URP DURP One guy did this thing and he's American, so... URP DURP

Houston, we have a Genius...

They finally make an Ender's Game movie and it gets 34 some odd replies on Slashdot? Wow, the audience here has really changed...

Every time someone posts about some awful dictatorship like Cuba, someone on Slashdot invariably equates them to the US. I like putting freedom in "scare quotes," that was a nice touch, but also really lazy. You basically did not have to substantiate or prove your point at all, yet you still got 3 points, phenomenal. I am sorry, but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.

I also was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and have gotten by without drugs (which you may or may not value) for my whole life. My technique is to change my environment. You cannot make the people in your dorms less noisy, but you can go somewhere else. For now, you can go to that quiet basement in the physics building, or the graduate study lounge on the third floor of the math building, or that anonymous study area in the Library with all the lockers where the students come and go talking of Michelangelo (but you don't notice because there are a hundred of them). I found all the little quiet spots on my campus when I was an undergrad, and knew how to hop from one to the next if an unexpected distraction arose. Long-term you will want to move into an apartment and get a car which will give you further capability to control your environment. Later on when I was a junior I moved into an apartment but always remembered and occasionally used my old haunts on campus. Changing my environment has been the best and most effective way I have found to get work done. Good luck.

Well, in addition to being familiar with these court cases etc... I have been watching Star Trek TNG on Netflix and have already worked through five seasons, so therefore I am also an expert like you on design patents. I can tell you that as I have been watching episode by episode I have kept a keen eye out for likeness and similarity to Apple's devices. The interfaces in Star Trek are static, the buttons don't move around, they are always in the same position. All of the table-top displays are more like those thick videophones people were trying to sell in the late 90s, and nothing like an iPad is today. Their powerful computers hang out of the sides of the wall and have static interfaces always beneath a display. The idea that the interface and display are the same is definitely not realized.

They do have 'tablet' like things, but you rarely see what the display looks like. If you do see one of these tablet displays, it is almost always used to play a recorded video and really looks quite different from the iPad. I am not trying to rain on your parade, but the idea that Apple's design patents are invalid because of Star Trek's prior art is based on a degree of similarity between the "devices" that simply isn't born out when honestly and objectively watching the series again. Star Trek is inspiring, but far from prior art, very far.

This is Slashdot, and it is obvious the typical political viewpoint leans far left of center here. Thing is, that is exactly the problem. This place is an echo chamber and all these posts reinforce the same viewpoint. This is why climate change is so obvious to some people, and so suspicious to others: it is highly politically charged. I still remember when the climate change indoctrination started back in the late 80s and early 90s. It was, and has always been driven by politicians who are, you guessed it, very left of center, like the posters here. You could ignore this, and look to peer reviewed articles, and extremely young conference proceedings and journals to convince yourself its about 'truth' and not politics, but, I'm sorry, you would be very wrong.

Typically empirical scientific knowledge is wrong, very wrong initially, less wrong later on, but almost always wrong. That's just the way it is, we all learn about it in school. Not all empirical scientific knowledge is equal, far from it. Knowledge that has been applied in very awesome and useful ways (physics, chemistry, biology) is readily accepted and taught in classrooms. This knowledge is hundreds of years old, widely and usefully applied, universally accepted, and predates and/or is orthogonal to existing political modes. Knowledge whose primary application is motivation for economy-shifting industry regulations with a far-left slant, which is tremendously young, and which is fraught with funding conflicts of interest is going to receive incredible scrutiny and skepticism. When I was still a Ph.D student I remember my advisor had never mentioned climate change one minute, then he won a huge NSF grant about green energy, and it was his thing. New York politicians push this funding to liberal professors, who generate results, which is then published in state-funded conferences, etc... Astro-turfing can be accomplished with public money _and_ industry money.

These are all very good reasons to not teach climate change in the class room, it is _not_ settled science, it is obviously politically charged, and it oozing with astro-turfing money and feel-good campaigning. Now for a kid to be expected to challenge his _teacher_, in a classroom where all the other kids just want this annoying arguing kid to shut up and sit down, is _not_ how the opposing view point should be expressed. Its not fair to the viewpoint, or the kid, or the rest of the classroom. There was a name for kids that stood up and bitched with the teacher: (annoying) dorks. The teacher shouldn't be indoctrinating students in questionable and controversial knowledge and relying on students to challenge him. Most students aren't equipped to debate the teacher, nor brave enough, nor inclined enough to do the necessary research. This is why the teacher should stick to old, widely accepted knowledge and not cutting-edge highly politically charged astro-turfed climate change.

Funny thing is, the article this all came from made its viewpoint obvious when it compared evolution (circa mid-1800s) to climate change in legitimacy. You guys are Fox Newsing yourselves and you don't even realize it.

Its not about the language, its about the project. When I was young I wanted to make the most amazing 3D game ever. My hero was (and still is) John Carmack. He used C, OpenGL used C, and pretty much anything fast used C (or C++). There were scripting languages, like Perl, which were even used for some games (e.g., Frozen Bubble), but if you wanted to get serious, you needed to learn a language that lets you directly manipulate memory and devices. I _wanted_ to learn C because I wanted to do my project right. Ultimately, when I was in 12th grade I used flex, bison, and C++ to make a C compiler for SPIM based on what I learned at a local university. That experience wouldn't have happened in perl. Disclaimer: I use all the languages, python and perl mostly for scripting. My point is C is a great first language, if you want to build something best built in C, which is actually a _lot_ of stuff.

So I guess what I'm saying is your question is being asked by the wrong person. Its your 11 year-old that should be asking about what tool he can use to get his job done. If you want to entice him into programming, then you are asking the wrong question. Maybe you guys should work on a project together, in which case, you can select the language that should be used and teach him what he needs as he needs it. My Dad and I did a lot of carpentry together because he tried to entice me into that when I was young. I found it boring, but he tried. I learned some stuff, but didn't go into carpentry. Hopefully it will be different for you and your son. Good luck.

What are you talking about? If you have a tuple with 8 bytes each, that is still only 24GB for just the data. In terms of storage, buy a machine with 128GB of RAM that asynchronously writes back to a RAID volume, what's the big deal? Maybe networking would be more of an issue, but that is probably very solvable too.

Window managers manage windows:

I use GNOME 2 with Compiz and I'm very content. What are the killer features for me? Focus follows mouse, I can press Alt-click and drag windows by clicking anywhere, I can press Alt-middle-click and resize windows by almost clicking anywhere. I made a shortcut where if I press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+I it maximizes my window only vertically (great for terminals). One big killer feature with Compiz is an OS X-like Expose thing that lets me easily select windows, and shows me everything on my screen at once. What do all these awesome things have in common? They are all about managing windows, and nothing else, which is what a good window manager _should_ do. GNOME should keep going this way and not philosophize over what the default ought to be.

How I use my terminal window(s) depends on what I'm doing (developing, debugging, scripting, writing LaTeX, etc...). I don't care if my web browser is maximized once the fonts are readable, it looks pretty, and I can see everything I need. What do all these things have in common? The window size is _not_ the problem, only the application and the user know how the window ought to be, and only the user knows how it ought to be relative to other windows. There is no good default. I used Chrome OS for a couple weeks and hated it. The window manager ought to manage windows and focus on that.

GNOME 3 Gets Search and Beauty, Good:

What GNOME 3 is getting right is bringing back 'Beagle' and extending it to do more stuff. I love Spotlight on OS X, it has made the Dock, the start menu, desktop shortcuts, the Launcher (in Lion), and all the rest of it obsolete. Spotlight is king, bow down to spotlight. GNOME 3 gets this, good. GNOME also gets that the UI needs to be pretty, its just depressing when its not. My Linux machine isn't as pretty as my OS X machine, and that makes me sad, there is no reason that has to be. GNOME gets this, good.

GNOME 3's Direction:

I guess GNOME 3 should keep making stuff prettier, definitely keep focusing on search, and make me a wizard-God when it comes to managing windows. I want to do Expose, I want to effortlessly save window configurations and have GNOME 3 remember them when I open up the same applications. I want to re-size, drag, tile, layer, focus-follow-mouse, and make my windows do back-flips, effortlessly. I want GNOME 3 to not presume to do anything by default, but listen to the application and me.

What you are asking for is very difficult to provide, even if you had the perfect AI-based proxy server of every librarian's dreams: the person simply is honest and does not cheat or access prohibited content. I have taken take-home tests where I explicitly avoided looking up the solution, but the Internet is crafty, and I eventually ended up reading a variant of the problem description that subtly provided me with hints without my knowing. When I reflected on my thinking, I realized that it was severely effected by what I found on the Internet and that some of the leaps I should have made on my own were actually provided to me. Was I cheating? Perhaps, but not on purpose. The line between 'related' and 'solution' is very blurry, and even humans have a hard time distinguishing, let alone some automated arbiter or policy.

So first of all this seems really neat. In OS X Spotlight is the killer feature for me. When Spotlight works (finds my stuff while I type) I'm very happy, and when its laggy, it feels like my whole computer is freezing shut, so Spotlight is very important to my workflow. Now Ubuntu is taking it a step further than Spotlight, and is not just indexing applications and filenames, but web browser bookmarks, sub-commands in programs, menu items, and more. I think this is really great, and I would love to see this come back to Spotlight in OS X. This is exactly why I use Linux, to try out new stuff while the others are sitting on their hands. A lot of Mac users don't find Spotlight as useful as I do, but I liken that problem to what Steve Jobs said about people who can't type: the solution is to wait for those people to all die off :) Linux and her various distributions shouldn't wait to innovate, that's why I have always loved Linux, it doesn't wait.

When I was at T.J. Watson (as an intern), the other guys I worked with who were researching a new CPU architecture were roughly divided into two camps: people who were doing the same thing as at least 10-15 other people, and people who were doing something either completely unique, or working with just 2 or 3 others. The guys that worked with 10-15 people worked with IT to get the source control system (Jazz) and basic dev environment standardized, and working with relative 'ease'. The people who were on their own were working on advance projects, or very unfinished parts of the system, and consequently were liable for their _own_ IT. Basically there was a pyramid, broad support and common need at the bottom, and no support and total control at the top. There wasn't this Us vs. Them attitude: IT helped us by figuring out how to support popular parts of the project that had broad use, and didn't interfere with more complex and unfinished bits unless called upon (e.g., to help configure a personal MySQL server for some reason). I have had similar experiences at other good software/hardware shops, and have come to believe this is really how it ought to be.

Computer Science and software engineering are rife with themes. Many so-called inventions and 'new' ideas are applying these tried and true themes to a new permutation of some old problem. For instance, folding two loops together to reap stale items in a hash-table while simultaneously doing a query by iterating across a bucket list (a previous but recent slashdot patent posting). You can tell someone (a Judge) what JIT is, that it effectively combines caching of already-compiled code with partial compilation, but he can't appreciate that software engineering and computer science are pervaded by the concepts of caching, and right-sizing work. He can't possibly appreciate how obvious some of these 'inventions' are, and rank them fairly on a scale of truly inventive (LZW in my opinion) to 'someone-skilled-in-the-art-could-do-that' (twiddling bits in FAT to support short file-names). I think this is in general the primary source of frustration for engineers and scientists: that judges and patent clerks who really have no good sense of taste or knowlege on the matter make such important decisions. Redhat pointed out once that in the _vast_ majority of patent suits, the person being sued is never accused of actually _reading_ the patent, but infringing accidentally. People don't read software patents, so their claimed benefit of being able to publish great ideas by protecting them for the inventor is just bunk: society eats the bar while the inventor is anomolously protected for really no reason. They are basically landmines that only rich or organized people can buy, and most of the community knows it. Giving judges crash courses in Java is a promising start, but its also a depressing reminder of how far we have to go.

I think the author's assumption that people would search for "When are the Patriots playing next year?" rather than "patriots game schedule" is flat out wrong. People know they are using computers, and not talking to a person, and they compensate accordingly. Google therefore, also compensates accordingly, by finding every page on the internet with "patriots", "game", and "schedule" in some close proximity. They may (and probably do) do more, but Google's approach has always been index everything you possibly can, and NLP has always taken a back seat. The Bing folks on the other hand have explicitly tried to optimize for NLP cases. However which engine is better isn't a matter of can you ask it questions in English, but can someone find what they are looking for. Given that most people know that "Googling" is not the same as asking a question, it is not fair to only test NLP queries.

This is a good reason to have an ID system the government can use to identify citizens on-line. However the notion of enabling private parties to sue each other over comments made on websites on the grounds of slander is not a good idea. As you pointed out, the vast majority of these "slanderers" are children or inconsequential people, so one wonders why anyone would care? This seems reasonable given that in most other countries people generally disregard or ignore what is said about them in mere comments, and only sue actual concerns with a physical address (e.g., a newspaper) when they have to. Furthermore, it seems that the majority of such suits would be frivolous and used primarily as a means of censuring other people by intimidation. If the state were to use such a power (the party who you suggest should be suing your parent poster) it would literally be some form of an Anti-Sedition law, which is generally regarded as at best a war-time necessity, but at worst a gross violation of free speech. The next step would be the state having the ability to literally track and follow its citizens and observe what they say and post on the internet. If companies have to maintain this information, at best the state would only need a subpoena, and at worst, they would soon pass a law giving them a computer protocol to access it at will. Such an event is bound to occur when you have a country where companies are used to maintaining pools of people's real identities. You make this all sound as if we should think this is reasonable, but it just sounds alarming, and your defense of this type of law, even in its early form, is in many ways even more alarming. Are you sure you even want to _look_ down this road?