Citation needed:

Kodu looks to be a little too simplified for high school students. In my opinion, it would be a disservice to college-bound high school seniors who are interested in software development to teach a course like this without giving them some exposure to actual "code".

In my first year high school programming class we learned to program in BASIC by creating games. We started off simple with games like black jack and bingo, but by the end of the year some of the more advanced students had progressed to the point where they were creating some relatively complex games such as Tetris.

The games were simple and ugly looking but that didn't matter to us in the least. We were proud of our creations and proud of the fact that we had become "programmers".

My point here is that if time is limited, the students would be better served by reducing the complexity of the end goal (to something as simple as Tetris) rather than abstracting away the nuts and bolts of real programming.

For the record let me just say that I went scuba diving at the great barrier reef back in 2005.

It was a wonderful experience that I'll never forget, and it is a great shame that climate change is causing the coral to become bleached and die off. However, everything that I saw - including the fish, which to the best of my knowledge do not suffer the same effects of bleaching that coral does - was without question much less colorful than what is shown in the travel brochures.

Again - I'm not disputing that bleaching occurs or that the reef is in danger... just pointing out that the specific example of a tourist complaining about less-vivid-than-expected-colors doesn't really qualify as solid evidence or give a good idea as to the scope of the problem. It's the equivalent of me saying "I heard several tourists complaining about the heat while visiting the grand canyon this summer - it's a crying shame that global warming is ruining peoples' enjoyment of this natural wonder".

Another possible explanation for why the reef isn't as colorful as in the brochures: cheating on the part of the photographers.

Is that what the voices tell you?

Drug resistant bacteria?

Unless sound scientific evidence is discovered that suggests that "there is a God who has an active role in the guidance of evolution", then there is absolutely no reason to discuss such a concept in a science class.

P.S. you deserve to get modded as a troll for using the phrase "Slashdot groupthink".

While I find radical religious fundamentalism just as distasteful as any other atheist, I would also hesitate to launch into Muslim bashing just because one professor has noticed "an increasing number" of Muslim students boycotting his lectures. For all we know, it may be a small number of students boycotting that do not represent a larger trend, and there may be more to the story than reported here (what if, for example, the professor made offensive remarks about Islam and its followers during a lecture, a la Richard Dawkins).

In regards to whether or not these students should be allowed to graduate and become doctors, I'm a little torn. On the one hand, I don't see how someone's stance on evolution is going to have any demonstrable impact on their ability to perform surgery, for example. On the other hand, if a doctor doesn't believe in evolution, they might also not believe that over-prescribing antibiotics can bread new strains of drug resistant bacteria, which could lead to genuine threat to public health.

I guess I'd say that if evolutionary biology is a requirement for the major, then they should be required to pass the course in order to graduate. They don't need to attend the lectures, and they don't need to believe that it's true - but in the same way that we force future doctors to suffer through organic chemistry (often against their will), these students should be required to pass the final exam in order to demonstrate that they are at least capable of understanding the material.

Not sure if this is a coincidence, but the credit card that I had on file with Steam got billed with a fraudulent charge on Nov 6. Any other steam users experiencing anything like this?

I agree with Anonymous Coward. CM7 feels a lot snappier than WebOS did on my Touch Pad, and my Touch Pad sees a lot more use now than it did before.

For me though it's less about apps or performance than about the web browser. The WebOS browser didn't work correctly with a number of sites that I frequent (with Slashdot being one of them), while the Android browser is pretty solid.

I think that WebOS showed a lot of promise and with a little more support it could have grown into a great OS. Browser issues could have fixed and performance could have been tuned. It's been several weeks since I've used WebOS, but I still find myself trying to use the flick-up-to-close gesture in my iPhone and Android devices.

You misunderstand me when I say "configure". The last time I installed linux on a new system (a laptop), I ran into the following issues out of the box:

1. The system would mysteriously hang on boot about 1/3 of the time
2. The system would crash when plugging in an external monitor
3. The system would not resume from suspend
4. The mouse/trackpad would stop responding after a couple minutes of use
5. Battery life was cut in half vs. running windows

By "configure", I meant fix all of the above problems - any one of which I view as a critical showstopper issue - by tweaking drivers, startup scripts, and system params. All of these issues were at least as difficult to solve as flipping a BIOS setting.

I'd rather be a paid shill than a crackpot!

Somewhat ironically, most of these Android smart phones which have helped bring Linux to the masses also came with a variant of SecureBoot installed.

This just isn't a concern for me.

Installing and configuring Linux is difficult. Some slashdot readers will disagree with me, but as CS degree-holder and Linux user who has spent hundreds of hours troubleshooting fresh Linux installations on my own machines (and in several cases reverting back to windows because of some deal-breaker hardware incompatibility issue), I can confidently say that I would NEVER recommend to any of my family members that they attempt to install Linux on their own.

In other words, I view the ability to google for solutions when a strange error message pops up (i.e. when the SecureBoot check fails) as a prerequisite to installing Linux (or any operating system, really) on a system.

For the majority of PC buyers, I think that the added security of SecureBoot far outweighs the potential risk that they might get flustered when attempting to install Linux.

Sure - for developers working on Live CDs, I can see how this would be a pain in the ass. But try to think of the bigger picture.

"The Final Countdown" just popped into my head. Thanks. :)