True, but the remainder of the Lockhart article addresses that. To paraphrase, students take to math class with a lot less friction if they understand that math at least can be satisfying. Plenty of students dislike their high school art classes too, but they can at least sit through them understanding why certain other people think it's pleasant and important—and therefore not futile, even if it is frustrating. By contrast, too many high school students are ready to dismiss math as something that other people use for techie things but will never to themselves be of any value, intrinsic or otherwise, other than as a prerequisite for college. (And they're mostly right because of the way those classes are taught, but that's a separate complaint.)

The Lockhart article actually does address the issue of making that side of math apparent to novices and laypeople, and makes a pretty persuasive argument that it is possible (if beyond the capabilities of most public school classrooms).

Dave Barry is awesome. :)

I've seen the following link in many a Slashdot thread before, but it certainly bears repeating here: "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart It's mostly known as an insightful critique of what's wrong with K-12 math education, but I've always liked it as an explanation of why people who enjoy math do it in the first place: it's satisfying in an artistic way. I think it would be great if more students saw math as something worth doing for its own sake, like art or athletics, and hey, it lets you do science and engineering too.

In fact, this summary sounds similar enough to "Lament" that I wouldn't be surprised if this Dr. Lewis was inspired by and/or cited it. But this is Slashdot, so I'll let someone else check that out.

20% is pretty many. I didn't say "most".

It's an intersection of right-wing economic thought, which many of us around Slashdot approve of, with right-wing willful ignorance, which none of us except the trolls approve of. It's tough finding friends in two-party American politics when you're a libertarian.

But then what happens when a corrupt prosecutor is paid off by a guilty defendant to deliberately violate a procedure? Under your suggestion, the defendant would have bought himself immunity from prosecution forever. What needs to happen in that case is a regular mistrial, with the D.A. having the option to retry with a more honest prosecutor—or, even if the D.A. doesn't suspect anything, a more competent one.

Oh yeah, it gets worse than that:

'Cause... that's not subjective at all.

"Study shows that Fox News viewers pitifully lack our oracular abilities."

And the article in the first link, the AlterNet one, gleefully engages in even worse correlation-causation trolling than the Slashdot headline:

This goes beyond bad reporting on science. Even if Fox News really is biased, the notion that this survey proves it scientifically is just a snide partisan fantasy.

And no, I don't like Fox News.

Yes; moreover, TFA seems to say as much, although it could be clearer.

Can someone clarify what "Kindle archives" means in this context? Because I can't find one word in the article that says the book was deleted from any customer's local storage.

I don't mean to defend the decision to censor by any means, and this is still downright dishonest if the customers had a reasonable expectation that Amazon would go on providing their books for re-download perpetually. (I'm sure the fine print absolves Amazon of any legal responsibilities to keep hosting the books; as for refunds, I don't know.) But it's miles and miles away from deleting books from local storage on customer-owned devices. Unless there are further facts about remote deletions that the linked article omits, the summary is wrong and potentially libelous. Furthermore, if I'm right, Amazon is in fact abiding by (the letter of) the promises they made after the 1984 debacle.

I can't quite tell if this is meant more as a joke or as well-justified speculation on Uwe Boll's motives. It could well be the truth. Until recently his business model centered around exploiting German tax law to receive money regardless of how badly his movies did. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that he is now doing something similar with American (international, really) copyright law, and maybe even planned for Far Cry to produce profits through copyright damages/settlements before he even released it.

Of course, there are plenty of parties other than the movie's director in play here and I can't really disentangle them all right now, but to deliberately make a movie as a pretense for lawsuits, rather than as art (even badly attempted art), seems so much like an Uwe Boll thing to do that I have to expect he's rubbing his hands and cackling right now.

Agreed. Microsoft may have done a lot to devalue their competitors' products and forcibly create monopolies—embrace-and-extend, "commoditizing protocols" (to borrow a phrase from the Halloween documents)—but at least they have enough of a basic sense of shame to do it in subtle and underhanded ways. I can't imagine any company other than Apple being brazen enough to say, "Dude, you're our competitor. Did you think we were going to let our users get to your content?"

And now this Slashdot story will just increase the traffic, making things even (better|worse) for (national security|Wikileaks). (Congratulations|For shame), Slashdot, you've (protected American lives|disrupted the democratic flow of information). (Nice going|Nice going [sarcastic]).

As a PDF file, as opposed to as a bacterial culture, right?

That sounds more like a feature than a bug to me. If you get busted by a tyrannical authority on suspicion of spying, your concern will tend to have more to do with labor camps than lost photographs. If anything, you would want to "accidentally" overexpose your "innocent tourist photos" before any authority figures confiscate them. (Of course, even then you can only hope that they decide you're not worth the trouble of punishing without evidence, but that goes with the territory.)

Hand-encode? Of course not! It's a trivial scripting problem. Here's a Python 3 function that does it in one line.

Okay, yes, that's completely missing your point, but I thought it was geeky enough to post anyway.

Playing devil's advocate for a minute... what if the crap from control-freak directors happens only because they are attempting the impossible task of executing their vision through a human actor? What if you had a director with a complete and vivid image for how he wanted a role played, down to the last detail, and the technological wherewithal to implement that vision without needing to harangue a human actor into doing it for him? If you beat the uncanny valley, maybe it wouldn't suck. In fact, the creative process I just described is essentially animation, but with tangible robotic models (a necessity for stage productions) instead of pictures.

Also, consider that in some of the best movies out there—Citizen Kane, for example, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is a personal favorite of mine—the director and the lead actor are the same person. This, in a manner of speaking, allows the director to direct the actor without a barrier of interpersonal communication. I find it interesting that it has that in common with a director programming a robotic actor. This technology will have to do a hell of a lot of maturing before any of this is useful in practice and the first several dozen productions to seriously attempt it will probably be nothing but crackpots, but it's food for thought.

You beat me to the punch on this reply, but since I had already typed up some back-of-the-envelope calculations, here they are.

World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers according to Wikipedia. The past couple of months it's been pushing out updates in anticipation of the Cataclysm expansion. Let's round the size of those updates to 5GB (although they may well be closer to 6GB by now). Perhaps not every subscriber is actively playing and has downloaded those updates, but they'll be outweighed by the active players with two copies of the client software (desktop and laptop, or work and home), so let's underestimate the number of updated client programs as 12 million.

You can divide World of Warcraft players roughly into two categories: the majority who let the game client automatically update itself using the BitTorrent protocol; and the minority who prefer to manage their patch downloads manually using BitTorrent. The set of players who pay enough attention to download their patches manually but choose FTP over the more convenient BitTorrent is minuscule. So we can safely estimate the portion of patch downloads that use a P2P protocol as 100%.

12 million subscribers times 5GB per subscriber is 60 million gigabytes of legitimate P2P throughput. And that's just getting ready for Cataclysm this autumn. There must have been several hundred million gigabytes more with the last two expansions and over the life of the game, to say nothing of Starcraft II (huge pre-loads of the entire client!) or other game companies than Blizzard (gasp!).

So, indeed, 60 million gigabytes != all but "almost every single byte of it". Even if piracy does account for a lot, even a majority, of P2P traffic, it does have a nontrivial legitimate usage that Internet users have a right to.