Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one. HP at least used to have a reputation as the best maker of printers - they still make good printers, but now I mostly think of them as the makers of the worst computers.

Well, conditions on the earth vary dramatically with location, even ignoring biological and biogenic variation. It seems to me that a vessel capable of performing tests over a wider area can't help but provide better data. One of the big downsides of the Mars rovers is that they're restricted to such a small portion of the planet's surface, especially since for the Titan mission this can apparently be achieved on a low budget. I mean, what reason do we have to think that the chemical composition of the ocean and atmosphere don't vary with location? What about things like currents, and winds? Maybe we'll find something that's entirely unexpected!

Maybe Star Wars was right and planets other than earth are all 'desert' planets or 'ice' planets with uniform conditions all around, but if not, this seems worthwhile!

Google's argument seems pretty sketchy. The idea that all advertisers will learn to make less obtrusive and obnoxious ads completely ignores the basic incentives at work in advertising. Flashy, annoying ads *do* work better - that's why they do them, and while it may be in the industry's overall interest to tone down the ads so that people don't use ad-blockers, each individual advertiser is likely to benefit from being as flashy and annoying as possible. This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation.

Now, it's true that there's also a market for more restrained ads - there are people who won't click the flashy ad, but can be tricked by the simple text ad that seems relevant to the page. The real reason Google has no problem with ad-blockers in Chrome is that the more popular ones don't block text ads, so Google is happy with anything that hurts their competition while leaving them untouched.

I'm going to disagree here. While careful documentation of your work is essential for a scientist, I think it's the wrong thing to emphasize. If you stress the boring side of science, you're likely to discourage interest in the subject matter, and in any case, having a kid just imitate scientists without an understanding of why they do things is no way to teach the scientific mindset.

Scientists record their work because it makes practical sense given their goals. If the result of an experiment depends on careful measurement and analysis of data, the scientists will diligently record the data he needs, and explicitly write out his analysis so as to avoid error. However, most science kits for kids focus on exciting immediately visible results of the sort which a scientist would have no reason to document except for the purpose of publication. When my fake volcano explodes, what exactly am I supposed to record anyway? Making a child mimic the 'scientific method' in this case sends a very confusing message about what science is and how it works. Most children will miss the point, and the more clever children will be confused wondering why they're doing it.

If you really want to teach scientific thought you should start by focusing on exciting experiments that capture the imagination. You should emphasize understanding why things happen instead of cataloguing what happens. If the experiment is supposed to demonstrate some principle, don't have the kid write down what he saw, talk it through with him. Ask him why he thinks it works the way it does, and use questions to help him guess the right answer. Ask him how he'd confirm his guesses with more experiments. Documentation should fall out as a natural necessity rather than as a ritual followed dogmatically.

Ok, so I'll be the first to agree that Linux documentation is on the whole terrible. You can get some documentation with man, but unless you're pretty comfortable with a command line, the documentation is likely to be completely useless to the average user (I remember when I first started using Linux that figuring out how to make sense of man pages was often more challenging than just guessing how to do things). The contextual help in Ubuntu is slightly more readable, but usually useless when there's any available at all.

That said, is Windows documentation any better? I haven't really used Windows in a couple years now, but from what I recall, opening up one of the help files to figure out how to get something done was completely useless. I have generally found that I'm much more able to figure out how the program works by fiddling than by reading help pages. Less technical users (like my parents) generally can't figure out how to do things, it's true, but they also are completely incapable of finding the relevant help page - I suspect that the skills are related. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that for most end user applications documentation is pretty well irrelevant, and the real question is how intuitive the interface is. On this front I think that Windows and Linux are pretty well tied at this point, both lagging a ways behind the top to bottom uniformity you get from Mac OS.

Finally, is there really any problem with using Google as your documentation? I think that Google is the best sort available documentation on all the major OSes, and I'm not really sure I see the problem the summary is claiming exists. So, in summary, poor documentation isn't a linux problem, and I'm not even really sure it's a problem at all. This seems like a lot of fuss over nothing to me.

Actually, if you're using an innovation already that would constitute prior art and would prevent someone else from getting the patent, or at the least would serve as an effective defence against a patent infringement claim. Which isn't to say that patents can't be used defensively - having a patent could help defend against an infringement claim on a very similar patent. Also, having the relevant patent might let you avoid suit altogether, and avoiding a lawsuit is generally better than winning a suit.

In any case though, if you're doing something already, and can document it, someone who comes up with the same idea later isn't going to be able to stop you. If Google's interests were purely defensive, it could just as easily protect itself by widely disseminating the details of its cooling system to thoroughly establish their prior art.

I hope you were being sarcastic and aiming for funny (I laughed!) but since you've been modded to insightful, I fear this needs an answer.

Scientists are under immense pressure to publish, and, as long as an article can pass peer review, the more sensational the claims you make, the better the odds of being published. Once you have published, more sensational claims make it more likely you'll be cited, and generally lead to your article getting more attention, which is purely to the scientist's benefit so long as his claims aren't so outrageous that the scientific community responds with ridicule. Scientists have every incentive to make the most dramatic claims they can get away with, and the peer review process seems to let them get away with an awful lot. Publication in major journals is one of the primary determining factors in employment and promotion in academics, yet hiring is usually done by people with expertise in a different subfield (schools like a range of researchers) who won't necessarily look too carefully at the articles themselves relying instead on number of publications, the reputation of the journals, and number of citations.

So, short answer: scientists have every reason to exaggerate and overstate.

I assumed he was talking about the theory that it's getting hotter because the climate's all mad at us for being such assholes with the air pollution. I'll grant that it's a more or less untestable theory unless someone knows the climate's address so we can send flowers or chocolates or something.

I wish I had mod points - this needs modding up!

I don't doubt the anthropogenic basis for climate change - you can take a look at the IPCC Synthesis Report for a persuasive outline of the case. However, once you get past the most basic assertions, the scientific community is doing an absolutely terrible job. Most of the time when I read a paper on climate change I can immediately spot lots of methodological and deductive errors, and, conveniently, they always come out in favour of anthropogenic climate change. Some argue that science is just another religion. This isn't true. However, the sort of 'science' most climate scientists are doing nowadays may as well be a religion, basing conclusions on manifestly insufficient data, and inferring causation based on correlation alone. Right now the climate sceptics don't need to make straw men to argue against - the scientific community is making the straw men for them.

Scientists shouldn't be arguing against sceptics - scientists should be the sceptics. Even ignoring faulty reasoning, many published scientific results are wrong (see this article). Scientists should be constantly questioning results to try to arrive at a refined, unbiased analysis of the facts - instead we have become defensive, treating every sceptical inquiry as an attack, and as a result, the research doesn't get the sort of scrutiny necessary to advance our understanding. Something needs to change.

Ok, we're all agreed the guy was an idiot idiot for posting at all. But he 'had it coming?' Really? Suppose instead he'd made two posts to slashdot in that time - a clear misuse of school property - would he deserve to lose his job then? What if he'd posted and reposted a critique on some sort of scientology blog - would he deserve to lose his job then? It seems to me that the reason this guy lost his job is because he violated the ridiculous community morals of a small town, not because of anything to do with misuse of school resources.

At one point in my life I seriously considered becoming a teacher, but I realized that doing so would likely place me at the mercy of the sorts of unthinking bigoted responses we're seeing here. This attitude is at least part of the reason our public education system is failing - the work environment is so unpleasant that (with the exception of a few saints) no one with another option for a career would do it. Would you really want to work beside people who are so shocked by a couple one word internet posts that you can't work with them anymore?

I switched to Linux a few years ago, since then, I claim that I windows has changed too much, I don't know how to use it anymore, and that I've forgotten what I did know. It's actually more or less true, and since they think that computer problem solving is a matter of knowledge rather than method, I've been much less likely to be asked for help since then. When asked for help I just tell them how I'd go about learning how to solve the problem and they find someone else usually.

Though, the recommendation I saw above of moving the family to Mac is actually a really good idea. Mac users have way, way less tech support issues.

Presumably data exist about historical exchange rates, so it ought to be able to correlate that data to produce a correct result. At the least, it shouldn't pretend to have an accurate answer when it's just fudging matters. In this case, Alpha has produced a result that's worse than useless for any serious purpose since it is apparently reasonable, yet completely wrong.

In any case, this is *exactly* the sort of basic processing Alpha needs to be able to do right to be useful. If Alpha can't do this sort of thing reliably, I have trouble coming up with a scenario where I would trust it to do anything I can't do faster and more easily myself.

I guess I just haven't heard anything that makes Google wave sound like a backhoe to me. It sounds to me as if IRC is a shovel, and Google Wave is a shovel with a nice moulded grip. Useful, I'm sure, but hardly newsworthy.

Well, if Google wave does *nothing* that IRC couldn't, then the first question that comes to mind for me is "why is slashdot wasting my time with all these articles about redundant technology?" The GP isn't saying there's anything wrong with Google Wave, he's just wondering what all the fuss is about. I'm sort of wondering about that myself.

I think you have a good point here on the whole. However, it's worth noting that the fundamental difference here is that, in the Civil Rights case, the constitution, which all states presumably treat as the highest authority, was on the side of Civil Rights. Basically, by agreeing to the constitution, states and citizens gave up certain rights to self determination. The constitution says nothing relevant to this issue.