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Comment Re:One way to get more registered voters (Score 1) 1088

by pingveno (#26832377) Attached to: Iowa Seeks To Remove Electoral College

Go look it up and read how it was and WHY the Founding Fathers set it up that way...

Be careful not to idolize the Founding Fathers and framers of the US Constitution. When the US Constitution was written only white male property owners were allowed to vote (~15% of the population). Now we have voter registration drives to get as many eligible people to vote as is possible. Besides, election by state legislatures makes cronyism even more of a problem than it is now.

Comment Creating Unity (Score 2, Interesting) 250

by pingveno (#26240257) Attached to: Google, Apple, Microsoft Sued Over File Preview

There's a least one benefit to patent trolls like these guys. They unify companies that normally are fierce competitors. Or, as Psycho Dave from Kuro5hin describe another group:

"...what common ground does pretty much every person regardless of their political or religious beliefs have? They all hate the Westboro Baptist Church."

Comment Re:Bad idea (Score 1) 474

by pingveno (#26220219) Attached to: ACM Urges Obama To Include CS In K-12 Core
Agreed. K-12 teachers already have enough on their plates. Spending a great deal of time trying to explain a linked list to a classroom of children who generally have little aptitude or use for the subject wastes valuable time. On the other hand, I would like to see students who have some aptitude/interest in CS encouraged to pursue it. Guidance councillors? Yes. Core curriculum? No.
Education

ACM Urges Obama To Include CS In K-12 Core 474

Posted by kdawson from the little-algol-and-less-fortran dept.
jmcbain writes "The ACM issued a set of recommendations supporting Barack Obama's stated goal of making science and mathematics education a national priority at the K-12 level. The ACM is urging the new administration to include Computer Science as an integral part of the nation's education system. 'The new Administration can play an important role in strengthening middle school education, where action can really make a difference, to introduce these students to computer science,' said ACM CEO John White." Is CS such a basic subject, at the level of science or math, that it makes sense to (try to) teach its principles to every elementary school child?

Comment Vandalism erased (Score 1) 145

by pingveno (#26187223) Attached to: Court Allows Arkansas To Hide Wikipedia Edits
Is this even that big of an issue? I know that that state owned computers shouldn't be used for political purposes, but it's not like there's lasting damage. The vandalism probably disappeared within a few minutes (tip of the hat to counter-vandals). This looks like making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Government

Court Allows Arkansas To Hide Wikipedia Edits 145

Posted by Soulskill from the change-we-don't-believe-in dept.
rheotaxis writes "A circuit judge in Arkansas will not order the state to reveal where its computers were used to edit Wikipedia articles about former governor Mike Huckabee while he was running for President. Two Associated Press journalists used WikiScanner to track the edits to IP addresses used by the state. Writer Jon Gambrell and News Editor Kelly P. Kissel filed a suit in October 2007 asking the state to reveal which state offices used the IP addresses, because state rules don't allow using computer resources for political purposes. The director of the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, Claire Bailey, claimed in court that releasing this information would allow hackers to target these state offices."
The Courts

Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated 152

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the still-looking-for-a-fat-lady dept.
blackbearnh writes "Last week, the net was all abuzz with speculation that SCO was finally gone and done for. With the final judgment in SCO v. Novell in, and SCO millions of dollars in the hole to Novell, it seemed like the fat lady had finally sung. But like most things in the legal system, it isn't nearly that simple. O'Reilly Media sought out Groklaw's Pamela Jones, and got a rundown of what's still alive, and why a final end to the madness may be many years away. 'Summing up, it looks bleak for SCO at the moment, but let's enter the alternate realm of SCO's best-case scenario in its dreams: in that realm, SCO wins on appeal, which one of SCO's lawyers indicated might take a year and a half or five years, and the case is sent back to Utah for trial by jury, which is what SCO wanted (as opposed to trial by judge, which is what it got), then everything listed above (except for the IPO class action) comes alive again, presumably, depending on what the appellate court decides. Then SCO is in position once again to go after Linux end users, as well as IBM, et al.'"
Government

Ted Stevens Loses Senate Re-Election Bid 337

Posted by kdawson from the down-the-tubes dept.
JakartaDean writes "Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, famed Internet regulator, has lost his Senate seat. The AP is reporting that 'Stevens was declared the loser in Alaska on Tuesday night after a two-week-long process of counting nearly 90,000 absentee and early votes from across Alaska. With this victory, Democrat Mark Begich (the mayor of Anchorage) has defeated one of the giants in the US Senate by a 3,724-vote margin, a stunning end to a 40-year Senate career marred by Stevens' conviction on corruption charges a week before the election.' It's probably too early to tell what this means for Internet regulation, but at least there's a > 0 chance that the next committee chair will understand something about the Net."

Why Developers Are Switching To Macs 771

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-we-mostly-can-expense-them dept.
snydeq writes "Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform, in large part due to Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and to embrace virtualization of other OSes, which has turned Mac OS X into a flexible tool for development, InfoWorld reports. The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development. Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory and likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.' What remains unclear is whether Apple will lend an ear to this new wave of Mac-based development or continue to develop products that lock out uses programmers expect."
United States

Discuss the US Presidential Election & the Economy 2369

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-that-matters dept.
A number of folks have been submitting topics that indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election. Since we're under a week now, I've decided to run a series of discussion stories to give you guys a place to discuss the issue. So here's the first one: The Economy. It's the biggest topic these days, eclipsing even war as the most important issue to most Americans. But how will that affect your choice next week? And why?
PC Games (Games)

99.8% of Gamers Don't Care About DRM, Says EA 554

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-also-don't-understand-it dept.
arcticstoat writes "If you thought that EA might have been humbled by the massive Internet backlash against its use of SecuROM in its recent games, then you'd be wrong. Speaking at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money Conference, EA's CEO John Riccitiello claimed that the whole issue had been blown out of all proportion. 'We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 per cent of users wouldn't notice,' claimed Riccitiello, 'but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Study Shows Worm Grunters Imitate Moles 110

Posted by kdawson from the queue-the-jaws-theme dept.
Science_afficionado writes "In the southeastern US, fisherman have an unusual way to collect earthworms for bait. The practice is called worm grunting, fiddling, snoring, or charming. It involves pounding a wooden stake into the ground and rubbing the top of the stake with a long piece of steel to produce a grunting sound that causes earthworms to come to the surface where they can be easily collected for bait. A study published today in the open access journal PLoS ONE shows that the technique works because the worm grunters are unknowingly imitating the sounds created by burrowing moles. Full text of the paper is available at PLoS ONE."

The True Cost of One Laptop Per Child 356

Posted by Zonk from the good-idea-falls-short dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The '$100 laptop' Negroponte is hoping to put in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations may actually be more like the '$900 laptop.' From the article, 'Jon Camfield says...once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970. This, he says, doesn't even take in to account the additional costs associated with theft, loss, or accidental damage. Camfield contends that such an expensive undertaking should at least be field-tested in pilot programs designed to establish the viability of the project before asking countries to invest millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.'" Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

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