Contents

1. Inkscape 0.47 Released
2. Computer Games and Traditional CS Courses
3. Shedding Your Identity In the Digital Age
4. Two Senators Call For ACTA Transparency
5. Brain Scans Used In Murder Sentencing
6. Google Analytics May Be Illegal In Germany
7. Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child
8. Major IE8 Flaw Makes “Safe” Sites Unsafe
9. Haskell 2010 Announced
10. UK File-Sharing Laws Unenforceable On Mobile Networks
11. New Theory of Gravity Decouples Space & Time
12. Nvidia’s DX11 GF100 Graphics Processor Detailed
13. Police Arrest Man For Refusing To Tweet
14. Wal-Mart, Amazon Battle For Online Retail’s Future
15. Inside England and Wales’ DNA Regime
16. Prison Terms For Spammer Ralsky, Scientology DoS Attacker
17. Giving Touch-Screen Buttons Depth and Height With Pneumatics
18. Would You Use a Free Netbook From Google?
19. A Skeptical Reaction To IBM’s Cat Brain Simulation Claims
20. Intelsat Launches Hardware For Internet Routing From Space

Does it actually make standard SVGs yet? - by BitZtream (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Everytime I’ve looked at Inkscape in the past its idea of ‘standard’ SVGs is about like Word’s idea of ‘standard’ HTML, even when you switch to the standard svg format rather than its extended version.

I’m grabbing it now, but I see nothing in the release notes about this particular issue. I see things about adding more extensions which is great and all, but I use SVG because its a documented standard that I can work with in my own software, I’d love to suggest Inkscape to others, but until its capable of producing version 1.2 SVGs with text flows that work with Apache Batik is useless. The font improvements look promising, as long as it isn’t retarded and storing all text as curves.

Heres to hoping …

A “must-have” package - by AliasMarlowe (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread
Inkscape is installed on all of our Linux PCs at home, and on the Windows PCs and VMs at work. It is one of the “must-have” applications for graphics. We all use it at home, adults & kids.

Re:Hurrah! - by palegray.net (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
As a general rule, “1.0” doesn’t really hold a lot of significance in the open source community with regard to actual usefulness. A heck of a lot of the (very stable) stuff I use is < 1.0.

The closed circle - by westlake (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

As a general rule, “1.0” doesn’t really hold a lot of significance in the open source community with regard to actual usefulness.

It’s rather a pity that so many projects like Inkscape might be overlooked by all those folks living outside the open source community.

Where Rev. 0.x = Beta state, maybe, and Alpha, more than likely. Immature. Unstable. Basic features missing or unusable.

Think of it as another handicap, like naming your premier photo editing program The GIMP - which to the outsider translates simply as “crippled” and “sexually perverse.” 
 

Re:Hurrah! - by mcrbids (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

But you forgot to say why!

Many times, developers will have a list of features that they figure are “1.0”. They may not have reached all the features yet, but the features developed thusfar may be very stable.

A case in point is my own set of backup scripts (this is not) Backup Buddy. I’ve been using them for years, they work very well, stable even with very large sets of data. (Well into the TBs currently, managing over 100 backup sources in 24 hour rotation)

But I don’t consider them “1.0” yet because I always envisioned a handy-dandy web interface for managing backup rotations, verifying backups (currently working) and recovering files 1-by-1 securely. So, I edit config files. (aw shucks)

An example or two.. - by Beowulf_Boy (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I have a bachelors degree in Game design, and using games was a big part of how programming was taught at my school.

A lot of people are going to say “but how are they going to learn, games are complex, etc etc”

They don’t have to be. A few examples from how I learned…

In my networking fundamentals, we covered opening sockets, threading to take care of the sockets, passing information back and forth, etc. At the point in a normal course, you’d probably do something like…make a lame chat client, or an FTP program or something. Instead the professor said, ok, I want you to make a game that uses these concepts to pass information between computers. I wrote a pong game that used a client / server type setup. One computer ran the server and both ran the clients. The server computed all the stuff and returned data to the clients on where to place the ball, paddles, and the score. I also had a lot of fun doing it.

Another good one. For my programming fundamentals class (eg, first class the freshman took to learn programming) they used python. After we covered the basics, such as arrays, if statements, loops, and so on, we got into user input. Then the instructor turned us loose on a simple header he’d made that let you move ASCII characters around the screen and asked us to make a simple game, such as a maze the user had to move through via the directional keys. It was amazing, because the next class students came in with some really awesome games using pretty complex stuff they’d looked up and taught themselves. By the end of the year long series of classes, freshman were making sprite based games on par with Super Mario Brothers 3 and other scrolling type games using PyGame.

I also learned Direct3D and OpenGL and wrote a few simple games with them to learn how to work with a rather complex API. Then we picked up Ogre and a physics engine (I can’t remember the name off the top of my head). My final project was a bowling game that head realistic physics, and you controlled the spin and movement of the ball via the mouse. I showed it to my current employeer (I started out as a co-op) during my interview, and it really set me apart. Granted my job requires very little programming, but it still really made me stand out when I was able to show them something flashy, rather than a program that did a lot in the background but not much in the userland end of things. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but people tend to like flashy cool looking things.

Not This Again… - by Comatose51 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

“Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses.”

Nowhere in the article do I find a statement that supports the claim that traditional CS courses are lacking real-world relevance. Can we please stop taking shots at the four years CS degree? If you don’t like it, then don’t get it. It’s only been five years since I graduated my with my Bachelor’s in CS and I can tell you that the course I took are highly relevant. I use it every day when I’m coding and thinking about my algorithms. I need to know what the run-time complexity of my methods and how I can use various data structures to make my code more efficient and what the trade offs are. In fact I do it so much that it’s almost second nature. These are things they teach you in the core CS classes, at least where I studied that’s what happened. My school was very prestigious but not well known for its CS department so I imagine that my education isn’t that extraordinary.

Our CS program offered a set of courses that would have allowed students to create games. In fact, that’s what the computer graphics course did. I worked with a couple of students who took that class. They reused those same skills again later during our AI project when we created a simulation where the AI played against itself. We weren’t exactly creating the next WarCraft III or Civilization IV but some of the fundamentals are there. Likewise, those same skills could be put to use in other projects. The school doesn’t have to have a course called “Game Programming for the Real World” for people to see that its course are relevant to the various sub fields in software engineering.

Also, software engineering is a more expansive field than just making games. Programming an O/S or network programming are both very relevant skills even today.

game programming the means not the end - by j1m%2B5n0w (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

While a focus on games may help stir interest, it seems as though game development studios are as yet unimpressed by most game-related college courses. To those who have taken such courses or considered hiring those who have: what has your experience been?

It seems like that’s not the point. The goal of having students write games isn’t to turn them into game programmers, but to show them that programming can be fun, and then they can use their new skills to solve all sorts of problems.

Re:One step at a time - by muecksteiner (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Yep, it’s all about advertisement. With that one word you’ve hit the nail on the head. Utility to the students… comes somewhere way down on the list of desirable properties of these courses. In a lot of cases, the main reason is so that the one graphics lecturer who is into gaming himself gets some visibility. Remember, the fight for resources at a university is usually beyond feral - and visibility, and the number of students, go a long way in securing them. What you later do with these students, or how good their career prospects are… well, that is very seldom evaluated. To a disturbing degree, working academia is very often about appearances, and little else.

I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I’m talking about here… and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who “are into” game developing. Far too many.

Now this is not to say that a) one cannot have a well-paying career in game development, or that b) game programming is technically uninteresting. Nothing could be further from the truth (especially point b). But there is such a thing as catering for the needs of an industry - and then there is also mindless overproduction of graduates with questionable qualifications, just in order to please those academics who have “gaming” on their resumes. And I know of at least on example who actually does “gaming” precisely because it is such a good way of getting students into his working group. And not because he is all that interested in the area as such.

Just look, for instance, at the academic job listings on jobs.ac.uk in the past 24 months. There are lots of small universities starting to offer “game development courses”, and are recruiting lecturers for this. In my opinion, there are simply not enough jobs in this line of work to actually offer such a large number of graduates of such a specialised course any sort of perspective, once they graduate. And besides - what do these courses usually teach? And who gets recruited by these smaller universities? Former top-notch developers who can really communicate useful stuff to the students? Or rather guys who did not make the cut at a major studio, and are fed up with freelancing?

At the last Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (one of the smaller, but quite high-quality geek-outs for the rendering community), there was a panel discussion which included a somewhat senior person from the gaming industry. His assessment of the relevance of current real time graphics research was pretty short: guys, it’s nice what you are doing at the universities, but most of this is almost totally useless for us in the real world, who have to meet deadlines, and make code work on normal systems.

But what is taught in those “gaming courses”? Usually precisely the stuff the main lecturer gets off on, and that he wrote papers about (and that the guy from the gaming studio described as nice but useless). This is natural, of course, everyone does that thing of teaching about one’s research achievements (myself included, in my area), but… if there is one area in Computer Graphics that should be taught by people with industry experience, it is gaming. And this is practically never the case.

Just my 0.2E-32$

A.

I program games. - by clinko (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I program games. I’m coding right now in fact.

In less than 6 hours, I will be going to the office to program insurance software.

If you want to program games, do it for fun.

If you want to eat, bone up on your Insert/Update/Select/Deletes.

Slashdotters have him beat - by noidentity (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

Writer Evan Ratliff tells how he managed to hide from crowdsourced searchers for 27 days.

This guy’s got nothing on the average Slashdot reader. Not even the sunlight is able to find them in their basement dwellings!

You must remember - by Whiteox (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The point is that Ratliff still used the net incognito, which was important in this comp. I suggested to Wired that this be a yearly event, much like Cannonball. This first one attracted a lot of interest and made use of social websites as a tool. Fascinating sociology. 
He could’ve after all, hid in his mum’s basement.

Re:You must remember - by Shadow of Eternity (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

i think that bears repeating, really the only reason he was found is because he pretty much did the digital equivalent of walking around with a neon sign on his head.

The average person can dissapear quite effectively from pretty much anyone except the govt or groups with similar power.

Re:You must remember - by JWSmythe (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

    Yup. It’s pretty easy to disappear. Don’t go out where you’ll be seen. Give traces where you aren’t.

    You know, it’s not very hard to send a trusted friend your credit card and cell phone, and tell him “Use the card every few days to pull out $40, and deposit the cash once a month at a different branch.. Call your girlfriend/house/friend from my cell every few days just to chat.”

    Now go camp out at another friends place, where you won’t be expected. It’s really not that hard to disappear for a month at a friends house. TV, internet connection, and they bring you food and other necessities that you pay them for in cash.

    If the heat is on, hoof it, catch the first morning city bus to a used car dealership. Buy a car with cash, and drive on the temp tag for a month. The more common the car, the better. Buy gas and food with cash. Go across the Canadian border in an obscure location (there are plenty of them). Trade the car to a sea going fisherman for passage to somewhere else. Greenland … Iceland … Europe. If you’re slick about it, you can be sitting in Germany, drinking down good German beer, and laughing about the fact that they’re still checking for you in Los Angeles, where you bought the car, or Chicago where your friend is using your credit card and cell phone.

    Pick up day labor jobs. Maybe the fishermen will let you stay on board for a month in exchange for a cot to sleep on, and food to eat.

    Is email really that important? Read it on your own server somewhere with pine over an SSH connection 4 steps away in distant lands. (i.e., sitting in Germany, shell into Russia, to Canada, and then to your box. Keep the neon signs saying “I’m here” flying in all the wrong places.

    And no, you wouldn’t guess where I’m sitting right now. :)

Hiding from the government is different. - by WiiVault (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Sure one might be able to hide from a group of relativly untrained people with no resources for quite a long time. But in my experience if someone is actually wanted by the police they tend to be found pretty quickly. The only reason so many get away is simply a lack of any real motivation to target that specific invidiual. This is why the bike you had stolen is far less likely to be found than the man who murdered his wife. In the end, a well trained force with authority and technology is quite difficult to evade in the long run. Especially without going life ruining stres and anxiety.

My original link + PDF of the letter - by angry tapir (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Here’s the link to the longer article that was originally in my story submission before the editor removed it. It includes a link to a PDF of the letter.

cheers, 
A. Tapir

Most insightful department ever - by selven (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“We got more senators than that”

Indeed. It’s a shame that only 2% of the senate is willing to stand up against this gross violation of transparency and democratic principles. Good luck to Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown and anyone else who might join them.

Re:Most insightful department ever - by afidel (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Brown’s been on the good side of technology legislation for a LONG time, when he was over in the House he served on the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet and was almost always on the side of the citizenry. Every time I’ve written him about issues concerning me I have received a detailed and thought-out response, some signed by him personally. I’ve also had the pleasure to meet him in person on numerous occasions and even had the chance to follow-up on some of those letters. He remembered details of my correspondence so I’m fairly certain they were not simply responded too by staffers. He might not be as approachable today as a senator has significantly more constituents but I doubt he cares less about them.

Re:Most insightful department ever - by bigstrat2003 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I just wrote to my senator urging him to help these men fight this injustice. Write to yours, too.

Re:Most insightful department ever - by kurt555gs (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I wrote to Senators Durbin, and Burris. They both responded in form letter that they are all for whatever is being negotiated to stop “piracy”. Apparently either they didn’t read or don’t care that what is really happening (from what has been leaked) is the end of Fair Use, and First Sale. Along with DRM with no way out.

Nice to know both my Senators have our interest at heart.

Not!

Re:Nature versus Nurture - by CannonballHead (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Let’s assume, for a moment, that we have a murderer or rapist that does it because he’s genetically wired to do it.

What then? Put him in a “special” place and do genetic “testing” on him? That doesn’t sound so nice.

Let him go, because “he couldn’t help it” and thus he is not culpable? Hm. That, from a protect-society standpoint, sounds incredibly stupid.

Re:Capital Punishment - by Shakrai (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Stop spending ~$43,000 per prisoner to house them in Club Fed and revert prison to what it should be: Three square meals and the chance to break big rocks into little rocks. Stop locking up non-violent druggies (you’ll note that I was talking about violent crimes in my previous post) and use the free space/money to lock up violent criminals that actually pose a threat to the rest of us.

A shoplifter deserves a shot at rehabilitation. An armed robber does not. Both sought unearned material gain — but the latter was willing to threaten violence against his fellow human beings in order to obtain it. Once you demonstrate that you are willing to do that then I don’t think you deserve to live among the rest of us. You are no better than a rapid dog and deserve to be treated accordingly.

Re:Capital Punishment - by hazem (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I was just reading Freakonomics and they make the case that part of that decline was also because of Row vs. Wade and the greater availability of abortion. They say the evidence supports the idea that Row vs. Wade made abortion available to women in poverty and that their aborted children were among the group that would have been most likely to become violent criminals. They do quite a few comparisons between states that legalized abortion at different times and other factors to show this.

I’m not sure I accept it, but it’s an interesting argument.

Re:Capital Punishment - by Runaway1956 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Anyone who claims that our prisons are rehabilitative are totally out of touch with reality. It is at least as accurate to say that petty criminals who find their way to prison get the opportunity to learn new and better ways of committing crime.

If we ever correct the serious disconnect between the idealists’ vision of prison, and the reality of prison, then we MIGHT begin to correct the abortion we have today.

The United States has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. Those cells are built, and kept filled, more to keep revenue flowing throughout government and society, than to “rehabilitate” anyone. The prison system is so lucrative, private corporations are getting into the act.

Please, just drop the rehab crap. IF rehab is really a part of the prison system, it’s so relatively unimportant that we can ignore it.

Re:Capital Punishment - by evanbd (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I tend to agree with you; however, the major reason I oppose the death penalty isn’t that it’s inhumane; it’s that we make mistakes. Given an imperfect justice system (as all are), a life sentence made in error can be partially corrected later if new evidence comes to light. It’s rare, but there have been a decent number of life sentences later reversed because of new evidence (in particular DNA evidence).

We owe it to the convicted to acknowledge that, in some cases, we make mistakes.

Re:Blocked with NoScript - by al0ha (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Actually, NoScript only does part of the job, google-analytics.com, coremetrics.com, any many other ad/tracking entities sneak around NoScript on many sites, including /.  
 
Install the RequestPolicy add-on and browse /. again, you will see what I mean.

Ridiculous. - by MikeFM (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If you come to my website then I, or my designated party, have the right to record the fact that you came to my website. If you don’t like it then don’t use the web. Is it also against the law to record what customers come in the door of your brick and mortar store in Germany?

Re:Ridiculous. - by martin-boundary (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
No. What people end up accepting in the States is their business, but the EU has a number of data protection principles (see section 2.2). Veiled third party advertising bugs don’t follow those principles.

Not local - by DrYak (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

But these statistics aren’t run local on the webserver itself. They are transmitted to Google.

No. 
It’s like *telling Big Brother* that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your house. 
And asking Big Brother to do some statistics about who comes to your house for you. 
Sure from the website’s owner point of view, the result is the same : he/she got on who visits the site. 
BUT from the *user* point of view it is different : The user accepted the fact that, by entering your house, you’ll know the users’ age/sex/clothes colour. BUT the user never accepted in the first place that you also send these informations to big brother.

The EU regulate clearly what you can transmit to 3rd party. 
Here the problem is not that website are doing *stastistics* (they can the information is trivial). 
The problem is that, in order to compute said stats, the websites *forwards* the data to google : a 3rd party which has nothing to do in the first palce.

The solution : Use adblock and/or noscript.

Re:Ridiculous. - by sopssa (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

There are however data protection laws in place and especially about storing personal information in other countries. From the article:

If you or your website is giving such personal info to other party and it’s stored elsewhere, you will be just as liable. And let’s be honest, Google is able to profile people really good. German authorities are especially worried about political parties and pharmaceutical companies websites.

real data available - by cinnamon colbert (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

The top scientist is R Gallo at the Dept of Dermatology, Univ California San Diego. I couldn’t find a mention on his web site, but the link below lists all his pubished papers. 
From the abstracts, I would speculate that the idea is something like this

the normal skin bacteria - the microflora - secrete various antimicrobials peptides, that is compounds which are toxic to other bacteria. If you wash to much, you don’t have the right peptides on your skin. at th bottom is an abstract from a recent paper

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=search&db=pubmed&term=Gallo%20RL

from this, the following article appears to have the clearest abstract:

J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2009 Sep;124(3 Suppl 2):R13-8. 
Antimicrobial peptides and the skin immune defense system.

Schauber J, Gallo RL.

Department of Dermatology and Allergology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany.

Our skin is constantly challenged by microbes but is rarely infected. Cutaneous production of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) is a primary system for protection, and expression of some AMPs further increases in response to microbial invasion. Cathelicidins are unique AMPs that protect the skin through 2 distinct pathways: (1) direct antimicrobial activity and (2) initiation of a host response resulting in cytokine release, inflammation, angiogenesis, and reepithelialization. Cathelicidin dysfunction emerges as a central factor in the pathogenesis of several cutaneous diseases, including atopic dermatitis, in which cathelicidin is suppressed; rosacea, in which cathelicidin peptides are abnormally processed to forms that induce inflammation; and psoriasis, in which cathelicidin peptide converts self-DNA to a potent stimulus in an autoinflammatory cascade. Recent work identified vitamin D3 as a major factor involved in the regulation of cathelicidin. Therapies targeting control of cathelicidin and other AMPs might provide new approaches in the management of infectious and inflammatory skin diseases.

PMID: 19720207 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

an article of interest 
J Invest Dermatol. 2009 Aug 27. [Epub ahead of print] 
Selective Antimicrobial Action Is Provided by Phenol-Soluble Modulins Derived from Staphylococcus epidermidis, a Normal Resident of the Skin.

Same with software - by JuzzFunky (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
I find the more bugs I introduce at the start of the project, the better the users are at dealing with bugs later on…

Re:Known this for years. - by markass530 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
George carlin said it best “You know when I wash my hands after I use the bathroom? When I piss or crap on them, which is 2, 3 times a week tops.

Carlin - by rainmaestro (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

George Carlin said it best 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdiCz_s

Re:All things in balance!!!! - by Capt.DrumkenBum (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

My parents were not very good about food safety and force fed me undercooked meat on a regular basis.

Perhaps they were trying to get rid of you. Its just a thought.

In other news - by Dartz-IRL (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Rain is wet…

Despite MS best efforts, IE just won’t shake it’s ‘insecure’ tag, will it?

Part of me wonders if perhaps these vulnerabilities aren’t being made a big deal of because of the reputation of IE6. The rest of me which started using Firefox a long time ago just feels smug and superior.

Re:In other news - by erroneus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The browser is a still an integral part of the OS. All else follows.

Re:In other news - by DJRumpy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Yes, after months or years of testing. Had IE been standards compliant in the first place, without all of the OS specific hooks, many companies wouldn’t be in this boat.

It is not an insignificant effort to get off of IE 6, especially without many thousands of users, and hundreds or thousands of apps that will break, or require testing under Windows 7’s Virtual PC software.

Breaking News - by BeaverAndrew (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Oh my gosh! Internet explorer is not safe to use? This is incredible hot, breaking news to me.

Re:Breaking News - by palegray.net (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I must dispute your view in the strongest terms possible. Internet Explorer is perfectly safe for everyday use. However, as there is no such thing as perfect security, you must take additional precautions to keep evil hackers away from your data. Apply these rules according to the sensitivity of your data, from least important to most:

• Disconnect your computer from your local network. Download files on another computer, scan them for viruses, print them out, scan them into your Windows PC using ORC software, and then view the pages in IE.
• Do the above, but have a priest onsite to bless each page individually before scanning it. This is an excellent deterrent against viruses with the word “demon” in the name.
• Do the above, but encase your PC in acrylic and immerse it in a 10,000 gallon tank of holy water. Interact with it while wearing scuba gear.
• Do the above, but put a lid on the tank and immerse it in the ocean. Interact with your PC via a submersible robot in the tank from from outside while wearing scuba gear.

If you fail to follow these simple security guidelines, you can’t blame Microsoft for the results.

Re:Concurrency? - by Lemming Mark (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Well, pure functional languages are (potentially) good for concurrency in general. Because they have no mutable variables in the usual sense, it doesn’t actually matter what order functions are evaluated in (other than the fact that callers cannot continue until their callees return). You can’t do this in C or Java because it might be necessary for one function to see a variable modified by another. In a functional language, any dependencies are explicit call-return relationships (well, ish, they typically do have some non-functional constructs otherwise it’s hard to do IO!), so in principle it’s quite easy to split up a program’s work across multiple CPUs (or machines) and not worry about whether they need to talk to each other.

Haskell, along with the ML family of languages, also has an amazing type checker that is waaay more sophisticated than most other languages. I think most people who’ve played around with these languages do start to feel that often “If it compiles, it’s bug-free”. Obviously that’s not something you can rely on, since the compiler can’t know what you meant to do. But it is true that the type system is *way* more useful at detecting bugs at compile-time than for any conventional language I’ve used.

purity, side-effects, and monads explained - by j1m%2B5n0w (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Let’s see if I can explain this simply.

The Haskell language, like any other language, needed constructs like “read” and “write”, but to implement them as simple functions would have broken the underlying assumptions of purity and lazy evaluation.

Haskell happened to have monads. A monad is essentially a typeclass for containers, that allow you to do certain things to combine containers of the same type, without having to worry about what kind of container it is. Most (all?) of the containers in the standard library are instances of Monad.

The Haskell language designers came up with (or perhaps borrowed) an idea. They would create a new container type, called IO, and make it an instance of Monad. However, unlike other containers, it would not have any accessor functions. You can pass around an object around of type IO in pure code all you want, but you can’t ever examine the contents of the IO container from within “pure” code. The only thing you can do with it is combine it with other IO objects. Combining two IO objects is equivalent to evaluating the file operation or what have you inside one IO object and passing it’s result to and executing whatever is inside the second IO object. The actions within an IO object, however, are free to invoke pure code if they like.

Every haskell program has a main() function, which is an IO action. This allows you do do any necessary file IO your program needs to do, and it can also call out to pure functions. Pure function cannot invoke IO actions. Most Haskell programmers try to keep the IO actions as simple as possible and rely on pure code for the bulk of the program.

As a concrete example, I wrote a ray tracer, which parsed a text file and generated an image. As I was writing it, I got to the part where I needed to write the file parser. I thought “oh, no, this whole thing has to execute within the IO monad and it’ll be a big mess”. However, it was not so. After scratching my head a bit, I ended up writing a pure function that takes a simple text string and converts it to my internal representation of a scene, ready to be ray traced. Within main (within the IO monad), I would read the text file in with a lazy function “hGetContents”, which returns a string which is the contents of the file. I would pass that string to the parser, and then trace a grid of rays (one per pixel) against the parsed scene. The list of pixels with their calculated color values was returned to the IO monad, where I used OpenGL to plot them to the screen.

The interesting bit about this is that hGetContents is lazy. In a strict (i.e. non-lazy) implementation, the whole string would be read at once. This is inefficient, and may cause problems for text files that won’t fit in memory. Due to laziness, however, the string is passed into the parser without being fully evaluated. As the parser needs more data, the run-time system will cause hGetContents to read another block. So, here we have an example of a pure function that’s indirectly triggering IO, and it’s doing it all without violating the constraints of the type system.

Re:Concurrency? - by AnotherShep (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
They figure if they make it good enough, more than one person will code in it at a time.

But I’m lazy… - by nweaver (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

So I don’t think I’ll look at the article until I actually need to program in Haskel…

Re:Reminds me of Life of Brian… - by acheron12 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Welcome to the programming language department. Bruce here teaches Python, the object oriented dynamically typed language. Bruce teaches Python the lazy functional language, while Bruce teaches postfix Python. And then there’s Bruce who teaches s-expression Python and is in charge of the snake dip.

Retarded - by BlackCreek (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Outright retarded article… Mobile data fees are so expensive that this whole story it makes no sense whatsoever

I’ve seen plenty of slow news days here where kdawson decided to publish non-sense, but this is a new low.

Bill the record industry - by Hatta (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

If the record industry wants this data, they can pay for its collection.

Re:Or it would go the other way - by denis-The-menace (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

All bow to the outdated business model that is the music business of the 50-90s.

Profits from this *MUST* be protected at the cost of freedom, privacy and progress. /sarcasm (in case of “whoosh”)

Amazing what bribes from robber barons can do to otherwise respectable politicians.

Of Course… - by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Anybody who plans on running bittorrent over a prepaid mobile connection is either going to pirate very small files, or end up paying rather more than retail for them…

Re:Of Course… - by RobVB (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

You can’t put a price on freedom!

But does it also predict - by asdf7890 (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
But does it also predict that time is an illusion, lunch-time doubly so? If not then there is still room for a more refined theory.

Re:Spooky action at a distance? - by jpmorgan (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Spooky action at a distance doesn’t need any finagling to get around lightspeed, because spooky action at a distance doesn’t involve any communication. It’s already compatible with general relativity (at least, insofar as any quantum theory is compatible with relativity).

A flawed, but illustrative example that should explain why this is so: imagine you have a friend who is flipping a coin… if it comes up heads, he writes an X on two sheets of paper, if it comes up tails, he writes a checkmark on both instead. Both are immediately sealed inside envelopes and mailed to opposites sides of the planet. If you open one letter and see an X, you instantly know the other has an X also. That doesn’t require any communication.

A slightly less flawed, and still illustrative extension: Now instead of a coin flip, you have a machine do it based on the decay of a mass of cesium, and you have a perfect envelope which protects against quantum decoherence. The same situation applies, as soon as you open one envelope you know what is contained in the other. The only difference this time is that the letters were entangled and in a superposition of states. However, it’s the same mechanism, and no communication is required.

Gosh darnit. Two guys I’d like to do my PhD under - by darkharlequin (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
In one day, and they are both in California. I am stuck here in New Jersey. New Jersey is Hell. When people die, they don’t go under the ground, they just pop up somewhere in Newark. See, us citizens of New Jersey are immortal because if we are killed, we just pop up back again in New Jersey. Its just really hard to navigate around Newark, so that’s why you don’t see us again…

Re:Just wondering out loud… - by maxwell demon (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Einstein’s theories of relativity basically start by saying something to the effect of “Let us assume the speed of light to be the fastest anything can travel. If we assume this, then…”

Wrong. 
Special relativity is built on two principles:

• The speed of light is the same in all inertial systems
• The laws of physics look the same in each inertial system

(actually, if you take Maxwell’s equation into account, the first is just a special case of the second). Especially it does not postulate that there’s nothing faster than light. Rather,

• it is a result of SR that anything slower than light cannot be accelerated to a speed faster than light (you’d need infinitely much energy to get it just to the speed of light)
• any action which goes faster than light would violate causality, so if in addition to SR we also assume causality, FTL cannot exist.

However, you can describe hypothetical faster-than-light particles in SRT (so-called tachyons; those cannot be decelerated to below the speed of light), and AFAIK there have been experiments to look for them. Note however that as soon as you add quantum mechanics to the picture, even with tachyons no information can be transmitted faster than light (local disturbances in he quantum tachyon field only propagate with light speed).

General relativity adds the equivalence principle (locally you cannot distinguish between gravitation and acceleration) and the demand of general covariance (the equations must look the same regardless of choice of coordinates, even if those don’t correspond to an inertial system).

Re:Just wondering out loud… - by maxwell demon (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

What if the laws of physics aren’t the same in all systems?

Then we need a new theory.

I have occasionally toyed with the idea that the heliosphere acts as a kind of lens distorting the apparent operations of the outside universe. Sort of an updated sublunar/supralunar idea.

Well, “the same in all systems” in the post above didn’t refer to “at different places in the universe”, but “as seen/described by different observers in the same part of the universe”. 
That doesn’t mean we don’t also assume that the laws of nature are always and everywhere the same. Indeed, that’s basically always assumed.

How can we test if the laws of physics operate the same on all scales?

By applying the laws we found locally to observations of distant objects, and seeing if they fit. For example, we can look at the spectra of distant stars and look if we get the same atomic spectral lines as on earth. This works great; so we know that atomic physics obviously works the same in distant stars. Also we can observe the 21cm hydrogen line everywhere in space, so atomic physics seems to apply also in between the stars.

Where we do have some problems is with large scale gravitation (what we describe with dark matter and dark energy). However, the local effects of those deviations are small enough that we couldn’t measure them directly anyway, so it’s also no evidence that the local laws of physics are different than the distant ones, even if those effects are to be described with modified theories.

Could the Voyager Anomaly be evidence that “local” physics is not universal?

No, it’s much too small for that. To be an indication for different physics “outside” it would have to be such a large deviation that we would have to have detected the difference if it applied to Earth.

Feh. - by Pojut (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The days of needing the biggest, fastest, most expensive card are pretty much over. You can run just about any game out there at max settings at 1920 X 1080 silky smooth with a 5870, which goes for less than $300. Hell, even the 4870 is still almost overkill.

Unless you plan on maxing out AA and AF while playing on a 30 inch screen, there is no reason to drop $500-$600 on a video card anymore…

Re:Feh. - by Kratisto (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I think this is largely because consoles set the pace for hardware upgrades. If you want to develop a multi-platform game, then it’s going to need to run on XBox 360 hardware from four years ago. I don’t even check recommended requirements anymore: I know that if it has a 360 or PS3 port (or the other way around), I can run it.

Re:Feh. - by Knara (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Almost as if Nvidia were looking at some other market than gamers…

When’s it coming out? - by Ant P. (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

There’s no point bragging about being faster than last month’s graphics card if your own is still a quarter of a year from being an actual product.

Re:When’s it coming out? - by Pojut (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

As a poster previously in the thread stated, a big part of it are games that need to work on consoles and PC. As an example, considering the 360 has a video card roughly equivalent to a 6600GT, there is only so far they can push ports. Hell, even now, 3-4 years into the current gen, there are STILL framerate problems with a lot of games…games that can now run at an absurdly high FPS on a decent gaming PC.

Alternative headline: - by Farmer Tim (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Cops powerless against teenage girls.

I think I can see why they needed to arrest someone…

seems pretty reasonable to me - by SuperBanana (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Stores, for example, are expected to at least talk to the local PD about traffic/crowd concerns, and engage in some common crowd control ‘best practices’, call the police if things look like they’re getting out of control, etc. And sometimes, yeah, the cops say Pool’s Closed if they think people are going to get hurt.

If the event was promoted on twitter, you’re damn right it is reasonable to expect that it MIGHT be an effective communication tool. At the very least, it’ll maybe stop MORE people from showing up. And if the cops said “look, there’s this crazy crowd, it’s going to get ugly, please help” and the guy won’t- well, sorry, that’s just being an asshat, and if people do get injured, I don’t think an arrest and charge is out of the question. Then the DA has to decide it’s worth prosecuting and the court has to decide if it’s legit enough to go to trial. And then he gets a trial by jury if he wants it.

Crap - by wkurzius (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

http://www.limelife.com/blog-entry/Fans-of-Tween-King-Justin-Bieber-Cause-Mall-Riot/26650.html

http://military.rightpundits.com/2009/11/24/james-roppo-man-arrested-for-not-tweeting-cancellation-of-justin-bieber-event-photos/

Crappy summary linking to crappy reporting.

Re:Crap - by clone53421 (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

All of the sources seem to link back to this NY Daily News article, and specifically, this paragraph:

James Roppo, 44, the senior vice president of sales at Island Def Jam Records, sent out Internet messages to over 3,000 fans that Justin Bieber was signing autographs even after police dispersed the crowd, cops said.

If somebody can find a link to those tweets, this accusation has some merit.

Re:Riotous rumor - by canajin56 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Yeah, previous posters, there’s a legitimate source of information. You could read the god damn article, but that’s way too hard, just read the comments and assume the ones you like were in the article. If you read TFA, the crowds were contained by police, who errected barricades to try and hold them back. The singer tweeted them all that it was off, and not to show up. They started dispursing without a story on the national news, so the record exec tweeted and told them it was still on, mixup, he’s inside RIGHT NOW RUN HURRY! And they rioted, smashing through barricades. Yeah, you’re totally right, teenagers don’t bring cellphones when they go outside, and those few that do don’t fucking use twitter. Idiot, every last one was subscribed, that’s why they showed up in the first place, twitter flashcrowd. So the guy got arrested because, instead of doing what he was asked, telling them it was canceled, because it was, he told them it’s still on, and urged them to break through police barricades.

purveyors of crap - by kimvette (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Wal-Mart has been the purveyor of crap for many years now. They push companies close to bankruptcy by insisting that the suppliers’ margins be pennies per unit - or they push companies to produce cheaper, crappy Wal-Mart versions of their product with a decent profit margin, but agreeing to do it Wal-Mart’s way can ruin your company by tarnishing your reputation. When Joe Sixpack buys your Wal-Mart model TV, your Wal-Mart model computer, or your Wal-Mart lawn mower and the thing turns out to be a piece of crap. Your company’s name will be tarnished, and you will get the blame, not Wal-Mart. You might make millions in the short term but over the long term, think about shutting down your company and starting a new one,

Check out the Snapper story (the man who said no to walmart)

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

I shop at Wal-Mart for some things. I don’t buy most appliances there though. I buy underwear, DVDs, and personal care items. Electronics, appliances I want to last for more than six months, and other bigger-ticket items I will buy elsewhere.

Wait, WTF? - by Arancaytar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They are just not going to cede their business to Amazon.’ Wal-Mart, with $405 billion in sales last year, dominates by offering affordable prices to Middle America in its 4,000 stores, while Amazon, with $20 billion in sales

‘We have to put our foot down and refuse to let them grow more powerful,’ says Dias. ‘I applaud Wal-Mart. It’s about time multichannel retailers stood up and refused to let their business go away.’”

Yes! Down with the Amazon monopoly! Give the underdog with twenty times the annual sales a chance! Preserve competition!

Welcome to the new economy - by colmore (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Remember all those quirky startups? That was a dead end. The new economy is 3 or 4 giant retailers selling everything.

Huzzah!

considering the arcane state of tax laws, - by Shivetya (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

let alone laws governing what can and cannot be shipped to where it is pretty easy to understand that one of the biggest hurdles of establishing a new business is government.

I code for distribution systems myself and the complexity of where items can go, the taxes on each per locale, and even how they must be transported, are mind boggling. Too many times competition includes fighting local governments who seem to find ways to create fines based on that day’s interpretation of a law

No way Walmart - by losman (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Fast shipping. Great customer service. Better prices. And most importantly there are better/quality reviews on Amazon. Sorry Walmart… and btw even locally I would go to Target instead of Walmart.

Misunderstanding how laws and enforcement works - by Lemming Mark (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

It’s bizarre but there still seems to be this perception that the police are a fine bunch of chaps who will universally do their best to apply the rules sensibly and fairly. There are plenty of police officers who that description applies to, I’m sure - but that’s not an excuse for lawmakers and the justice system to assume it holds universally true.

At the end of the day, the police are there - in practice - *to catch potential criminals*. Sorting out who is and isn’t guilty is not their job, that’s the job of the courts (as it should be). So the police don’t really have an incentive to be especially fair or reasonable; that’s not what we’ve tasked them with doing. What lawmakers sometimes seem to fail to understand is that if we pressure them to achieve “catch all the terrorists / criminals” then they’ll try to do that, even if they “catch” many innocent people too. If we give them new tools to do that then *they will use them*. If the tools we give them are extremely blunt instruments, like the ability to hold innocent people’s data on the DNA database, they’re going to use them to their fullest extent. If we want them to behave sensibly, the laws need to be more focused and less open to abuse.

It’s the same issue with various “anti-terror” laws. Allegedly local councils in the UK have used these to put people under surveillance for reasons unrelated to terrorism (like whether they’re using their rubbish bins correctly and whether they live in the locality of a school they have applied to). We gave them overly broad legislation and assumed that they wouldn’t use it, even though it helps them to do what they see as their job. None of these organisations can be relied upon to act in the best interests in society because each of them only sees part of the big picture - our politicians are *supposed* to maintain the balance of power with targeted legislation that results in society’s best interests being served overall. That goal can’t be reached by handing out disproportionate powers indiscriminately.

Re:Oversight isn’t a fix… - by MobyDisk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

1. I don’t think there is anything we can do to stop the collection of biometrics (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) And there really are legitimate reasons to do it. There are countless ways that the government (or anyone else) could get my fingerprints and DNA.

2. As a matter of principle, we should not pass laws that cannot be enforced.

So with those two rules in mind, instead of fighting the inevitable biometric data collection with unenforceable laws, let us make laws governing its use. If anyone uses that information, then they have to bring it in front of a court and prove their case. At that time, the judge can decide if they used the biometrics properly. If not, the evidence is thrown out. That is a pretty darned strong incentive for them to use the information properly. It is measurable and enforceable. Good laws can make it transparent.

Just brainstorming here, but what if the law required notifying someone of when and how biometric information was collected, how it is used, etc? Imagine if people suddenly got notifications about their fingerprints or DNA being stored - I think that would contribute to public awareness a heck of a lot. Awareness is good.

Re:Actaully, it seems pretty accurate - by AmiMoJo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problem is that the police use DNA for fishing expeditions instead of doing real police work. Rather than bothering to investigate and find likely suspects that they can then interview and perhaps ask for a DNA sample, they just arrest anyone who has merely been accused and take their DNA. Even if it turns out that are completely innocent that DNA is kept forever and tested against all future crimes.

Let’s say you accidentally brush against someone on the street. A few days later the police arrest you because a hair with your DNA was found at the scene of a child rape and murder. You now have to explain how your hair got there (it landed on the clothes of the person you passed in the street and was transported there) and your whareabouts at the time of the crime. You will need to involve other people to confirm your alibi, which means they will find out that you are a suspect in a child rape and murder. You will not be able to go to work while in custody, and will have to explain your absence to your employer.

All because the police couldn’t be bothered to try and figure out who might have done it, they just grabbed any DNA from the scene and looked in their database, then arrested everyone who matched to see who could provide an alibi.

Re:Actaully, it seems pretty accurate - by aslate (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

No, that means that 80% of those have had some form of criminal conviction or caution at any point in their life, which could be for a large array of fairly minor things.

Cautions can be given out for petty vandalism or fairly minor crime, lots of things that people may have done during their younger years. Not the sort of crimes that i think DNA should be kept on a database for.

Re:The same should be done - by Beardo the Bearded (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Tim, Terry, and Ted would like a word with you.

That word would be “kaboom”.

The vast majority of “middle east” folks who are here are here because they’re tired of all the shit in their home countries. The guy next to me is Iranian; he’s here now with his family because he’s not going to get dragged into the street by the secret police or arrested because he went to University.

Most people, no matter where they are from, don’t want to blow things up or destroy buildings. (Personally, I realize that some buildings have to be blown up, but that’s because of the work I do. Frankly, if you’re getting shot at by the Navy, then it’s probably not a big loss if we kick you off the planet.) They want to go about their lives without the fear of being blown up or shot at.

These “Muslims” (and just for the record, not everyone from the middle east is a Muslim.) emigrating to the Western world are often highly-educated (like the non-Muslim Professional Engineer next to me that I referred to earlier), young, and wanting to make a solid contribution to the countries that they are now calling home.

We were not attacked by Muslims. The attacks on the Cole, the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon were performed by brainwashed puppets controlled by a billionaire megalomanic sociopath who convinced them that they would be better off dead. They were no more Muslim than the Branch Davidians or Manson’s followers were whatever religion they purported to be. The Koran is pretty clear about the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” rule, same as the Torah and the Bible. (There are parts like Leviticus in the other texts as well, so don’t cut and paste something out of context from a website.) I’ve had Muslim co-workers, and they are as opposed to violence as anyone else. This includes hating Hamas for rocketing Israel and condemning 9/11 as a travesty.

The TSA is bullshit security theater, plain and simple.

We got into this mess from political gaming, not from “liberals”. Liberals want the government out of people’s lives, smaller government, and no deficit budgets.

Anonymous is winning - by AnonymousX (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Anonymous has done a lot since the early days of prank calls and whatnot. The legal protests as well as other actions by Anonymous (also legal) have delivered a crushing and unprecedented blow to Scientology. Anon has probably done more to fuck them over than even the FBI did at the end of the 1970’s. Now because of Anon, there is massive negative media coverage of the scilons. Hollywood is rebelling against them and more and more celebs are walking away or saying no. And on top of all that, now the Australian government is taking a hard look at Scientology as a criminal organization with a Senator actually denouncing them in open Parmiment. Anonymous has enabled many ex-scientologists to speak out as well as family of those still inside to seek communication with their loved ones without fear of reprisal. Anonymous enabled this by breaking the back of Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs and has them so tied up, they can’t prioritize which targets to go after and have lost their effectiveness almost entirely. After nearly 2 years of this, only one conviction against an anon and for a lowly DDOS attack that happened in the early few weeks of the movement is a testament to how good Anonymous is at staying within the law. Sure it may cut out some form of lulz, but we have found that action against the Scientologists that hurts them but leaves us legally untouchable generates way more lulz because it leaves them no lawful recourse against us.

Dmitriy Guzner: - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

secularist martyr

you don’t fight vile “religions” that zombify and enslave the weak with kind words and cupcakes

this is the way the mafia known as the church of scientology plays:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

turn around is fair play

scientology - by Dan667 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
is not a church.

Re:scientology - by Wyatt Earp (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

They are a cult.

People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations; 
Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized; 
They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader; 
They get a new identity based on the group; 
They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

From everything I’ve read about and seen of Scientolgists and Scientology, they do all of those things.

Contrast that to say…Judaism or Islam, theres a big difference.

Scientology is not a religion! - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

…it’s a tax evasion scheme.

This explains Star Trek - by Shivetya (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

and their exploding work stations.

killer app - by jjeffries (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
The killer app for this will of course be a Timex Sinclair 1000 emulator.

Having read TFA - by fridaynightsmoke (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I am left thinking “so what?”. All they did was PROJECT graphics onto an inflatable surface, and used a camera and image recognition to determine which ‘button’ was being pressed.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe this as a ‘touch screen’; the image is projected onto the surface (which could be true for ANY surface) and the surface itself does NOT detect touches. There is also no tactile feedback whatsoever. I might as well get one of those laser projection keyboards, set it up on the bonnet of my car and announce that I’ve made a “self-propelling air-conditioned touchscreen that seats four”.

Pricetag? Reliability? - by courteaudotbiz (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
And what would be the actual pricetag of such a device? I understand that we use more and more electronics to simplify the mechanics behind our devices. Now, with a pump, you need to physically inject air under the screen, so you have moving parts, and they are usually costly… besides, what would be the reliability of such a thing? and could you get a “flat” screen?

Visual feedback - by Enderandrew (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I assumed I’d have issue with the touch keyboard on the iPhone. However, when I press a key, that key is highlighted and enlarges. I receive visual feedback of the key I pressed, even if I don’t have physical feedback. Yes, it requires I look when I text, but I can’t imagine many scenarios where I’d really ever text without looking just because there was some physical feedback.

I’ll take the lack of moving parts over the physical feedback, especially given how often I’ve dropped my phone.

Attempted before - by flogger (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
This was attempted before with Free-Pc.com (Now it is just a parked domain). This was back in 1999. 10000 free Compaq computers were given away. In return people gave up personal information/demographics/hobbies/etc in return for a PC that had advertising on the screen 24/7. Source.  
 
The attempt was a bust if I recall right.  
 
But this is 10 years later; we have come a long way in targeted advertising. If anyone can do this, it is Google.

You forget who you’re talking to - by Tarlus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Give us a free netbook at the cost of seeing ads? You’re forgetting one thing: Chrome OS is Linux at its heart, and we’re a bunch of Linux geeks. We’d have those ads hacked out of it faster than you could say ”/etc/hosts.deny”.

I think it’s a great idea. - by tmosley (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
I don’t think they would be able to give them away for free, though. As someone else mentioned, people would take advantage of that, and wallpaper their rooms with monitors and such. What I would do is charge the person who wanted one COST or something less than cost, and let your profits come from the advertising as mentioned. If the cost to make one of these things is ten or twenty dollars, as speculated in the article, it would probably work quite well. I’d pay ten or twenty bucks for a Google netbook. Hell, if it provided free internet access, I’d pay a few hundred, a la Kindle. I think most people in the developed world would do the same. That is, assuming it remained open and unhobbled.

ideal for my 2 year old - by alen (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

i have already started teaching my son who is 2 and a few months about computers. found a few free games like Thomas the Train that he likes. and for reading i’ll open up Google and type in Dora in the search box and spell it out for him letter by letter. he already knows most of the letters of the alphabet, can count to 12 with help, knows a bunch of basic shapes and colors. time to teach him to read since most of the good NYC schools expect a child to read and write by 1st grade. at least that’s what i’m told by parents with kids that old. the good schools in the NYC suburbs are the same way.

a free or ultra low cost Google netbook is perfect for this. my son likes to bang on the keyboard so if it breaks i just go get another one. nothing to break software-wise.

a few months of playing with one of these junky useless Chrome OS gizmos and he will be ready for a real computer. i’m thinking a Mac just because he can learn some UNIX on it and it’s usable unlike most of the linux distro’s i’ve tried. I do think Ubuntu sucks as a home PC

i’ve played with the Chrome OS vmware image floating around the internet and i don’t think it has any value at all for a normal person or any kind of computer user i’ve ever met

Interesting Historical Perspective - by Like2Byte (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

The good gents at IBM didn’t see the value in the “Operating System” Microsoft was selling them.

The good gents at Microsoft didn’t see the value in monitoring what their users’ daily activity on their respective OS was.

I wonder what the good gents at Google are ignoring today that will be a gold mine tomorrow.

—-

On another note: I’m very surprised that people are all that interested in what is, essentially, a SpyOS. Forget tracking cookies - this OS is going to be tracking people’s behavior 24 hours a day.

Not to provide any ideas into advanced Spywware under the guise of “free useful PC” but imagine if there is a GPS in the netbook that is able to track the users’ movements. Traffic patterns, of the individual, could be analyzed and combined with other users and applicable advertising will show up for ‘popular’ products both in on-line advertising and roadside billboards.

I don’t want to get too far off topic so I’ll ask this question: When did we turn the corner of being Anti-Spyware to being Pro-Spyware?

Markram’s for real - by Bell Would%3F (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

My research recently took me to some of Markram’s work - the guy is brilliant and REALISTIC. His research goals are simple and attainable and any claims of success he has are *well* within the real world. He’s incrementally worked his way up from a few neurons - the way a *real* scientist works; and to him, the simplest “brain simulation” of any sort is definitely possible, but far off in the future.

Re:Almaden’s Dharmendra Modha: You got pwned! - by yt.rabb at gmail (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
The only thing missing from that email was his momma. Hey Mohda, Your momma’s research methodology is so flawed, that she puts the hypothesis to be proven as an assumption. Biatch.

Skeptical? - by golden age villain (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This IBM announcement was just ridiculous. To cite only one argument, the brain does not consist only of neurons. It contains at least as many other cells which are also involved in signal processing. Mohda would be laughed at in any neuroscience conference and he certainly doesn’t help the cause of theoreticians in the neuroscience field by making such stupid announcements. Eugene Izhikevich who designed the neuron model being used for these simulations had a PNAS paper not too long ago modeling the entire human brain and he did not claim that he successfully modeled the human brain. Plus no one has any clue how the brain computes really so making a claim about the formation of thoughts is just nonsense.

long ways to go yet - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

From the original FA: “The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat’s brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat’s brain work together.”

So the most bad-ass computer simulation, assuming it worked, which this guy is saying it probably didn’t, was still 100 times slower than a real cat’s brain. A real cat’s brain also fits inside a tiny furry space the size of a baseball… and it runs on a once-daily small bowl of cat food. We have a long ways to go.

Re:long ways to go yet - by toppavak (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
He’s not arguing that it didn’t work, he’s arguing that they essentially ran a simulation of a large Artificial Neural Network, a relatively trivial task as long as you have a big enough computer behind it. ANNs are essentially points that connect to each other and learn by assigning weights to these various connections- this is essentially the simplest possible way to simulate the behavior of a neuron. The argument is being made that to claim an ANN, regardless of its size, approaches the capabilities of any mammalian brain is simply wrong, and that a true attempt to create such a simulation would need to factor in the stochasticity of ion channels, branchings in neurons and various other biological phenomena that have a tremendous impact on how our brains work. 
 
Without reading more details on the original work, I’m inclined to say that he has a very valid point if they were indeed only running a large ANN model.

mcmurdo.gov - by Doc Ruby (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Back in the earlier days of the less popular Internet, I used to get a kick out of pining mcmurdo.gov , the US base in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, because it was as far as I could reach on the Net (ping times usually about 800ms). Before I’d traveled very much around the physical globe, I’d stretch my imagination to the scale spanning “me to McMurdo”.

I’m really psyched to look forward to pinging Jupiter.

No Viop for you - by headhot (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’m sure Cisco conveniently forgot to explain the concept of latency before they sold them voice service on and router in space.

Re:Not even Cisco - by bucky0 (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

bremsstrahlung is the word you want :) /physics!

Re:Yes but …Christmas gifts,Jacket,shoes,handbag - by ByOhTek (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Annoying slashdotters?

Is this site *BEGGING* to get hacked?

It won’t work because, - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

in space no one can hear you stream…

Signal to Noise ratio over time