If you're not afraid of programming (and it sounds like you're not): R. Gimme more details if you want to know what packages to use for graphing and stuff but installing R is incredibly easy. At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can read through this post, the corresponding story and the replies to it. There are a ton of packages for producing graphs. Are you going for accuracy? Beauty? Speed? What?

Lastly, please don't hate on the TI-84. I still have mine as well as a TI-89 and while they were both expensive, they are beautiful and trustworthy devices. Both have outlasted countless other computing machines that have passed through my usage.

There are 300,000 gun related deaths in the United States each year. Therefore, by your logic,we can never discuss gun control.

For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.

For better or for worse, these are completely worthless things in a Capitlistic society.

So it has been, so it is now and so it always shall be: Money drives everything. I don't understand Anil Dash's point and I didn't get much new information from it. It's pretty generic. Make observations (very easy) and then offer conclusions that are bland and optimistic like:

Wow this guy uses some pretty strong rhetoric for not having to explain how this is ever going to be fixed. Also, I feel like he fails to even scratch the surface of what is a very deep "intellectual property" hole of copyright and patents giving the mindset that other companies shouldn't use our ideas to make money or we want that money. And that is so ingrained right now that I don't see "we'll fix these things" as a given. Also this "pendulum" concept he speaks of is hilarious. Care to explain the historic swings of this pendulum to me?

Call me when somebody has a solution that will work. Since you'll never be calling me, I'll just continue to deal with the current state of things.

Shipped/Unshipped for Me People who say that Kickstarter is rife with scams might be right about a few projects but I think that the people who operate that site keep it pretty legit. My own personal history wtih the site (and, yeah, I realize this is going to reveal a lot about me but I don't really care) is that I have received:

• Nature of Code book PDFs (plan on doing a review of it after holidays)
• Two old forgotten sci-fi books (from Singularity & Co)
• Three separate physical magazines on special interests
• Four CD albums by new artists
• 20 of the same Rmashackle Glory vinyl album (don't ask)
• Several T-shirts like fangamer's kickstarter
• FTL (RTS game)

Now, that said, I'm still waiting on three or four video games to be released like Grandroids, NASA's Astronaut game, Kitaru and, of course, the OUYA console. I'm also waiting on a movie that is well overdue (although the dude running it is very responsive and was clearly in over his head), playing cards, a new cartoon from Ren & Stimpy's creator, a board game called "The New Science" (which I might also try to review for Slashdot) and another DVD/CD combo and T-shirt which were very recent so it's not a big deal.

Now, I've only put money in here that I didn't really care about. Yeah, it adds up to real cash but I've been quite happy with all of the things I've gotten out of this and super excited about the future projects. I agreed that the facebook glasses sound like a scam but I was really disheartened when people called the OCULUS a scam. Nobody seems to be covering Zeyez's engineering updates and all the comments are just that it's still a scam and they want their money back.

So why is there there so much negativity associated with Kickstarter? My experience has been largely positive although I would have thought I would be seeing the NASA game sooner (the other funding didn't hit until November of 2012) and I thought I would be watching "Flood Tide" by now. Aside from that, my experience has been largely positive. Do people have negative stories where they've been screwed or cheated or lied to on Kickstarter?

"No presents this year, little Timmy. Also, I just got off the phone with the Australian Authorities who said they found Santa dead in Murray Sunset National Park. Unfortunately it looks like Santa had a new iPhone for navigation and was forced to eat eight of his reindeer. Then there was apparently a struggle between him and the last reindeer. After several blows, it broke free and eventually flew off to leave Santa to bleed out in the dirt from gory antler wounds. These are sad times but we still have each other, just no more frivolous Christmas gifts -- ever again!"

*walks away nipping on a fifth of bourbon*

Actually, yeah they do, it's called "live fire training." And since they do it in a controlled area like a shipping container or abandoned house marked for demolition worth nothing with nobody at risk, I would think that you too would do that sort of work considering you can set up a VM and have no risk and try to get ahead of the virus authors. That's exactly what the author had me do when I read and reviewed the Metasploit guide.

Do you have a link to the law that says writing viruses is illegal? You're saying that if I set up a network of computers in my house disconnected from the internet and infect them to study how a botnet mutates, that would be illegal? How do you actively combat mutating malware without studying it and growing it internally?

Doctors might not infect people but they certainly grow cultures of bad bacteria and study viruses that they keep in a lab. Honestly I was quite shocked by this knee jerk response.

Oh dear god!

Well, that's bizarre, when I go to the demonstration page in Firefox nothing happens yet when I go to it in IE, it magically works. What are they doing in their demonstration page that is different? Browser version shouldn't matter, right?

Conversely this just sounds like Microsoft being bit in the ass by giving their browser special privileges to native OS libs and dlls.

Well, I like to think that when a news reports on something like a study and it turns out that there was a reason to doubt that study in the first place, it's that news organization's prerogative to make sure that they follow up on that story. The fact is he's still listed on the board of PXP.

Fracking is indeed nerd-like for the geologists, environmentalists and anyone concerned with energy or resource dependence. Fracking for shale resources is going to have a key effect on the future of the world. That will affect everything nerd-like. To quote Jim Rogers:

And I feel like western nations are clawing at any sort of straw they can find to prevent that. Unfortunately I personally feel this has resulted in putting all our eggs in natural gas and developing those resources at all costs.

Dearest Grandson,

Thank you for the wonderful Christmas gift you gave me this year! Why I hadn't even heard of the bitter coins prior to our yuletide celebration but after you left I got on the google and found this lovely place called the Silk Road on the interwebs where I could get all the Viagra I wanted. I haven't split your grandmother in half like that since VE day. But that's not all I got on there, why it takes me back to the great war and the things you could get overseas. And, bless it, those bitter coining A-rabs sold me the stickiest icky I ever did toke! Oh, my, Hjalmer would have loved to puff puff on this stuff, too bad the Krauts gunned him up on that god forsaken beach in France.

Well, do you know where I can get more of those bitter coins? Musta been more than wacky tabaccy in that herb cause Grandpa's got the shakes and now your grandmother's demanding more of the Beast with Two Backs so if you have another wallet laying around with some of those bitter coins, I'd very much appreciate it.

Love,

Grandpa

I'm confused, how exactly does one 'kill' Linux? I thought that one of the beautiful aspects of the GPL is its robustness. Everyone is free to do basically anything they want (with the most minor caveats) which is great because that means you can always just fork GPL'd code as long as you release your changes with your distributions. Even though I've moved from Debian to Xubuntu for my personal computers, I could very easily move back. This is not true with my servers (which have remained Debian for that very reason).

Personally I feel like Canonical has done a lot for Linux and they've done that by taking risks. Now Shuttleworth is taking risks that a lot of people simply do not agree with. It's fine to criticize these in detail but a hyperbole like "killing Linux" frankly befuddles me. How is this going to disrupt CentOS or Debian or Gentoo or Slackware or any other distro of Linux? Furthermore, how is this going to disrupt the core kernel itself? Linux is robust. Linux is alive and vibrant on servers. Canonical made a move to make it a desktop OS just like Android was an effort to put it on phones. If they think that taking their code is a smart gamble and you so strongly disagree with it, fork that code and start doing your own development.

Shuttleworth can't kill Linux. He can make stupid decisions that negatively affect Ubuntu but at the end of the day, he's getting money for that development from backers and has the say in which direction that development team takes. He worked on Debian a while ago and left because he disagreed with it. Now if you're developing for Ubuntu and you don't like his direction, leave and make MasterNerdGuyLinux or whatever you want to call it. No one's stopping you, the Linux kernel development marches on, what's the problem here?

Microsoft can't kill Linux and neither will Shuttleworth -- that's a testament to Linux. He can jeopardize his marketshare but at the end of the day I will argue that Shuttleworth has made a major positive impact on Linux despite my frank disagreement with his latest developments.

This is a confusingly ignorant misunderstanding that I constantly see reiterated on Slashdot. There is only a finite amount of arable land and that is 18% of the United States with 0.21% of that being permanent crops. From this site, you can see in this graph that the figure of 18% actually fluctuates. Now, there's a lot of factors at play but drought is a big one and this idea that you "just move the cattle North" to the new land is downright laughable. Temperature is not the only factor in making land arable. Why does Iowa produce more corn than per acre than any other state? Well, the soil has a lot to do with it but also the temperature is better than, say, Minnesota even though there's a lot of corn and soy grown in Minnesota.

During the dust bowl of the 1930s, we should have learned that you can't just "move cattle and farming North a bit" to avoid droughts. We also should have learned how important it is to combat erosion and protect our water supplies.

What happened last season in Texas was they failed to grow their own roughage (hay, straw, alfalfa, sorghum, etc) for their steers to eat and so they paid top dollar to have it shipped down to them and other states profited from Texas' loss. This is not a sustainable model. Moving cattle northward will not work, there is a reason ranching flourished in Texas -- any areas north of there that have the same conditions have long become ranches. Even if someone does the math and says "Oh, hey, this area of Montana here is going to be highly sought after" it's not like a massive ranch in Texas can pick up operations and move them to Montana in a single season. You're going to see restructuralization problems and the United States consumer will cry highway robbery when their already subsidized McDonald's burger costs $1.33 instead of $0.99. Should Texas become akin to Arizona, our economy will feel it.

You can already buy this from Montana and other states. The problem is how much grassland can support free roaming cattle. Again, a lesson learned from the Dust Bowl, we need to build ranches and feed them in order to prevent top soil erosion. If you demand they be free roaming and you calculate it, beef will become incredibly expensive and not a viable option for the entire populace.

Right, those grapes were sour anyway?

So? Most states depend on multiple sources of revenue, right? You should be alarmed when any major industry faces a major problem. Otherwise, why not just kill off all the other industries and embrace "lots of oil and natural gas"? Well, that's simple, you use what you got and Texas is losing arable land to grow food for their cattle.

An unsustainable agricultural strategy is bad agriculture. Doesn't everything -- even your oil and natural gas -- depend on the availability of water? You make it sound like we just turned Texas into Mars and probably for the better? Ruining land is not the answer and this report states that Texas will get more arid so measures should be taken to at least prepare for that, wouldn't you think?

Well, that's a valid point however hamanity's war with the sea is nothing new and the Dutch have become quite adept at it (with 20% of their country being reclaimed land). Now, that has a whole bunch of caveats about how much trouble they face is that system ever fails and we've all probably heard about that. I would bet that if people believed these reports, some relatively inexpensive measures could be taken to prevent a much more expensive catastrophe. I don't know how much these efforts could help Florida -- an occasional hurricane might make them a bigger problem. But engineers have been tackling this problem.

For the United States, I think a bigger doomsday scenario of this is for agriculture in Texas. Texas already lost $7.62 billion in agricultural this year and if you're telling me that that part of North America is going to get more arid? Well, droughts are something that humans have long had problems with. You can build all the irrigation you want but when that's dried up, there's not a lot you can do. If you like to eat beef and if you like Texas to be a productive state in the union, you should probably be concerned about this.