The idea of open-sourcing is great - that everyone gets to see the source code of the program, or even start experimenting with it, implementing ideas / features that were not yet in there.

But there are problems too ...

Case in point ---

http://old.nabble.com/Pivot-Table,-a-revisit-td31307325.html

http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/faq.shtml

I was like typing "pivot table" on a search engine and click away ... and before I know it I ended up on the two above links

The program is Gnumerics - an GNU implementation of spreadsheet

The wanted feature is "pivot table"

The problem is two fold --

1. No one cares enough to code

2. No one wants to include that feature in the official release of Gnumeric

And judging from the date stated, that "pivot table" had already been requested for the past few years.

Hmm ....

There have been a lot of reports on land grabbing by Chinese in Africa, and the latest report is from the famed Oxford University of United Kingdom - a paper just published ( @ http://oucan.politics.ox.ac.uk/index.php/blog/14059-big-is-beautiful-megadams-african-water-security-and-chinas-role-in-the-new-global-political-economy ) is claiming that the Chinese are planning to build 100 hydroelectric dams in the African continent !

That will surely be a grand scale ecology disaster in the making.

Link @ http://www.eggwall.com/2011/09/android-arm-assembly-device-set-up-part.html

I just came across it, don't have time to try it out yet.

As a long time Apple customer (I still even own an original Apple II), I've come to rely on the firm to design high quality equipment and provide top tier support to sustain consistent workflow. I don't expect the firm to work miracles, but I do expect honest communication when problems arise.

I have a 2010 27" iMac. Recently, the firm has recalled 1TB drives shipped with units from this era. I had purchased Applecare, so the machine was still even under warranty. It had never been opened, it was - other than some minor cosmetic blemishes on the screen - as original as it had been sold. So, I contacted the nearest Apple Store and arranged to have the unit serviced.

On the 23rd I spoke with a Genius Bar (tm) representative who assured me it would almost certainly be same-day service. Though, it might - if there were problems - take up to three days. Regardless, he assured me, a representative from the firm would call me and give an update regarding the status of the repair. Since I've moved from the United States to Australia, he also offered a power cable with the new connector. Great! On the 24th at 9:45am, I brought the unit in for servicing in its original box and coating with its original foam cover.

I asked the representative to also check the superdrive, as I thought that it wasn't reading discs properly any longer. And, no that isn't because of region coding differences. It really did seem to be a head alignment problem in the drive.

'No worries, we'll fix it up for you! Expect a call late this afternoon.' Came the reply.

They conducted an analysis of the machine, we did some paperwork, and then I left with an empty box at a bit after 10am.

No call that afternoon was forthcoming. But, OK. Maybe they had a backlog. Whatever. Then no call came the next day. Fine. And then no call came the next day - three days in. However, it was the weekend and I thought, 'hey, I'll give them a break. Maybe they don't service machines on Saturday or Sunday, even though the store is open.'

Then no call came on Monday. By Tuesday morning I was angry. Not only were they five days into a repair that was - at most - supposed to take three (with a verbal promise of same day), but they hadn't even bothered to call or email me to give a status update on the repair. And I have a work backlog to deal with.

So I called and spoke with the manager. I told him that the issue wasn't that they were taking longer than expected to resolve the repair. The issue was a lack of communication with their customer. The firm wrote on my sheet that a staffer would call with an update within 48hrs and nobody did. Further, they made me wait thirty minutes on hold calling for a status update only to lose track of me and hang up.

A staffer called back and told me the machine was ready for pick up.

I get to the store and immediately I feel like I am not wanted by these staffers. They segregate me off to the side. Then they bring me to the back genius bar desk and bring out the machine and paperwork, but - unlike when they inventoried the machine during the initial sign in - they didn't turn the machine on to prove its functionality during check-out. The staffer clearly wanted me to sign the paper and leave as quickly as possible.

I asked about the power cord. She refused and suggested I speak with a staffer who would sell me one.

'OK, fine.' I thought, 'I don't need a power cord and I definitely don't want to be here any longer. These people are rude.'

I picked up the computer and left as fast as I could.

Only two years ago you offered best in service. While I don't expect freebies, I certainly do expect follow through on promises. Your store failed in every respect, from meeting policy obligations your company set for staffers in dealing with the customer to fulfilling verbal promises your staffers provided on the side.

Bad bad bad bad bad. Frankly, worse than Dell.

Apple, what the hell has happened to you? This professional customer who buys top of the line equipment to support his business workflow now wants to find an alternative. For Adobe is where I butter my bread, not Apple any longer. And its clear to me, Apple has determined that I'm not how they butter their bread either.

Hey, remember these? I do. Vaguely. But vaguely isn't good enough, so here's another one. Since I've discovered that the secret to understanding machine learning problems well enough to implement them is mostly a matter of strategically procrastinating, it seems only fair that I should run one of these. So before cross-entropy actually starts making sense to me, what would you like to know?

It's time to get rid of the Electoral College.

Based on the results of state vs. national polls, it's looking increasingly likely that Obama may lose the national popular vote but win in the EC. As a nakedly partisan Democrat, would I be pleased with this outcome? Well, I'd be happier about it than I was when Bush lost the popular vote but managed to finagle an EC win, obviously ... but "happier" does not equate in this case to "happy" by any means. Because having someone against whom the majority of Americans vote become (or remain) President should simply never, ever happen.

The EC hasn't served its ostensible purpose, to protect the interests of smaller states against domination by larger ones, for generations, if ever. All it does is focus an unwarranted amount of attention on a few "swing states" every four years, with the effect that the interests of the residents of states that don't fall into this category get no representation at all at the Presidential level. If you live in Texas or California, you might as well not vote at all in the Presidential election; same if you live in Wyoming or Vermont. And that really sucks.

Even "swing states" don't really matter all that much, most of the time, if they're sparsely populated. New Mexico was just as close in 2000 as Florida was, but nobody cared how it went, because whoever got Florida was going to get the White House. (Gore won NM by some incredibly narrow margin; if you'd forgotten that detail, I don't blame you.) What was that about small states, again? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Get rid of the damned thing. This isn't partisanship. It's an acknowledgement of reality.

There is a report from Middle East claiming that ambassador Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, was raped before he was killed by a bunch of Libyan gunmen.

http://www.tayyar.org/Tayyar/News/PoliticalNews/ar-LB/usa-killed-lybia-zek-970.htm

Additional information disclosed that it was the Libyan security team which revealed the location of Mr. Christopher Stevens to the attackers

From - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57511043/assault-on-u.s-consulate-in-benghazi-leaves-4-dead-including-u.s-ambassador-j-christopher-stevens/

"Wanis al-Sharef, a Libyan Interior Ministry official in Benghazi, said the four Americans were killed when the angry mob, which gathered to protest a U.S.-made film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad, fired guns and burned down the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

He said Stevens, 52, and other officials were moved to a second building - deemed safer - after the initial wave of protests at the consulate compound. According to al-Sharef, members of the Libyan security team seem to have indicated to the protesters the building to which the American officials had been relocated, and that building then came under attack"

More information at http://www.inquisitr.com/330504/ambassador-stevens-was-raped-before-his-murder-reports-claim/

If I log in my own account, I can't find my own comment - as well as the replies to my comment

But if I log out and access slashdot as an AC, I can see my comment

Case in point -- TFA http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/10/0245230/how-spyware-reaches-oppressive-governments

I have a comment - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3105111&cid=41284963

It's just that when I am log in, as Taco Cowboy, comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3105111&cid=41284963 and all the replies beneath it are gone

But when I log out, all of them re-appear

Why is that??

What are you trying to pull, Slashdot ?

This is the second time in one week I got the pink-color warning : " Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet ... "

Excessive bad posting from this IP ?

Go screw yourself !!

I just finished submitting revisions on The Paper. Not, you understand, revisions in response to reviewers' comments--we haven't received those yet--but rather revisions made necessary by my discovery, well after submission, of a bug in the code. Fortunately it didn't substantially affect the main results or the conclusions, but it did require revising some of the numbers.

I've never had to do anything like this before, and sincerely hope I never do again. It was a stupid bug, the kind of mistake that anyone can make coding at 2:00 AM on too much caffeine and way too little sleep, and I should damn well have caught it before sending out a paper which will pretty much define my research career to date.

But I'm glad it's done. Because while everyone makes mistakes, and indeed those mistakes are part of the process of science, you have to be honest about them. If you're not honest, then what you're doing isn't science, it's something else (say, politics or religion). There is no capital-T Truth in science, but there is truth, and we must always tell that truth as best we can.

Whoa !

I just got a note from Slashdot that, because I have post a lot of bad comments they are threatening to ban me

I do not dispute the fact that some of my comments might be offensive, but then, not all comments from me, which were modded all the way down to "-1 Troll" are bad posts

Like the following example

http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3007729&cid=40785819

In the above comment, I posted a link to a video which shows an ant, under stressed, committed suicide by exploding itself, and my comment was posted under the thread " exploding termite species discovered ", url:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/07/26/232211/exploding-termite-species-discovered
but it was modded all the way down to troll

And you know why?

For some reason, there's a bunch of kids in Slashdot who really don't like me

Whatever I post, no matter if the comments make sense or not, they will find ways to mod the comments down, and they also threatening replies, under "AC"

Like the following example -

The thread:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/22/0311210/earths-corner-of-the-galaxy-just-got-a-little-lonelier

and my comment:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3063883&cid=41078941

My comment was modded to +5 Insightful, before that bunch of kids came in and started to down mod it

I only show you two examples out of the hundreds of my comments which had been treated similarly

I never complain to anyone about this, but, when I received a threatening note from Slashdot that they were going to ban me because of "troll" postings, that became the last straw

Instead of investigating why my comments getting modded down to "troll" - and identifying who are the one who did the modding, you will be surprised that many of those who modded my comments down share the same IPs

It's an open secret that there are those whose life are so miserable that they had to register multiple accounts on slashdot so that they can get multiple mod points (and multiply it by 15, if they manage to gather enough good karma) and then spent more time targetting people that they don't like

It's also an open secret that those people are also responsible for astroturfing certain brand(s) of IT product

In other words, they are paid trolls

Instead of targetting those paid trolls, Slashdot choses to target me

Fine, Slashdot, if that's the way you want, go ahead and ban me, because I ain't take no threat from nobody

Wow.. took a break from slashdot for a while and already the mass down mods are happening again. Its no wonder why almost every story has posts with people crying about how slashdot has turned to shit. I guess it is a sign of how desperate someone's position is when they have to downmod with overrated just to stop an opinion they disagree with from being seen.

What's that saying about reality is everything that remains when you close you eyes and stop choosing to believe in something? I guess the same is true with the downmods. Just because they attempt to hide the comment doesn't mean the statement stops being true, it only means it stops being seen as easily. I can imagine a group of idiots sitting around plotting and planning thier down mod adventures in a comic book esq setting with them laughing about how they will win the war of whatever they deemed important at the minute, by not letting others speak or letting their speech be seen/heard. Then they stop to pop their zits and return to the plotting while declaring that if they are the only ones heard, they would always win,.

Of course the reality is probably much simpler and less sinister. It is more likely someone got but hurt by a comment made and while sitting in their mom's basement reassessing the pathetic life they live, decide to take their anger and frustrations out by mass downmodding someone they disagree with. They might pause for a minute to wipe the tears from their eyes, but are set to teach someone a lesson about having opinions contrary to their own.

But here's the thing. When I was born, my father was working for NASA on the Apollo program. You know, "the Eagle has landed", "one small step," all that. He was one of the (many, many) people who made that happen. He was there, as "there" as it's possible to be without feeling Lunar soil under one's own boots.

When we moved to Denver a couple of years later, he worked for what was then Martin Marietta, on the Viking project among other things. IIRC, he also worked on the early design process for the Shuttle. At that time it was supposed to be fully reusuable, the "big bird little bird" idea that was supposed to make flying into space not a whole lot more complicated than flying across the country.

So I grew up in a house full of space stuff. Giant glossy PR posters, mostly, including one incredibly detailed one about the Apollo missions that covered everything from orbital routes to spacesuit design; also unique memorabilia given only to those who actually worked on the Moon landing, prospectus-type brochures from Martin detailing the kind of stuff they seriously expected to be building within a few years, and--of course--Star Trek stuff. Because that was where we were going, sooner or later. That was the goal.

I grew up with this, waiting each year for it to happen, to start moving forward again. Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab were ... well, they were still something. And surely our retreat from the Moon was temporary, a retrenchment, perhaps an opportunity to do it right the next time by laying the groundwork with a permanent Earth-orbital station that would serve as a dock and transfer point for space-only shuttles between Earth and other destinations. But we weren't going to just give up. Surely not that.

Except we did. Every year, we dropped our expectations a little lower. Even our mass media science fiction reflected the change: from Star Trek and 2001, to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. From believable visions of a future that we could really build, to heroic fantasy with a technological gloss.

It wasn't until some time in the late 80s, I think, that I finally accepted it wasn't going to happen. We were not, in my adulthood and probably in my entire life, going to be a truly spacefaring species. We could be by now, you know. We could be living on the Moon and Mars, mining the asteroid belt, colonizing Europa and Titan and maybe figuring out, once and for all, if there are any loopholes in our current understanding of physics that might put the stars within reach. And all the work done by Spirit and Opportunity, and that will be done by Curiosity, could be done in a week by a couple of grad students from Areopolis U.

So you'll understand, I hope, if my happiness at seeing Curiosity's success is a little bittersweet. Not because it's not good and satisfying and important, because it is. It's just not enough.

Morford is guilty here of a sin that might be called metaphoricalism--assuming that because he himself often speaks metaphorically, people who insist on literalism must be fools, ignorami, and/or members of a tiny lunatic fringe.

Yes, of course the ability to interpret metaphor is an important characteristic of the intelligent, educated mind. But most of the time, most people mean exactly what they say, and it's a grave mistake to assume otherwise. He really goes off the rails when he insists that mythology must be interpreted in metaphorical terms. There is no reason to believe--no evidence whatsoever--that the people who originally told the stories of Eve, Paris, or the risen Christ thought they were speaking anything other than literal truth; nor were the monsters lurking in the darkness beyond the campfire anything other than our ancestors' attempts to rationalize (not symbolize) the nasty, brutish, and short nature of life throughout most of human history. A metaphorical interpretation of these myths is more reasonable than a literal one, to be sure. It is also, historically and to a large degree in the modern age, a distinctly minority view.

Your terrifying lack of imagination

(Also: âZ"Science is just mysticism disguised as mathematics," says the guy on the internet.)

With Apple suing the world, and the Olympic Games just started in London, I can't help but imagine the scenario of Apple Inc being the sole sponsor of the Olympics

Now that the London Olympic Games already barring people wearing Pepsi t-shirt from entering the Olympic venue, would Apple impose even more draconian measures?