Preface: I'm just a programmer nerd who reads slashdot. I have no idea what I am talking about.

I wonder if it would be possible to have data storage as an ionization of a solid in the normal operating range of tech (and probably small, like carbon) where ionized atoms represent one bits and non ionized represent zero bits, and you can read atoms in some rigid lattice where the ionized ones represent ones and the neutral atoms are zeroes. Yea, there are huge problems, like preventing electron shell state dropping and keeping the electrons off the negatively charged carbon, but it seems like it would be a great objective considering the smaller data storage type after atom ionization will be measuring quark states to represent multi valued data.

Not to detract from the programmers are stupid bandwagon here, but I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way.

Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem, yes, but more so the problem is that Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together. A lot more stuff is user space than in windows / osx and the tradeoff is that user space stuff isn't tested with rigor to work 100% of the time like kernel mode stuff. It leaves Linux more secure but user space programs failing that average joe has no idea how to remedy does not make him happy.

But overall, as a programmer, I do take offense to not knowing how to design a UI. I know perfectly well how to. All you do is come at it from the perspective that it needs to work for someone who has no idea how anything works (aka, my mother) and someone who knows how everything works (aka, me, if I made it) and make sure there is no gap in the swathe of people between those extreme points where the design fails to, if not intuitively, at least give them the ability to change it to become intuitive for them, naturally favoring the lower end where significantly more people are than the high end.

But having art also function as a profession that feeds you gets a lot more young artists into it. Alternatively, they would either go into STEM, one of the service fields, the military, or find no purpose in life. Most of the artistic people I know have no scientific inclination, and now this is my opinion, but I feel (personally) that if you are not making something useful (and art is useful, from a cultural perspective) you have diminished purpose.

So when the artist could have made a minimum wage living off selling paintings, if you can duplicate without reciprocation the works of art and he cant survive off just art anymore, he has to take on a menial job that detracts from an otherwise gifted individual.

I don't like copyright, but until you don't need to work to eat and sleep in a bed in your own home, you can't expect artists to work, and more importantly attract budding artists to pursue their talents, to take up the profession. We need to maintain a way for artists who make duplicate digital media to survive off what they make while acknowledging the cost of reproduction is less than a cent on most of this media and not distributing it for free is doing the opposite of what the constitution defines progress as.

Graduating in May, so the worst case scenario is that I'm not going 3k into debt every 6 months the second half of this year. In the event I can't find any employment as a software engineer / programmer anywhere (I hope this is not the case, but I am pretty dumb when it comes to software) I can at least live with relatives, which is more than most people have.

When you enter any private establishment, you forfeit any right to having your location at any time unknown or unrecorded. It becomes the individuals responsibility to inquire what information about them is being recorded and to chose to continue staying wherever they are or to leave, but when you enter you enter a contract with the owner of the establishment about your presence there.

In store cameras have never been complained about. It might be a breach of privacy to take advantage of radio signals from cell phones, since you never gave the store permission to use the signals your own device generates, but that is a matter of popular opinion - does the store have a right to record or use signals produced by their customers for their own purposes?

In general that is a no, so in that regard I side with the consumer. In the end, it is an argument of privacy in private - inside stores and other establishments you are not in public, so public law need not apply to you. The question is what can the owner of a private place you inhabit at any time do to you or involving you. I say monitoring location is not a problem - recording the radio waves generated by cell phones is kind of a problem.

The problem with modern public education is that from a young age any child going through school is disenfranchised from it by having to do things they already know, dont know, or having difficult social circumstances with classmates, etc.

Whatever it is, the problem is that 90% of kids dont want to be there. They dont care, they dont want to learn because they dont care to learn. That is the massive gaping wound in public education. It is also a factor of the factory like public schooling we have - in this "information" age, students should be learning what interests them from a young age. If you foster creative sparks and teach what the student wants to know, they will actively participate and things like ipads become accessories to learning to help promote it, not the other way around.

Real world example. At my high school we had macbooks when I graduated. Standardized test scores dropped by 30%, 60% of students grades dropped, 20% stayed the same, 20% went up. The 60% whose grades declined were using the laptops to ignore the classroom and not engage in something they didnt want to do. The 20% whose grades went up used the laptops in class to accelerate learning. The other 20% did some of both. The net result is that a huge fraction of a student body doesnt want to be there, and has no interest in learning, and you try to force feed them material that wont stick or have lasting impact but then try it again the next day, the next year, and for 13 years straight. It is a broken system by that mark.

You need to get every young person interested in education, get them something that they would want to learn, and move away from the factory farm public school system we have today. Technology allows more specialized per child education, and it really needs to happen. The technology has encroached everywhere else in their lives except in schools in any meaningful way - just throwing ipads at a disenfranchised populace only gives them more tools to ignore the class.

I mean, I would much rather having accomplished scientists, engineers, and other professions representing me than someone who majored in law in college with the sole intention of being a politician. There is a breakdown in the system, and it was completely intended - when individual senators represent and are elected by up to 60 million people (Cali) they have no connection to their constituents at all.

I mean, the process to fix it is an arduous process. We need to take money out of politics, take it out of campaigning, and we can easily use technology to develop a mutually agreed upon open platform on the internet to market representatives. Like, say, each county could host a site called elections.XXXX.gov and it would allow people to apply and run for the office. Probably have a tiny $10 running fee to keep people from flooding the sites, but besides that make it open to all constituents and all it takes is the ability to type in ones positions and appear at public debate. And then outlaw the spending of money on political advertising, because once we have an easy to access platform for knowing all the candidates where they can respectively give their standings on different political topics, we can move away from the grossly unintended 2 party system and more towards electing people and not parties that don't work in the publics interest.

Problem is, the entrenched powers have absolutely no desire to move towards a system where anyone but the in crowd of each party could ever get nominated and handed to the public. They want 2 partys because they are easier to control and mutually benefit from the status quo.

Fast forward ten years when we are all driving driverless cars. No matter who makes them, they need to get permission from Google to make such a vehicle even if they never use any google product in its production. The fact that technology will have easily progressed far enough by that point to allow fully automated vehicles, google will still be getting a huge chunk out of any car made or sold without ever having any part its design, construction, or sale, besides being the first ones to do it.

This is like all software patents. Trying to patent mathematics and language. And we are going to have a whole generation of wasted potential because there is no way to fix it, because the only ones that can change it love the way things are now.

Now, I am as against slavery as the next liberty loving nutbag, but can /. not have double standards on google search?

A few weeks ago they took torrent sites off instant search and there was massive outcry. Technically, in most countries using google, most of those sites were breaking law. What they were breaking should not be criminal, but it was still not law abiding to host copyrighted material on torrent sites. And the /. community exploded against it! Hoo rah, how could Google do this, search must be agnostic to culture and law, blah blah.

So lets not have double standards. I love google supporting this, but I also am I proponent that google search has become too imbedded and powerful on the internet to just giving google passes if they start blacklisting sites from their search. It is a slippery slope that goes against the intent if you start making exceptions.

I mean, there is this big cultural panic that women don't go into STEM and everyone wonders why. They point out that they are force fed dolls, and shows about mothering, princesses and other assorted crud, where boys are fed high strength stuff like GI Joe and Bob the Builder.

But that isnt the cause of the divide. The culture inside public schools is almost as immobile as governments, because the younger children adopt the values of the older ones to try to fit in, be cool, and seem more mature. The effect of peers on kids growing up has more profound effects than any specific media they are consuming - it is more a product of their behavior around one another than it is from what they watch on tv

I dont have any sources off the top of my head, but from other discussions on this topic, the general consensus is a home schooled boy and girl completely cut off from peer influence have absolutely no real discernible preference away from math, that statistically if you introduce math in interesting and purposeful ways, both of them can like it, and develop interests in it. There is no genetic or hormonal effect prohibiting either from developing a fascination with any particular field. So of course it is cultural, but I believe it is in the in-culture of public schooling, must less the culture of society as a whole, that keeps this problem from being dealt with.

I don't like the incentive that the addon maker should decide what ads are "acceptable" or not. I will choose which sites to allow ads on, if they are in the way of content, I will get rid of them, otherwise I will usually allow them.

Heres an example: ads on youtube. I use noscript to block the in video ads, because I am not waiting through 15 seconds of wasted bandwidth and time to get to a video. Ads on the side? Those are fine, and I allow them under adblock. Does your site pop an ad up when I load a page? Adblocked. Ads on the banners and sides, that are not animated / sound, usually just a single image or some text? Perfectly fine.

I have never bought anything based on an ad before, from TV or internet. I always research purchases, or when it comes to consumables like food, I try different brands. It is almost like wasting bandwidth to throw ads at me, but I do know there are plenty of people that eat up ads like candy.

There are a few problems with functional programming languages that have prevented their true adoption anywhere.

1. Limited paradigms - I always prefer languages that let me write my code the way I want, a la C++, than a language that requires a strict paradigm from academia like Lisp. If I want to use the inherent hardware property based side effects of certain code structures, let me. Programming languages =/= mothers.

2. Difficulty. 90% of programmers (not on the internet, in general) write code like Fortran when its 2010. The most popular languages now, C# and Java, are popular because they are extremely easy to understand, if not easy to get things done in. You dont need to know lambda calculus or templates or prototyping to understand 99% of C# / java code (yes, I know C# has all of those and java has 2/3 of those). The problem with functional languages is that they always use these paradigms.

3. Most functional languages except Ocaml are like Ruby and Python in that they have tremendous performance overhead. For a consumer application, that overhead usually doesnt impede adoption (its more like the software is poorly written than the applications environment is too inefficient). But when talking about server programming the costs of running something under Ruby vs C are astronomical, and the same problem arises with functional programming. It might not hurt the consumer that the Python implementation of their music player consuming 30% more clock cycles than the exact same program written in C, but it does cause huge scaling issues with popular resources like Twitter.

4. In extension of 3, functional programming is getting away from how the hardware actually works. It is good for a novice that doesnt want to get into the details of pointers and caching and disk IO, but professionals should enter the game knowing how the underlying system runs and that making tradeoffs for readability by someone who doesnt know the language anyway vs performance benefits falls to the wayside. Developer time is important, but when you factor in the massive overhead trying to get 20+ year professional developers in C to try to think functionally you are never justifying the upfront cost of using the languages.

I mean, I dont use them. Thats personal preference. I like the way C and OO work more than I like dynamic typing and having no data and all the other out of this world paradigms. I really hope that D can achieve what I hope it will evolve into, a language that is hopefully as easy to understand as Python without the boilerplate of Java but with the performance of C. Thats kind of where the end goal of programming languages needs to be.

I mean the reason this is a problem at all is that Mozilla is a non profit but still needs to cover operating costs. Since everything they make is free, they need to either monetize customer support (and who has ever heard of that with a browser or email reader) or have ad revenue.

The google deal was just a means to an end, that some fraction of the add revenue from google goes to mozilla because google was firefox default search. The reason its so dangerous for mozilla is because google has such monopolistic power over search they have no one else to turn to to get ad revenue from searching from, hence the inquiries at M$.

But do consider this - Google is paying 100 million a year, but in 2010 they had revune of 29 billion. In exchange, they go from having influence in a quarter of the browser market (Chrome) to half the market (Chrome + FF) and then they have majority influence. I imagine its something they want when pushing WebM video and standards compliance in browsers.

I use Firefox, and have tried Chrome, but as a developer, add on nerd, and moralist I can't give myself to the company whose adds are blocked by a plugin in their own browser. I have compared them, and run them against Sunspider, and the half a milisecond of delay in page loading doesn't make me want to ditch a fully open project for something Google has lordship over. Its the same thing with Android vs Ubuntu on tablets, I want to see Ubuntu succeed because it is an open development process, not just source wise. Google already close sourced Android 3 even though it was blatantly illegal to close source software built on Linux. So I'd rather stick with the open standard. Worst case scenario, I might find a few months to work on FF myself and try to fix some of the slowdowns if I really take issue with them. That's the benefit of open development.

The power of media is just part of a recurring theme of politicians just ignoring the constitution and putting Supreme Court judges in place to keep whatever backwards legislation they pass as law.

If all three branches of government are controlled by private media dollars, there are no checks and balances left, and there is no way to enforce the constitution if all the branches are taken out of the picture like they are right now.

I mean that is the main reason for OWS, getting corporate influence out of government. The real solution is to really understand what the constitution was for - it was just a document to unify the states under a common base law. That was the reason for the 10th amendment. The states should be handling almost everything the fed is right now, and through financial mobility anyone disenfranchised with a given state could move to one that better suits their political ideology. The problem is that states have become irrelevant as amendments like direct voting of senators came about removing the states from the federal level.

It really is just a side effect of the top down politics when they should be bottom up - new ideas of political discourse should come from local attempts at new ideas and good ideas should build up across districts into state laws, and eventually if everyone starts doing the same thing it might become national law. The way it is now is just backwards

I own none of the modern consoles, and bought a ps2 back in 2001 when it came out as a naive youngster who didn't know how horrible the closed system of consoles is.

But the economics of consoles make sense, for both developer and publisher, and that is why I don't see them dying off. Fundamentally, subsidizing hardware through self manufacture or using your push in the tech industry to get insanely low cost hardware made, and then after that selling it at a loss to get more initial purchases, just to make it up on a title fee for the next half decade makes great sense.

It's also the reason free to play games with cash shops are booming. If you can lower the barrier to entry you will almost always get more net return. You reach a divide when it comes to general purpose computers and gaming in the console-esque way, because there are two forces going against one another in the general market - the hardware manufacturer needs to maximize the profit made off the units, and that raises the barrier of entry to gaming hardware. That, and the best graphics will only be had on high end hardware specialized for gaming (which is just gpus in general now).

Consoles are so weak right now because the current generation is almost a decade old. Their tech specs are being bumped up against by Nvidias next couple Tegra iterations. When the Xbox 720 and PS4 come out on hardware that would cost an average joe $900 to buy but is brought down to $300 through M$ / Sony manufacture and retail deals thats where the idea of consoles works.

The reason it works also has to factor in the iron grip the price market for games is at. There are basically three tiers of purchased games (not free to plays, etc) - the app store $1 game, the indie $10 game, and the big studio $60 game, and outside of Steam sales there is no price variability. Gabe Newell realized this. The magic sweet spot of maximal profit is well below $60 in a digital distribution system, because the cost to reproduce is near 0, and if Steam integrated some peer to peer downloading client for the games it sells it would be practically 0. The only costs to developers is getting on widely used distribution platforms, but that isnt really necessary, you could just sell the game from the corporate website and cloud host the distribution. Much cheaper than either the Steam cut or physical retail but also requires some work. If the game price became as organic as it needs to become through digital distribution, games with high demand would have their price rise and games with low demand would drop their price to find a demand point. The point is to find the individual threshold they will pay for a given game - that is why piracy is so rampant. No one is at the personal purchase threshold they like the most when it comes to most titles.