I know this is off topic, but... it is my opinion that altering some portion of a person or organization's name so as to give a negative connotation, as you have done with "CONgress" and "L-Mart", is the absolute lowest form of argument.

It's not particularly clever to have noticed that the word "con" can be found in "congress" - especially when you consider that you were by no means the first person to come to this realization, and have probably copied this from someone else.

It is most definitely some form of logical fallacy. Congress is spelled with the letters "con", and is therefore made up of a bunch of con-artists... is that your argument?

Even if the latter statement happens to be true, it by no means follows from the former. Furthermore, even if one were to accept that congress is entirely made up of corrupt con artists who are out to steal from the public, you don't present any justification for why you think that private business would be capable of directing funds more efficiently than government (what makes Elon Musk so special as to be beyond the reach of corruption?), or how it would be possible to "get private space to be honestly profitable" without public funds from congress.

And I can't even begin to dissect what your reasoning might be for referring to Lockheed Martin as "L-Mart". Anyone care to take a guess at what that means?

Again - I'm sorry to go off on a rant here like this, but I really hope that we can keep this sort of irrational style of "debate" off Slashdot. If you want to want to write crap like that there are any number of popular news websites out there that allow public comments and cater to a less-educated readership, like ABC News or Fox News, where I think you will find yourself in good company.

Pfft... having a $5 dollar phone is nothing to brag about. This guy, on the other hand, doesn't even own a tv!

And that's one very good reason that you'll never be the CEO of a large company. One trait that you'll find across all CEO's is that they are Driven (with a capital "D") - by greed, vanity, etc. - much more than your typical person. I'm sure that Randall Stephenson had enough money to retire comfortably before he ever took over the position of CEO at AT&T - I don't think that's his motivation.

I do agree, though, that there are probably instances where outrageous CEO salaries have encouraged them to take risks that weren't really in the best interests of their employees or shareholders.

I don't know you personally, so this statement may not apply to you personally, but the notion that your average person could ever survive for a year as CEO of a $200B company is completely absurd.

A typical person would be torn apart by the stress of having to please their board, shareholders, creditors, clients, partners, and also the sheer torture of having to make huge decisions in the absence of perfect information. Personally, I wouldn't even consider taking on that sort of responsibility if the compensation were only $150K per year.

I agree that a total compensation of $27M is excessive (irrationally so), but the reality is that there are not a lot of people that have what it takes to be a CEO of a large publicly traded company, and therefore their large salaries are at least partially justified by the law of supply and demand.

Slashdot needs a -1 "TMI" mod option.

Intel's recently announced Cedar Trail update to the Atom line of processors also includes some models that are meant to be run fan-less. I think you're more likely to see these Cedar Trail chips being brought to the market in silent PCs than Medfield chips.

Glad to see that there are others out there who value silence above all else!

I think you've got to look to the future to really understand why this is a good thing.

Intel has by far the largest R&D budget of any chip maker out there. They've done some amazing things in the desktop and server space recently with their "Core" line, to the point where pretty much no one can touch them at the moment on performance or power efficiency (at that performance level).

This is only their first release for the smartphone market, and already they are releasing a chip that beats existing ARM processors while being competitive on power usage. Future iterations are going to get better, and by bringing to bear their enormous and R&D budget and advanced manufacturing processes they are going to push the smartphone industry forward.

You ask:

By having Intel compete in the smartphone business, I think the answer is "yes" to all of the above. It's just going to take some time to see the results.

Agreed that Intel entering the smartphone market is not going to have the same impact on smartphone users as the announcement of a new or improved OS, for example. However, as consumers we are all likely to benefit from the competition.

As an Intel shareholder, though, I am very excited by this announcement.

That's not to say we should just take Airbus at their word, though. An independent 3rd party should be brought in to investigate and ultimately make the decision.

Wow - you didn't even read the first line of TFS. This isn't someone looking for a camp for their kid.

Also, your advice is completely worthless since this student specifically mentions they are less interested in learning to program than they are in learning about math and physics.

P.S. Do you happen to work in my IT department? Your writing style feels oddly familiar for some reason...

I completely respect the fact that it is difficult to write in a foreign language. If your point here is simply to say that it's not cool to hate on non-native English speakers, then I agree with you.

That being said, I don't think that it is unreasonable to request that the author have somebody proof read his article before submitting to Slashdot to be read by a large English-speaking audience. Or to include half-decent mockups/illustrations. Presentation is important when disseminating ideas.

I'm even willing to overlook poor grammar/presentation if the content is sufficiently interesting to justify the extra effort. But given that the best thing that you managed to say about this article is that it "makes some sense", compared with the negative attributes that you cite of being "incorrect" and (likely) unoriginal, I don't think we are in disagreement here that this article is a straight-up stinker.

I had absolutely no idea what the summary was talking about, so I made a rookie slashdot error and went to read TFA. Here's the first paragraph:

The first paragraph is riddled with unfounded assumptions and grammatical mistakes - as is, I assume, the remainder of the article. While I stopped reading after the second paragraph, I did spend a few seconds to scroll down to the bottom of the page to the only screenshot of what Semantic Line Interface might look like:

Example of a Semantic Line Interface

Visionary.

Citation needed:

Kodu looks to be a little too simplified for high school students. In my opinion, it would be a disservice to college-bound high school seniors who are interested in software development to teach a course like this without giving them some exposure to actual "code".

In my first year high school programming class we learned to program in BASIC by creating games. We started off simple with games like black jack and bingo, but by the end of the year some of the more advanced students had progressed to the point where they were creating some relatively complex games such as Tetris.

The games were simple and ugly looking but that didn't matter to us in the least. We were proud of our creations and proud of the fact that we had become "programmers".

My point here is that if time is limited, the students would be better served by reducing the complexity of the end goal (to something as simple as Tetris) rather than abstracting away the nuts and bolts of real programming.

For the record let me just say that I went scuba diving at the great barrier reef back in 2005.

It was a wonderful experience that I'll never forget, and it is a great shame that climate change is causing the coral to become bleached and die off. However, everything that I saw - including the fish, which to the best of my knowledge do not suffer the same effects of bleaching that coral does - was without question much less colorful than what is shown in the travel brochures.

Again - I'm not disputing that bleaching occurs or that the reef is in danger... just pointing out that the specific example of a tourist complaining about less-vivid-than-expected-colors doesn't really qualify as solid evidence or give a good idea as to the scope of the problem. It's the equivalent of me saying "I heard several tourists complaining about the heat while visiting the grand canyon this summer - it's a crying shame that global warming is ruining peoples' enjoyment of this natural wonder".