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.

Years ago, I thought Code Monkey was funny and sly, and although I'm not that into pop music, it had a good beat and was fun. It's under a CC license, which makes it possible for other people to do versions of it like this.

The original Sir Mix-a-lot version of Baby Got Back has some interesting things to say about race and body image, and the video was funny in spots, but I thought Coulton's version was a hilariously silly juxtoposition of style with substance. Coulton goes up another notch in my estimation.

Fox rips him off without credit and produces a Glee skit that's funny ... for exactly the same reasons Coulton's song was funny. That's pathetic.

And then Coulton comes back with this very graceful response. Game, set, and match to Coulton.

You're obviously not getting a lot of love from the slashdot crowd for asserting that MS is less hostile to FOSS than it used to be. I think realistically it's a mixed bag.

I would also point out that Bill Gates himself is not completely hostile to free information. For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped to fund the creation of this physics textbook, which is under a CC-BY license.

And Coulton's version isn't just a cover either. If you listen to the Sir Mix-a-Lot version and then to the Coulton version, Coulton's puts the lyrics to a melody that wasn't there in the original rap song. Coulton owns the copyright of this melody.

An R^2 value of 0.8 is actually pretty low. And looking at the graph, it's really only three points, even though it looks like a hundred points. They have one big blob for phytoplankton, one for trees, and a third blob in the middle for everything else. This is really not that impressive. If you throw three baseballs in a microwave and observe the resulting random positions, they will often come pretty close to lying on a single line (which is what the R^2 measures).

Within each blob, the correlation looks like it's essentially zero, e.g., it doesn't seem to be true that big trees live longer than small trees.