Comment Re:Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Score 1) 154
I actually did a report for school based on the premise that Google is in-fact, making us forget things. Here it is: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3E3Q9cUhtU2RUZSOG5EemdzeGs
Comment Education Bottlenecks (Score 1) 433
I don't know how much of a problem this is in higher academia, but according to more articles like this
And the fact that prestigious universities such as this only accept a handful of students in computer science in a year, it's not surprising. One of the more surprising things is that UW received 40 million dollars from Paul Allen a while ago, and they used it to build a giant 40 million dollar new computer science building. But the number of students they accepted per year didn't change. Why is this? If you have lots of students who want to go there, why not use extra funds you have to expand the number of applications you can accept?
I dunno, I'm sure the downward trend of education spending all over our country isn't helping universities to expand the number of students they can accept either.
And the fact that prestigious universities such as this only accept a handful of students in computer science in a year, it's not surprising. One of the more surprising things is that UW received 40 million dollars from Paul Allen a while ago, and they used it to build a giant 40 million dollar new computer science building. But the number of students they accepted per year didn't change. Why is this? If you have lots of students who want to go there, why not use extra funds you have to expand the number of applications you can accept?
I dunno, I'm sure the downward trend of education spending all over our country isn't helping universities to expand the number of students they can accept either.
Comment Re:Absolutely nothing. (Score 1) 415
This is exactly how I felt about a lot of recent "vigilantism", either online or in real life. It's too soul crushing for me to believe that there aren't great leaders out there who do understand human behavior. The idea that you need to treat the cause and not the symptoms seems lost on most people and that makes me sad.
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age 287
al0ha writes to recommend a worthwhile piece up at American Scientist on the problems of archiving and data preservation in an age where all data are stored digitally. "It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the 'digital dark age.' This is the idea — or fear! — that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us. ... Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it."
Comment DMCA and Buy Something Else (Score 4, Insightful) 965
What we should be doing is trying to get the DMCA overturned; It is the bane of the tinker. It's ironic because I'm guessing many of the people working on this stuff over at Apple got interested in computers because of the creativity they could express by hacking away at computers.
I should say though, that Apple is not the only company in town creating hardware, I mean honestly a lot of these articles seem to make some leap at some point about how Apple is representative of all hardware manufacturers, when I think that's just not true. They create some stylish products, people buy them, and then they miss out on hacking the hardware. If people really want the option to hack the hardware, don't buy this locked down crap. It's not like Apple is the only game in town, they live off this spotlight everyone creates for them. Just get that less stylish piece of hardware that offers tons of customization and hopefully at some point Apple will have to learn what they should be doing.
I should say though, that Apple is not the only company in town creating hardware, I mean honestly a lot of these articles seem to make some leap at some point about how Apple is representative of all hardware manufacturers, when I think that's just not true. They create some stylish products, people buy them, and then they miss out on hacking the hardware. If people really want the option to hack the hardware, don't buy this locked down crap. It's not like Apple is the only game in town, they live off this spotlight everyone creates for them. Just get that less stylish piece of hardware that offers tons of customization and hopefully at some point Apple will have to learn what they should be doing.
Using the Internet To Subvert Democracy 202
david_adams writes "All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace."
Comment Re:april fools (Score 3, Funny) 273
That's easy, conficker would just have to install this: http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/
Comment LFG (Score 1) 1582
1 Digit UID Raid, Looking for mage
Kentucky Officials "Changed Votes At Voting Machines" 494
The indispensible jamie found a report out of Kentucky of exactly the kind of shenanigans that voting-transparency advocates have been warning about: a circuit court judge, a county clerk, and election officials are among eight people indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. As described in the indictment (PDF), the election officials divvied up money intended to buy votes and then changed votes on the county's (popular, unverifiable) ES&S touch-screen voting systems, affecting the outcome of elections at the local, state, and federal levels.
Wolfram Promises Computing That Answers Questions 369
An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram feels that he has put together at least the initial version of a computer that actually answers factual questions, a la Star Trek's ship computers. His version will be found on their Web-based application, Wolfram Alpha. What does this mean? Well, instead of returning links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer to your questions, Wolfram will respond with the actual answer. Just imagine typing in 'How many bones are in the human body?' and getting the answer." Right now, though the search entry field is in place, Alpha is not yet generally available -- only "to a few select individuals."
Comment Want the type of people who design mods? (Score 3, Insightful) 35
First, take off all the DRM, and we'll talk.
ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
Comment Re:How MMOs should be viewed (Score 1) 132
But you forgot, there's lots of other people running on different wheels in different cages, all placed next to me. Sometimes when I go really fast on my wheel it bumps the wall, sometimes even causing the other wheels to bump into their walls too. It's multiplayer!
Dead Space Wants To Scare You 195
Kotaku recently ran a story questioning whether the survival-horror genre still exists, and how Dead Space may or may not fit into it. With reviews for the game starting to come in, Ars Technica reports that the game is, indeed, both scary and good. Gamespy wrote up a Dead Space survival guide, and Gamasutra has a lengthy interview with the game's senior producer. In the production of the game, the developers studied things like car wrecks and war scenes to increase the level of realism. They also want the game's sounds to terrify players, including appropriately timed silence. The launch trailer is also available, though it does contain spoilers.
Spore Expansion Announced, Another Coming In 2009 105
EA announced this week what many suspected for a while, now: Spore expansions are on their way. The first, due out in November, will be an addition to the creature creator, offering more parts for players to use. The next, due in Spring 2009, will provide new gameplay:
"The expansion will give space-faring species the ability to beam down from their ships to explore other worlds and complete missions. And along with this, the expansion will include an Adventure creator, in which players can build — and then share — their own customized missions."
