Before you can even collect sales tax you will have to register with each state and pay for a sales tax id ($100 for CT alone). I don't believe for a second that states are going to give sales and use tax ids away for free either. I don't see how this is going to work for anything but the largest online retailers and I'm still not convinced that this doesn't violate interstate commerce.

Please read the article. "Forty-six U.S. states now have sales taxes, but a 1992 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited states from collecting sales tax from catalog sellers because of the burden it would place on the sellers. The court, however, left it up to Congress to allow states to collect sales taxes on remote sales if the states created a streamlined tax collection system."

"Desperate attempts to engage" us drove me and my wife away from our local symphony , the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, CA. We had season tickets for several years. Then they started showing video on a huge screen at their performances -- not all the performances, but about half. It was incredibly annoying. They'd play something that was supposed to be pastoral, and on the giant screen they'd put pictures of mountains and forests and streams -- not the landscapes that I wanted to imagine while listening to the music, but the landscapes that they wanted me to see. They'd do a piano concerto, and for the entire duration of the piece, they'd project live video of the soloist's hands from above, moving around on the screen. Incredibly annoying. We started trying to figure out which concerts had video, and we wouldn't show up for those. When it came time to renew our season tickets, we didn't. We figured we'd just buy tickets to individual performaces that we knew wouldn't have video, but in reality that was too much of a hassle, so we never went back.

Hey, Pacific Symphony, want me and my wife back in your concert hall, helping to fill seats and keep you afloat financially? Then please bring a bunch of musicians out on the stage and have them play good music really well.

We know what a disaster it was when Canonical tried to adopt PulseAudio in Ubuntu. Basically they broke audio for no good reason. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Problems_during_adoption_phase for more info.)

Mir would seem to be an order of magnitude more difficult to pull off, since it's to be developed in-house by Canonical, and video is *much* more complex than audio.

Over all, it seems extremely unlikely to me that Canonical is competent to succeed in this.

They also don't seem to have learned their lesson from the PulseAudio experience in terms of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

GP is incorrect, but not for the reasons you're saying. The standard model requires, for its own self-consistency, either the Higgs or some other mechanism to exist at LHC energies. The Higgs has long been the front-running candidate, and basically everyone expected it to be found. If the Higgs had not been found at the LHC, then the LHC would essentially have been guaranteed to find some other new physics, because without it, the standard model would have been inconsistent.

Supersymmetry did not predict a specific mass for the Higgs. SUSY can't make predictions like this because it has unknown parameters relating to how the symmetry is broken.

ST is believed/hoped to be consistent with the standard model, and the standard model includes a Higgs, so it's certainly nonsense for GP to claim that the Higgs invalidates ST.

The actual fact of the matter is that there are some string theorist who are deeply unhappy with the idea of a Higgs being discovered (the jury is technically still out, BTW, until the data analysis is more complete and more experiments run). The reason for this is that the mathematics involved in their theories make them falsifiable by the discovery of a Higgs.

This is total nonsense. The existence of the Higgs does not falsify string theory. ST has always been intended to be consistent with the standard model in the low-energy limit, and the Higgs is part of the standard model. It's pathetic when people post authoritative-sounding nonsense about science on slashdot and then get modded up to +5.

What is somewhat of a negative for ST is that the LHC doesn't seem to be finding supersymmetry at the electroweak scale. If SUSY doesn't exist at the electroweak scale, then it eliminates a lot of the motivation for SUSY. Since ST has almost always been worked on under the assumption of approximate SUSY, this would tend to make people look at ST more skeptically. However, the choice of an energy scale for breaking SUSY doesn't have any effect on the self-consistency of ST.

The problem with ST isn't that ST is in danger of being falsified by experiment. The problem (or one of many problems) is that after 30 years of effort, ST still has not reached the point where it makes any predictions that could be falsified by any experiment in the foreseeable future. This makes it questionable whether ST qualifies as a scientific theory. Scientific theories are supposed to expose themselves to falsification.

The cookies go away when you restart your browser, not just when you shut down your computer.

There is a trivial, 99% effective fix for this problem. In firefox, go to Edit:Preferences:Privacy and tell it to forget all cookies when you end a browser session. There is also a facility for whitelisting cookies from certain sites so that, for example, you don't have to log in to slashdot every time. Cookies from the whitelisted sites are remembered across browser sessions.

I have used technology, and will continue to, but it's not a major part of my instruction and I could easily do without it entirely.

I teach physics at a community college, and for the most part I agree with you. However, I do have one killer app for my classes, which is letting students check their homework answers (both symbolic and numerical) on a computer. Evil textbook publishers (oops, that was redundant) have systems like this that they make students pay for, but the pioneers in the field were open source (Lon-Capa at Michigan State), and there are now many good FOSS systems such as WeBWorK.

This is not something that you can do equally well without computers. Before I started doing this, many of my students would hand in homework papers without a single correct answer on them. They simply weren't getting any educational benefit out of the homework. These days, they know if an answer is wrong because the computer tells them so. They show up in my office hours showing me what they did on part c of problem 17. I help them, and it's extremely productive.

Zombies were cool. Then they got so overexposed that Homeland Security started making videos about the zombie apocalypse. Zombies are now as uncool as Von Dutch.

If MS is using git, it's obviously time to switch to something that is way newer, way cooler, and doesn't actually work.

TFA makes the point that, at least in theory, you can bandwidth-limit your router so that the amount of flow your neighbors generate is negligible. Someone who's driving through your neighborhood and is lost can pull over and look at a map on their handheld device, but the guy in the house next door won't be watching netflix all night on your connection and bogging you down. Another thing to realize is that if you have cable modem service, you're sharing bandwidth with your neighbors anyway.

For me, the big argument against doing this is simply complexity. Running a home wifi network for my wife and kids is already the biggest %*&%^*& pain in the ass ever. The damn system is fragile as hell. I've tried various things advised by slashdotters (buying brands and models of routers known to be reliable, using a surge protector and battery backup to avoid frying electronics), but the plain truth is that I've utterly failed to make a robust system and I experience constant hassles. It's like working on my own plumbing -- I acknowledge that I'm not competent to do anything more complicated than replacing a washer, and I don't want my plumbing to be a system so complex that it requires frequent maintenance. Others' mileage may vary, and many people here are certainly more competent than I am at networking. If so, more power to them. But personally, I don't want to stress my rickety system any more than I have to by having my neighbors on it.

A final issue is simply that wifi tends not to propagate very well. Even within my own house, I have trouble getting decent signal strength from downstairs to upstairs. I've installed repeaters and high-gain antennas, and it still doesn't work well. Our house isn't a mcmansion, but we have hardwood floors, and I think the building materials must really attenuate the signals.

Hopefully this will mean a complete rewrite of their click-to-play setup, including fixing this incredibly annoying misfeature of Firefox 19:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2644157
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=820678

As far as I can tell, this whole aspect of firefox was never designed properly. It grew into an unmaintainable mess, and now they're having a hard time finding their way out.

The youtube link is to a video that someone else made using the Coulton song. They were able to do that because Coulton put the song under a CC license.

The Coulton version is a joke. I think you missed the joke.

FORTAN: 1957

Lisp: 1958

Lisp was such a good idea that people are still reimplementing it 55 years later.

FORTAN was such a piece of crap that ... almost everyone started using it, it became for most people the only possible way to learn to program, it persisted for decades after alternatives were designed, it was sufficiently flexible to evolve into a very nice and usable modern version, it's still often more efficient than C, and it basically defined the whole procedural style of programming.

MS Basic, hell yeah. Amazing what they did in a few k of code. And when your code is in ROM, you don't get to release bug fixes after the fact -- it has to be solid when it ships.

VB ... not so much.

AFAIK, Maxima was the first, dating back to the 1960's. And guess what? It's still open source and works great.