You know I rarely use my moderation points since I don't come across any really good posts. In fact my moderation points just expired last night. This is one of the best things I've read on slashdot in a while though. I wish I had points to mod you up.

The reason they publish so many editions is to combat used textbook sales, especially in freshman and sophomore level undergrad programs. Professors sometimes write their own books as well, which are required when you take their course which is required for various degrees. A linear algebra course I once took was written by the department head if memory serves me correctly. The first edition had algebra misspelled as "algegra" on the binding. It understandably got a second edition. Too bad the book itself was quite horrible.

Of course when you continue through a math degree as I did they tend to use golden standard textbooks which haven't changed in years or decades receiving a new edition very rarely. By about my junior year we were using a lot of books from Springer which is a pretty decent publisher. Sometimes we'd use reference books from Dover which are mostly translated Russian and German texts that are quite old. Other courses such as differential geometry used "standard" textbooks like do Carmo's "Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces". I was even fortunate enough to have some really awesome professors. My differential equations instructor didn't even use or require the department's required textbook (some 50th edition book). Rather he taught from a bunch of his graduate textbooks which I actually bought after asking him.

That's not to say there shouldn't ever be a revised book. Errors slip through, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. Sometimes a new edition would also benefit from recent advancements in the field. Though this is less of a concern in math as new advancements are generally way above the rigor of an introductory textbook in the subject matter. However, in areas such as computer science this could definitely be a good thing for students every once in a while.

I think it comes down to how much publishers think they can make off of students. A lot of undergraduate mathematics is required by so many different fields that it makes sense why they do this (to prevent used book sales and make more money). When you start to advance towards a graduate program the number of people who need to take those courses drops off a lot. Perhaps the relatively recent F/OSS textbook movement could help here, although I doubt it. When it comes to K-12 I'm sure the situation gets a lot more cloudy because of ever changing standards though. Then again a lot of schools have relatively little money, I know the high school I went to gave us extra days off and only had half of the lights on in the building because they couldn't afford utilities. So perhaps F/OSS textbooks would work really well here.

This is what I see in games, cherry picking the best of both world.

For instance, say I buy a physical copy of an Xbox 360 game. If I lose or break the disc I'm boned, I'll need to buy it again. Of course I can also sell it to someone else when I'm finished with it. So it seems like a good to me. However, what happens if there's a part of the game that's only available if you buy it new? All of a sudden I don't own part of the game, it's more like a service (a non-transferable license). When it comes to digital distribution like Xbox Live or Steam things do a 180. Now if my Xbox 360 blows up I can just download the game from Xbox Live on another machine. Of course I can't sell it to anyone else. So I don't seem to own it at all now, I merely have a non-transferable license.

Basically if it's a good I should due able to do with it as I please, including selling it to someone else. If it's a service then I'd like to download it and use it anywhere (within reason of course), even if the physical copy is destroyed.

A GPU is a computing device, but it's not another CPU. So while it may be fairly flexible it's still designed with one thing in mind. Debugging isn't nearly as nice as it is on the CPU, you can't do things such as print to the console from within a kernel (on a GPU) without an extension, and if you initiate a very time consuming process on the GPU your monitor will probably be locked until it finishes. Not to mention memory management is difficult on the GPU since you have to think about things such as coalesced reads/writes and cache coherency. Branching is also a pretty slow process on a GPU which needs to be taken into account.

Lastly OpenCL is not just for GPUs, it's for a bunch of different devices including CPUs, FPGAs, and DSPs. All of these have their own quirks. Now I'm not saying it's not possible to abstract all of this away, but it's not easy like you make it sound. If you can't do it at this level you shouldn't do it at all since you are going to have to work at this level whether you use a wrapper or not. I'm sure in 5-10 years the situation will change, but until then I agree with the GP.

So tell me, what happens if EBCDIC characters are passed when ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode characters are expected?

Right, because settlers on another planet, moon or exoplanet wouldn't have to worry about conserving every little thing they possibly could to survive. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere would be colossally stupid since they'd most likely have a closed system where the plants can use this CO2 to provide oxygen and food in return. Plus it's not like we'll be using oil as an energy source since not only would it probably be nonexistent on another world, but it would also require oxygen to combust, something which is better saved for the people. Perhaps one day after a few hundred years of terraforming to reach an atmosphere near Earth normal and a steady supply of oil from Earth (which hasn't run out in that time frame) will lead to everyone getting all nostalgic and buying SUVs and causing global climate change, but I'm not seeing it.

Most worlds out there have no ecosystem to destroy, they have almost no atmosphere to pollute, and they are inhospitable to all but the most resilient forms of microbial life. So how exactly are we going to repeat "the whole damn shit again"? Hell, colonization would probably help out here since colonies would need to recycle everything they possibly can at the highest efficiency possibly. They'd also need the cheapest, easiest, and most efficient energy sources to power their colony.

MacDefender tried to install itself on my system a few days ago. Oddly enough another fake anti-virus bit of malware did the same to my Windows machine on the same day. With MacDefender nothing happened as I have the open safe files option disabled in Safari. Of course on Windows it had already installed part of itself and was spamming UAC elevation requests non-stop until I nuked it, at least it looks like I did anyway.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until OS X became a target. Granted this isn't as bad as what happens on Windows, but the arms race has begun.

In my college the math, physics, engineering, etc departments never used scan-trons, at least not in any class I ever took. For most of the courses it's not a problem to grade by the next day since there's one, maybe two sections and maybe 50 students at the most (although I've seen as few as 6 including myself). However, in courses such as calculus and physics with hundreds of students they still managed to grade all of these exams by the next day. The exams were basically 8-10 pages long with one question with multiple parts per page and a bunch of blank space to answer. The exams were divided up amongst the graders and grad students who helped with the recitation and lab portions of the course.

Strangely some of my other courses such as psychology, sociology, and similar did use scan-tron sheets. I never got the grades the next day since the scan-tron machine was clogged up.

There is such a thing as a visual programming language. I'm sure if someone really wanted to they could wrap a good node based visual programming language around C.

Although one of the people to respond to you is right, GUIs don't mean no text.

I think I've been hanging around /. for far too long. The first thing I thought about doing after reading that guys last name was making a list like you did...