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Games

Submission + - Learning games for a 7-year-old?

lawpoop writes: "My buddy has a precocious 7-year-old who has exhaused the level-building games on the Nickelodeon website. My buddy asked me about games that will help him learn programming or logic skills. I thought of Alice, but its youngest version is targeted at middleschoolers.

What are some great games that will help a 7-year-old build their creativity and logic skills? I'm thinking of stuff along the lines of Lemmings, where you have to come up with creative solutions, using logic. Also, free would be great :)"
Windows

Submission + - What's Keeping You on XP? 2

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "PC World reports that Windows XP lost more than 11 percent of its share from September to December 2011 to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS as users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired. Figures indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates. Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto "Standing still is falling behind" to promote Windows 7 and demote XP and in July, Microsoft told customers it was "time to move on" from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer (IE) team had dismissed XP as the "lowest common denominator" when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9. The deadline for ditching Windows XP is in April 2014, when Microsoft stops patching the operating system. "Enterprises don't want to run an OS when there's no security fixes," says Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Research rejecting the idea that Microsoft would extend the end-of-life date for Windows XP to please the 10% who have no plans to leave the OS. "The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.""
Politics

Submission + - Richard Stallman Was Right All Along (osnews.com)

jrepin writes: "Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia — but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality."

Comment Re:Do the math, indeed! (Score 2) 376

Without a lot of resources! Are you kidding me?
In Arizona, they had free air, heat, water just flowing around, food that grew on trees and ran around, and cheap and easy access to other people and their huge trade networks. And that was all stuff they *didn't* have to pay for!
The cost of all of those things are extraordinary when you're talking about being on the moon or in space.

Comment Re:upsetting science (Score 1) 79

but the previous work isn't really getting trashed, is it?

That's what it feels like, and that's why people initially have a strong emotional reaction to it. The various levels of the brain are all operating simultaneously -- the 'fight-or-flight' part and the higher-level cognitive part. We continue to have emotional, child-like reactions, but our higher-level cognitive functioning arrests and overrides such reactions.

Comment Do you *want* them to be trusting? (Score 1) 236

sounds like they don't trust their employees

Yeah -- you think there aren't attempts to infiltrate them left and right? How dumb and naive would they be if they *did* trust their employees? Would you want to turn over documents to them if the person to whom you did turned out to be a secret agent?

Or maybe they're just going to happen upon trustworthy employee by an extensive screening process and three rounds of interviews.

Comment Re:It's complete bullshit (Score 1) 1017

That makes sense. I've always been one of those people who've been skinny and I eat basically whatever I want, so it's counter-intuitive to me that overweight people eat more -- I always ate what my friend were eating when we went out ( and I don't eat all that healthily), so I just though some metabolisms were different.. I grew up in the same household that my brothers did, and one is more normal weight while the other was obese in high school. Funny thing is they were both athletic while I was the skinny nerd. But I guess we really did eat differently.

Comment Re:It's complete bullshit (Score 1) 1017

which is utterly useless since people will typically under-estimate their calorie intake by 20-60%

Wouldn't this be corrected by randomization? Or is it only overweight people who under-report intake and over-report expenditure?

In other words, suppose I had a hypothesis that redheads were 10-15 pounds lighter than the average person. I could do a survey, but I know that everybody under-reports their weight. However, since redheads under-report just as much as everybody else, it all comes out in the wash -- unless *only* redheads *or* everybody else under-reports their weight.

So if everybody is under-estimating intake and over-estimate expenditure, it wouldn't make a different because both groups. In other words, there's error but not necessarily bias.

Comment Re:Even more strange (Score 1) 628

But then they will need maintenance workers for those robots

But wouldn't the net effect anyway be less demand for human labor? I mean, isn't that the point of making robot/machine anythings? If all we're doing is build robots so we can do a new job for a while, why bother? Instead, aren't we building machines so that we have to work less? And with an Earth that's gaining people, isn't this going to be a problem?

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