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Japan

Transforming Robot Gets Stuck In Fukushima Nuclear Reactor 99

An anonymous reader writes with more bad news for the people still dealing with the Fukushima nuclear accident. "The ability to change shape hasn't saved a robot probe from getting stuck inside a crippled Japanese nuclear reactor. Tokyo Electric Power will likely leave the probe inside the reactor housing at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex north of Tokyo after it stopped moving. On Friday, the utility sent a robot for the first time into the primary containment vessel (PCV) of reactor No. 1 at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. 'The robot got stuck at a point two-thirds of its way inside the PCV and we are investigating the cause,' a Tokyo Electric spokesman said via email. The machine became stuck on Friday after traveling to 14 of 18 planned checkpoints."

Comment Re:Technology in Education (Score 1) 99

ipads are most useful if you want to consume content. Not much to experiment with them, at least not with the Ipad itself.

3D printers are tools, awesome tools. They have nothing in common with Ipads, you can do stuff with 3D printers. Think of them as the logo turtles of today. They show kids a tangible application of programming, physics, math.

Teachers have the opportunity to choose to use that for teaching, or just let them tinker with cool stuff.
  And I mean single teachers, they can just print a mechanical assembly, or an atom model, or a dna model, a geometric shape . With already existing, easy access easy to use, and most importantly, easy to share tools.

Compare that to the authoring you can do with an ipad (or a classroom full of ipads) by itself. You _might_ be able to sketch something, but the tools are just not there, or available.

Comment Re:Double tassel ... (Score 1) 216

I've know really smart mathematicians who couldn't be made to understand computer programming. And, likewise, I've known some awesome CS people who struggled with math.

Are you sure?
It's hard for me to imagine an awesome CS person who struggles at math. CS is mostly math, or pretty close. Computability, regular expressions, automata, formal proofs, all of those are needed, in my book, to be awesome at CS, and I think you should be at least decent at math to grasp those.

Comment Re:ad blocker? (Score 1) 358

There is a way to expand the model to the internet.

Say you pay a youtube subscription, and you get ad-free youtube, and for the same price, or for an additional, you get ad-free adsense.
That means you won't ever see an adsense ad again. The sites will still have the adsense code, and google will just micro-pay, based on your usage of their site, from your subscription money.

Doesn't look like a bulletproof strategy to me, but something like that might end up happening.

Additionally, those who don't use adsense would be at a disadvantage, because youtube subscribers won't be able to make ads go away.

Of course, the privacy implications of all this are huge, because you would be essentially logged in everywhere, and that's another service that google would be able to provide.

Comment Re:edgerouter.. (Score 1) 225

So it's not stealing. It's something else.

And you might want to get your analogy checked, I don't thing it holds. Maybe if it was potato soup + recipe or something like that. In any case, no need for analogies. It's easier to get it without them.

They are not stealing anything from anyone. The users didn't have any source to begin with, for example. They are not entitled to the source. The problem lies in the other end. Ubiquiti is licensing some code, and not complying with the license, by not providing source. This means they are not covered by the license.

This is plain, simple, copyright infringement. Not stealing, something else. And when you do it for profit, most people agree it's a bad thing. At least in the current context.

Facebook

Ask Slashdot: Living Without Social Media In 2015? 394

An anonymous reader writes On Slashdot, we frequently write derogatory comments regarding social networking sites. We bash Facebook and the privacy implications associated with having a great deal of your life put out there for corporations to monetize. Others advocate for deleting your Facebook profile. Six months ago, I did exactly that. However, as time went on, I have fully realized social media's tacit importance to function in today's world, especially if you are busy advancing your career and making the proper connections to do so. Employers expect a LinkedIn profile that they can check and people you are meeting expect a Facebook account. I have heard that not having an account on the almighty Facebook could label you as a suspicious person. I have had employers express hesitation in hiring me (they used the term "uncomfortable") and graduate school interviewers have asked prying questions regarding some things that would normally be on a person's social media page. Others have literally recoiled in horror at the idea of someone not being on Facebook. I have found it quite difficult to even maintain a proper social life without a social media account to keep up to date with any sort of social activities (even though most of them are admittedly quite mundane). Is living without social media possible in 2015? Does social media have so much momentum that the only course of action is simply to sign up for such services to maintain normality despite the vast privacy issues associated with such sites? Have we forgotten how to function without Facebook?

Comment Re:HTTPS? (Score 1) 48

There's also another bit that I fail to understand.

If the Chinese Firewall guys wanted to DoS github, they could just do it. Playing synthetic traffic against github, for example.
Instead, we say that they hijacked their users computers, so they could generate traffic that in the end would have to go through the firewall.

From the firewall point of view, that wouldn't be a DDoS, because the attacker is always them, no distribution happens. It doesn't make sense, and it's a lot more work than just doing the DoS attack themselves.

Of course, MITM is something they can do, they might be doing that kind of thing, and hijacking clients computers for other reasons, but for this attack, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

China

Chinese Scientists Plan Solar Power Station In Space 226

knwny points out this lofty proposed power plan in China. "The battle to dispel smog, cut greenhouse gases and solve the energy crisis is moving to space. If news reports are to be believed, Chinese scientists are mulling the construction of a solar power station in a geosynchronous orbit 36,000 kilometres above ground. The electricity generated would be converted to microwaves or lasers and transmitted to a collector on Earth. If realized, it will surpass the scale of the Apollo project and the International Space Station and be the largest-ever space project."

Comment Re:Good Luck (Score 4, Insightful) 331

In any case, you would need Amazon to actually enforce it.
While they do have more money for legal fees, they would risk a big PR issue if they tried to prevent some guy from working at Walmart after quitting Amazon. Also, the first guy with such a problem wouldn't have a lot of trouble finding someone to help them with legal fees, if only for the publicity.

This is probably just a scare tactic, to discourage people from leaving them, it is unethical, but not really enforceable.

Comment Re:Good code (Score 4, Interesting) 298

For newly written code, things like readability, testability, and maintainability all can come in to whether it is "good" or not

For legacy stuff, Good code is code that works. Who cares how easy it is to read or test as long as it works?

The second one should also include "immutable". If it's hard to understand it will evolve easily to non working, and time spent on improvements can start to creep up very fast.

I have worked in very clever, solid code, but not easy to read. It was then maintained and extended by average, but competent programmers down the road, and turned into a big mess, only because it was so hard to understand.

In my experience, good code is easy to read, above all. That will make it easy to extend it coherently, find bugs and stuff. Also, if it doesn't work OK, it's easy to find out why. The single metric that saves time, money, and improves quality down the road is readability. Eveything else should be suject to that.

And, about the last point in the "article", "efficient", it's nonsense. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. You should _always_ follow the second rule of optimization (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization ).

Comment Re:Not being PHP (Score 1) 298

PHP can be good or bad, like any other code. Lately it's getting better.
As an example, do you think this looks bad? Looks pretty good to me.

  https://github.com/symfony/sym...

I have some awful, unreadable examples I could share in Java, PHP, Javascript and even C, but chosen language no longer forces you to write bad code. Maybe Perl, but I haven't seen it lately.

Google

"Google Glass Isn't Dead!" Says Google's CEO Eric Schmidt 141

lord_rob the only on writes "After Google stopped selling its wearable Glass device in January this year, many people speculated that the controversial gadget was on its way out for good. However, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said that the technology behind Glass is too important to throw away, and that the program has been put under the control of Nest's Tony Fadell to "make it ready for users" in the future.

Comment Re:You Can't Fix It (Score 1) 133

An AC, very close to first post, and it is actually spot on!

Unless you can get management to sign on to a mentality of "it will be done when it's right" rather than "it will be done on Thursday" you have no hope of achieving FLOSS levels of success. I'm not saying you shouldn't try your best, merely that you should be aware of your limitations and from whence they come up front.

"OS" mentality is that it will be done when it's _done_. Not when it's _right_.
And it's tautologically true. You don't need management to change their mentality, only to _accept_ reality, and act accordingly. I know it might be too much to ask for, but it's not too much to ask.

While it does make sense to have a roadmap, release dates for new software are too often wrong. It's a good thing to keep yourself honest about expectations, and drive the development process, so you can get quality stuff, in reasonable timeframes, providing the greatest possible value.

Unrealistic expectations and pressure on estimates won't help you get there faster, or better. Being realistic will help your team improve estimations, and also help you complete stuff faster, and better.

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