There is this idea that "computers", as an abstract concept, are a way to improve education. We see this all the time; most recently, states are pouring huge amounts of money into putting laptop computers into the hands of every student. It seems that people seldom ask why we're doing this. Why are we doing this? Well, it's self-evident that computers make education better, right? At least, that's the way we've been treating the issue. We don't have enough people asking in what ways, specifically, computers will improve education.

So this article is about the result of that way of thinking. Today, even the poorer kids have access to technology in their homes. And, obviously, they play video games with the technology instead of sitting in front of the computer and thinking great thoughts and composing essays and multimedia presentations in their spare time. But the article is full of people who express surprise at this. They are mystified that putting computers into kids' hands didn't magically make them into better students and deeper thinkers.

As has been said in this forum many times before, a computer is merely a tool. There is absolutely no reason why you should expect a student to suddenly become a great learner simply because you handed him a computer, any more than you would expect him to complete his education on his own if you handed him a pile of K-12 textbooks. Someone in charge has to stop and ask the right questions, if we want computers to really help in education. Someone has to stop and ask why and how we expect computers to help, and then implement a plan that actually makes that happen. Because right now, we're just funneling a lot of money into facebook machines for students.

You know, your whole post would have been a lot better without the first paragraph, which was mostly just pointless name-calling. Why did you do that? Did you think it would make your point more persuasively if you prefaced it by calling the rest of us "fat little smug antisocial nerds" and concluded your post with "fat asshole nerds?" I understand that you feel strongly, but get a grip.

Anyhow. I don't think most of us are unhappy because your eye surgeon friend gets a phone call telling her that she needs to go in to work. We're unhappy because some guy who believes that his time is more valuable than anyone else's refuses to stop talking on his cell phone while the entire rest of the airplane waits on him so we can push back from the gate. We're unhappy because people sitting in cinemas apparently believe that they should be entitled to take phone calls for the duration of the film (I don't care what your profession is, if you get a phone call that's so important that you need to take it at the cinema, or the theatre, or the symphony, or wherever, then you get up and leave the room to take your call). We're unhappy because people feel the need to SHOUT on the phone, and they like to sit next to us on the train and discuss the family's latest medical situation or other drama.

You accuse us of believing that the world revolves around us, but such are exactly the people who aggravate us the most. Nobody begrudges the use of cell phones during emergencies. But even during emergencies, it is polite to attempt to remove yourself from the midst of a group of people who don't want to listen to your phone conversation. Those who advocate for jammers are responding to a persistent frustration with inconsiderate people. Jamming is clearly not the best solution. But repeatedly calling people names doesn't really do much for the situation, either.

So the data are free for anyone to look at. But I'm not aware that there's any way to download georeferenced imagery from Google Maps? I mean, they're making the imagery available, but it doesn't seem all that useful to me from a photogrammetry standpoint. You don't have nearly enough information to do a lot of kinds of analysis using just a color-balanced RGB image (that may have been through some lossy compression process?). It seems like your Ikonos data are still of superior quality and use to what can now be seen on Google Maps. So what's the problem?

It used to be artificially limited (they called it 'selected availability'). Today, US GPS has selected availability turned off, so civilian GPS users have access to the same data as the military. I don't believe there's any technical reason why they couldn't turn it back on, but GPS has proved to be so useful for civilians that it'd probably have to be a pretty serious situation that would prompt them to do it.

Stationary GPS is a little bit different. The receiver is planted in a location whose coordinates can be very carefully determined via more traditional survey methods. Combine this with some other technologies, and you can get very precise and accurate results. For example, one of the factors that degrades the accuracy of GPS is atmospheric effects. With a network of carefully surveyed stationary GPS units, we can correct for atmospheric effects by seeing how 'off' the various units are compared to normal, and to each other. There are other sources of error, but the point is that GPS error can be greatly reduced when you already know where you are.

Now, in this case, the 'stationary' GPS units are actually moving at a very slow rate. With the error corrections described above, once all the other errors are accounted for, what remains is error due to actual movement of the GPS. I can't see the full text of the paper, but probably what they have is a statistical model that says the GPS units are moving by a certain amount each year, and a confidence level, and all of that.

So, to your last point: if you want to improve the GPS accuracy of your lawn bot, you need only to install a stationary GPS receiver on your house, survey its location very carefully, and attach a transmitter to turn it into a 'GPS base station' that your robot's GPS will use as a local reference to improve its GPS fix. (You can buy a GPS base station from someone like Trimble; they're often used for construction and the like.)

In most cases, including this one, the prisoner is interested in using his own money to buy an Xbox, not tax dollars.

Er... actually, President Bush toured the country in a bus from the same company.

404 pages that don't return code 404 make me crazy. I worked on some software that did periodic harvesting of remote data, and there was one site that was always moving its files around, and they had a custom 404 page that returned 200 OK. So the software was never able to tell that the file it was looking for wasn't actually there, and our database for that site was always screwed up. They would contact us and complain about our links being wrong every now and then, but I could never get them to fix their 404 page. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever got them to understand what the problem was.

The point of the whole project was to automate the process. If we have to go and visually inspect every URL to make sure that the remote web server isn't lying to us about the validity of the link, then it kind of invalidates the whole thing.

Probably not from Microsoft, but the OpenKinect community has developed an API that works under many platforms:

http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

Okay, that explains it. The submitter was only willing to put in the smallest possible amount of time and effort to make his blog post not so transparently an interstitial page with no beneficial contribution to the topic.

I don't mind if people link to their own blog in the summary, but if they're going to, at least they should make their blog post *useful*.

Thanks.

Probably, not every single computer in the OP's work needs to work with a Kinect. For some applications, it would be enough to have one machine dedicated to that kind of application, and its use would be shared among the office.

The blog post must have been written in a hurry by someone whose native language is not English.

Here is the link to the actual Microsoft SDK:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

I absolutely agree with you. I'd expect that the RIAA does not. It's clear to me that some limited amount of music sharing is good for sales; introducing people to new music is likely to make people want more of it (if they like it). Hey, that's what the radio is for, right? But the industry has got this crazy black and white view of copyright violation. I mean, they were complaining about people ripping CDs to put them on their iPods, like they were losing sales from that activity. They're getting ready to make a big stink about this cloud service that Amazon is pitching.

I'm not one who believes that we should all just give up on charging for information. But I think we need to form a basic understanding that the rules have changed, and that we need to adapt our IP laws not just to accommodate the present, but to be flexible for the future. The industry is trying so hard to drag us back to the past, where physical media was the way to control distribution, but that time has passed. I don't know why media companies don't even seem to try to see what's going on around them.

P.S. - I used to work at a particular office job. I would go to work, and I would have a pen that I got from the supply cupboard. Sometimes, I would forget to take the pen out of my pocket before I went home. Maybe, on the way home, I would stop and buy groceries, and I would write a check using that pen. She maintained that that was stealing. My opinion was that the ink that I used to do that was more than made up for by the work email that I would respond to when I got home. We were never able to see eye-to-eye on that topic.

I think it's the same kind of problem that prevents most people from getting up in arms about DRM. They just don't make the connection between the physical world and the digital world. For most of us on Slashdot, we see music (or text, or video, or whatever) as just another data stream. We see data as being the same stuff regardless of the delivery medium. Other people see a fundamental difference between, say, an MP3 file and a CD.

When they have a CD, they have a solid thing in front of them that they can point at and say, 'there's my music'. With music on a computer that they got over the Internet, it's a lot harder to point at a thing. It's scary, because it's one thing to talk about copying a CD and ending up with a big pile of pirated CDs, and it's quite another to talk about copying an MP3, and suddenly there's potentially an infinite number of pirate copies with no obvious physical consequences. There are physical and monetary barriers to making a bazillion copies of a CD, but no boundaries at all to copying an MP3.

Of course, to us, it doesn't make any difference. We know that the data are the same regardless of media. And it's obvious to us that people like Lee should realize that getting a pirate compilation from her friend is the same thing that a lot of us do on the Internet with music files. But it's absolutely not obvious to her (at least, I assume, from the obvious dissonance between her actions and her words).

I'm not even trying to take a position pro- or anti- in this case; I'm more interested in Lee having a consistent opinion of music sharing than in what that opinion actually is.

This is what I came here to say. The site looks good to me, but the RSS feed isn't formatted well. Also, when I logged in, there appeared to be a logo that was supposed to be showing in the login popup, but it was getting cropped.