monitor watch. But if you ditch the smartphone, then you lose your GPS capability (route, speed, maps, etc.). So then you are looking at a GPS watch. Are you a triathlete? Then you'll want to be able to have a device that can do speed, heart rate, etc. for both biking and running (tracking during swimming usually doesn't work, because the water attenuate the radio signals). But if you've got your ANT+ enabled GPS watch on your bike, then you can also use it to track your wheel speed (independent of GPS speed), pedal cadence and, if you've got enough money, instantaneous power supplied to the pedals. You can also add in temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure. I suspect it won't be long before we see earlobe or fingertip pulse oximeters and blood gluscometers added to the mix. Automatic detection of collisions, falls, accidents, and cardiac arrhythmia is also available.
Oh, wait, you just wanted to go for a run?
No, insofar as batteries are inherently direct current devices. You can't charge a battery bank from alternating current unless you first rectify it. The motor that drives it is an AC induction motor, which Tesla made the greatest contributions to.
In the next paragraph, regarding the Linux install:
To expend two whole paragraphs explaining how he soldered a bunch of header pins, and sum up that it might be intimidating to newbies, and then to basically say "RTFM" about installing and configuring Linux seems to gloss over an awful lot.
More on the difficulties of hardware:
But software is just fine and dandy, and oh so simple
I can understand that the reviewer is relaying their own personal observations, and perhaps the software really is that easy and straightforward compared to the wiring and breadboarding. Not necessarily true in my experience. The reviewer is assuming, or representing, different levels of experience and comfort between hardware and software.