The way this headline is written, it's as if they'd written "Armstrong jumps to moon", and neglected to mention in TFS that he was jumping from the ladder of the lander to the surface. TFS says "managed to 3D print, and assemble an entire automobile", and that's misleading to the point of lying.

It's a cool, impressive, incremental achievement, but they haven't landed on the moon here. And tech reporting, and tech in general, would be better served by accurate reporting of it.

Yep. MOOCs don't serve the important part of the teacher's job. Teaching is best as a dialogue. A videotaped lecture is little different from a book, in that the information is fixed; worse, unlike a book, you don't even get to read at your own pace. It's not without value, since some things adapt well to that and different modes work for different people, but it's still missing the two-way communication that a real teacher provides.

People have pushed MOOCs largely for the learn-a-bunch-of-facts classes, such as science and tech. Technique is also a "fact"; it's stuff that can easily be tested and graded. The things that are missing are the parts that make us consider a student well-rounded: history, literature, sociology, art. These sound trivial to nerds but they're about innovation and communication. They, too, have to be practiced, and it's not something that can be memorized. Even the STEMmest jobs are ultimately about people: seeing what people want, finding ways to tell them your ideas, building up a story together. And that's something that a real teacher can help with, and a videotaped teacher can't. (Nor can a videotaped teacher answer questions or ascertain just why a student isn't "getting it". Even a "great teacher" is little more than an actor when on video.)

Teaching is too often undervalued as if they were just handed a book. It's a skill of its own. We STEM nerds often undervalue that skill because it's not easily graded on a multiple-choice test.

TFS is written primarily in the present tense, which is kind of odd seeing as Lem has been dead for nearly a decade. We are already living in Lem's future, and the future for Lem himself is pretty much a steady-state.

I remember when the Redmond faithful used to go on about needing Windows to get "real work" done. My work must not be real because I can do it on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS. I find myself using my Android tablet more and more for work and all my social media promotions.

The operating system is becoming less relevant every day. People are choosing devices, not operating systems.

"Then she doesn't need a PC, she needs an iPad or a Surface RT".

Good luck buying one of those with a 24-inch screen, so she can see her pictures in full glorious detail. And read her messages in 24-point, because her eyes aren't so good any more.

But at least it'll fit in her purse. (And probably stay there, when she forgets about it).

Good for you, man. I'm glad to see it happening. I don't like having publishers as arbiters of public taste any more than you do. I just think it's important to recognize that the vast majority of self-published ebooks aren't very successful, and it's not just the bad ones.

Taking into account, of course, the fact that you have to do all of your own marketing. You have to make your novel stand out among zillions of other indie ebooks, all of which have the same low barrier to entry.

Just having a major publisher's name on it is pretty substantial marketing. Even more so if they go to the expense to print out a physical book, which is a large sunk cost up front. That tells readers that somebody believes in the book, to the tune of a few tens of thousands of dollars. And that publisher will generally get it into meatspace bookstores, where your book has to stand out only among a far, far smaller crowd of other physical books on the shelf.

It's not impossible to do very, very well with an ebook. But much of the time that additional 45% you get to keep is 45% of a much smaller pot. (And generally the margin is much wider than that, in fact. Going rate is usually in the 10-13% range, in my experience.)

The way I see it... if you can get a publisher interested, you probably should, at least until you have a large fan base of your own. It's the easiest way to that fan base. Building it up yourself is difficult. Not impossible, and possibly no harder than getting a publisher to take an interest in you. But if I had a publisher on the hook, I'd keep it.

Oh by the way, Grandma... you can buy this PC with Linux pre-installed for less than the other one without Windows. That's because Linux needs less powerful hardware to run properly. Oh, and you'll find it just as easy (if that's the word) to use as Windows.

Freedom! Isn't it good?

There is a certain amount of lock-in to the film incentives, especially for TV series. Shooting a film requires a substantial amount of infrastructure, both personnel and equipment, which doesn't exist everywhere. These people are often not employed by the studio directly, but form local service companies. And where those companies exist, it's easier for more film projects to move in.

Even if Walking Dead were to pack up and move, Georgia may still have accomplished its goals with the subsidies. I know that Maryland is similarly pushing this. They developed a lot of that infrastructure a while back during the filming of Homicide in Baltimore, and there have been a lot of follow-on projects. They're now trying to boost that with House of Cards, which is an enormous undertaking that employs many hundreds of people (at least part time). The resources of material and knowledge built up in the local economy attract other film projects that can do the job faster and better because it's already here, rather than building it up from scratch.

Of course, producers know that, and will drive up the price as far as they can. Maryland nearly lost House of Cards in a kind of game of chicken; neither side wanted the production to move but each wanted to get a better deal. In the end, House of Cards largely won, and people in the local film industry are extremely happy about that. I don't know if it's really a good deal for the state in the end, but at least for the moment it's employing a lot of people, and since it's a series they'll go on having work to do for a while.

Interstates are the perfect place for it: relatively few surprises and extremely boring for drivers. They're all "limited access highways", so you don't have to worry about pedestrian crossings or children running into the street.

If they just left it at that, I'd consider it an enormous advance over the present state of things.

I don't know why, but to me it comes out oddly comforting when Slashdot reformats it as prose.

First the militarization of small town police departments, SWAT teams for serving routine warrants, rising incidents of shocking brutality and now law enforcement has devolved to the point of being little better than a band of petty thieves. This is getting pathetic and scary. Foreign countries are issuing warnings about the conduct of U.S. law enforcement personnel. Am I the only person who has a problem with that?

Sounds like someone figured out the basis for the holodeck on the Enterprise.

Other questions that would be moderated "Troll" by Slashdotters:

"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?"

"What is truth?"

"And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many—is that just or not?"

"So to answer your question, US culture is, simply put, not communist dictatorship culture, it's something that's objectively better for most people..."

That sounds rather like a description of the American political system, not culture. What do you think is the difference?