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Comment "No idea how... the brain works" (Score 4, Interesting) 230

I'm calling the poster here out as being full of shit. As someone who's done neuroscience research, the idea that "Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works" is bollocks. We have a reasonably good idea on the large scale, and in certain areas (such as the visual cortex), that understanding is quite far along. There are frontiers to our knowledge, but human understanding of brains is well on its way. Poster needs to pick up some neuroscience textbooks and get clued.

As a particular recommendation, I'd suggest Kolb and Whishaw's "Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology"; it's an excellent textbook.

Open Source

Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development 355

Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.
DRM

Apple Music and the Terrible Return of DRM 260

An anonymous reader writes: Apple's rumored music streaming service looks set to materialize soon, and a lot of people are talking about how good it might be. But Nilay Patel is looking at the other side — if the service fits with Apple's typical mode of operation, it'll only work with other Apple products. "That means I'll have yet a fourth music service in my life (Spotify, Google Play Music, Prime, and Apple Music) and a fourth set of content exclusives and pricing windows to think about instead of just listening to music." He points out Steve Jobs's 2007 essay on the state of digital music and notes that Jobs seemed to feel DRM was a waste of time — something forced on Apple by the labels. "But it's no longer the labels pushing DRM on the music services; it's the services themselves, because locking you into a single ecosystem guarantees you'll keep paying their monthly subscription fees and hopefully buy into the rest of their ecosystem. ... Apple Music might be available on Android, but it probably won't be as good, because Apple wants you to buy an iPhone.... There's just lock-in, endless lock-in. Is this what we wanted?"
America Online

Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs 123

eldavojohn writes: You've probably got a spindle in your closet, or a drawer layered with them: the CD-ROM discs that were mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away "just in case." Now, of course, the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain eccentric individual named Jason Scott has a fever — and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn't stop there, "I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we're talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It's over. The time when we're going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there's going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I'm looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike." Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations!

Comment Re:So much for Debian 8, then... (Score 1) 338

"Accept this kernel patch because some web browser unwisely introduced a dependency on a kernel feature two years before it would be sane to do so"

"That's crazy, hell no"

I think you've misidentified the side that's in the wrong here. Software developers, when they see a new feature in some library they use or in a kernel or whatever, should be thinking "That'll be nice to use someday, I'll start playing with it in a bit, make it an option in a year if that's workable, and maybe make it a dependency in two years". Deciding "OMG yes NOW NOW NOW" is moronic.

Comment Re:Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! (Score 1) 681

Are you really going to be confused by the words that have been borrowed from other activities for lack of more appropriate terms? Look at the structure of how science happens - the interplay between research departments and funding sources, the role of reputation and qualification, the peer review system, the metrics of empiricism, testability, reproducibility, and follow-up studies, and reinterpretations of conclusions. It's a complicated, powerful, and beautiful process but it has no resemblance to debate.

Comment Violating airspace is all the rage (Score 1) 175

It doesn't seem prudent to be figuring out ways to violate another country's airspace unless wants to actually be at war with them. I wouldn't want to comment on the merits of war with North Korea per se, but at least from the perspective of maintaining peace and a normal international order, nations generally expect to have their borders respected, and they take responsibility to control their citizens enough to make sure they don't violate the borders of their neighbours.

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