Gee, what's wrong with this sentence:

      Now a computer model shows conclusively...

I'm sure the research modeling is interesting and worthwhile, and it's just the writeup that is idiotic. But y'know *computer* models do not ever show anything *conclusively*. The model is only as good as the assumptions that went into designing it. Those might be good and reasonable guesses, but you are only doing the model because you *haven't* (or can't) observe the actual phenomenon.

I consider the suggestion of using a proportional font for programming frivolous and a bit juvenile. In fact, I'm of an age where it seems a little off if my SSH backgrounds are not green-on-black (and hence make them so).

That said, a *good* fixed font really makes a lot of difference. Not too long ago, I found one called Anonymous Pro, that I have become very fond of:

http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html

It's freely available, TTF, and I've installed it most places. As much as I hate being forced onto Windows machines, in the few cases where I am, I actually think Consolas is pretty good quality too.

Is anyone conducting something to counter Monty's money-grabbing schemes. A counter-petition (in particular, one that got more signatures) that said "We FOSS developers oppose efforts (by Monty) to weaken or violate the protections of the GPL, and insist that MySQL code base remain free, and not be proprietarized by its former developers". Wording could be better, but something to that effect.

I would sign in a second, and I suspect thousands of /. readers would too.

Notice that the story, complete with the completely false, yellow journalism, headline, is only being run by Fox News. I saw the story on Google News earlier, and wanted to read the actual facts. However, so far no reputable news organization has bothered to report it. Something to keep in mind.

What seems to be the actual story is that the Congressman sent a rather routine notice to the FEC about a likely violation of PAC status and election law. All the "trying to send to prison" bit is just a deceptive way of saying that, well yes, laws do have legal force (including ultimately penalties).

I liked this comment so much, causality, that I made it my FB status for today (properly attributed).

I remember reading almost all of these exact same marketing buzzwords and hype ten years ago. The only difference was that then the "amazing, revolutionary language" was called REBOL.

Exact same business plan, as far as I can tell. Exact same hyperbolic language. Enough so that I wonder if the same copywriter did a search/replace on the old pamphlets. It's yet another moderately OK high-level language, but that comes in three versions:

(1) Free (of cost), but fairly crippled
(2) Expensive
(3) "Enterprise", i.e. REALLY expensive.

And just like REBOL ten years ago, it promises "revolutionary" cross-platform support, while dropping or being slow to update the non-Windows versions.

The linked blog/review of the language seemed to have comments solely from paid-shills. The reviewer himself was interesting, but all the comment at foot read like almost certain astroturfuing.... gee, just like REBOL did back in the 1990s. When you actually look at the "amazingly readable and compact" code... well, it looks a lot like AppleScript and a few other similar approaches to syntax. But one thing I noticed in particular is that the "unbelievably short" code samples were about the same as the ones I'd use in Python, or Ruby, or Perl, or AWK. At least in length; Python feels more readable to me... once you give up the silly conceit that Rev syntax isn't syntax because it kinda-sorta-a-little-bit reads like English. Rev *is* shorter than Java or C++, but that's not exactly anything amazing.

It does NOT "beg the question"! It might RAISE the question (perhaps not even that), but it certainly does not claim that the question itself is evidence for its truth.

Kids these days!

Read: http://begthequestion.info/ (or just a frickin' dictionary).

Give us a break: "Spent 331 days looking at porn"! This isn't the fault of the summary, the article itself has the same silliness. I am certain that the executive in question didn't *spend* 331 days looking at porn, but rather that there were 331 days *when* he looked at porn. Not sure the time interval, but even assuming a year, sure he looked at some porn every day. So what?!

If the guy (or any employee) isn't performing is job duties, worry about that. But that's a matter of specifying duties, not of stupid prurience about pornography. It's no better if he's looking at Facebook, or Slashdot, or a vacation planning site, or (god forbid) Fox News... nor even if he's just spending all day sharpening pencils.

I actually mostly agree that porn seems banal and boring, and fairly pointless. But unless employees expose other employees to what they're looking at unwillingly, it makes no differences whatsoever *what* someone is wasting time on. And it's not obvious that looking at porn actually means wasting time. In the real world, humans can't concentrate on work for 10 hours a day without interruption, or at least a lot of otherwise excellent employees can't. Taking little breaks to distract oneself "during work time" is just the human condition and part of our mental limits.

Most of the comments here are annoying riffs on the theme, "I can read the word 'manipulation' in a pedantically absurd way and pretend there is no distinction". In fact, law and courts can use common sense, definitions, and human reasoning. They are not constrained to crudely written algorithms (even sophisticated algorithms could do better than most posts here allow, but that's a digression too).

As TFA says, photojournalism already has a fairly well defined standard about what "modifications" are merely technical versus which alter the meaning of the material presented. Part of this is a question of particular transformations that may or may not be applied, but much of it is a matter of judgment about meaning. Clearly, at the edges, you can try to subvert some overly narrow and hyper-technical construal. For example, Man Ray (and other photographers of the early 20th C) created some strikingly abstract and recontextualizing images using only techniques that would no per-se bump against the technical "modification" techniques... his purpose was obviously much different than fashion magazines, but if a modern photographer applies the same devices, the law and courts would reasonably call that "manipulation" within the spirit of the proposed law (whether labeling was required would presumably depend on the publication context). On the flip side, there are no doubt other photographs that could be "manipulated" in a formal sense without intending to present artificial meaning. For example, photos (digital or film) that are damaged in various ways might need to be "manipulated" to produce the "true" image. Again, courts and laws can make that distinction on a case-by-case basis.

If you are running Windows, you are part of a botnet. If you are running a real operating system, your system is clean. Simple, huh?

I run mostly Apple machines myself. I have installed Linux distributions on them, but I wind up running OSX in the end. It does indeed "just work" better when it comes to peripherals and hardware features (sound, external video, power modes, etc).

Here are my favorite applications for the Mac (as measured by frequency of usage):

* Firefox
* bash (and all those lovely utilities one uses in bash: ls, grep, cut, head, vim, cat, find, wget, etc)
* Python (often iPython)
* jEdit
* OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice)

Notice anything they have in common? They are all Free Software

There are a few proprietary applications I also keep in my Dock:

* Safari
* Mail.app
* GraphicConverter
* Preview
* iCal
* iTunes

These have something in common too. They are proprietary, but they are applications whose whole purpose is to manipulate or utilize files in non-proprietary data formats (HTML, mbox, PDF, png, jpg, CAL, mp3, etc... OK, I know mp3 is a little bit proprietary). If I were to need to give up any of these, nothing would stand in the way of manipulating the data files I had created using other tools.

There are a few other applications I use that are less clear, and that I don't feel quite so good about:

* Dictionary.app
* VirtualBox
* Acquisition
* Skype
* Finder

Well, the dictionary is handy, and the way the data is stored is probably not very open. But if I didn't have it, I'd use some other dictionary; there's not any bad lock-in there. VirtualBox is free-of-cost, but proprietary format; I'm not so happy about that, but it does let me run Linux in a VM. Acquisition is a nice (shareware/nagware) fileshare program that I paid for... well, I use to download non-proprietary data files. I could use something else if I wanted to to get the same data. Finder is... well, I could use a different file manager if I wanted. I don't love it, but it's there and is basically fine. The only really locked-in program on my list is Skype. It's hard to get around that... but it's the same story on my Linux machines.

I am in general agreement with a number of posters about the effectiveness of Gmail's spam filtering. However, the claims of only getting uncaught spam once on the order of weeks or months baffles me. I get at least several spams a day that make it through Gmail's filter. Of course, next to that, I also get hundreds of spams that are caught correctly (and once in a while false positives too though, so I really need to review the spam folder manually, which is a fairly quick visual scan). It's manageable, but not completely negligible, work.

It's possible (quite likely) that I have a more public identity than many posters (I'm widely known, and never hide or disguise my email address). But I still have to wonder if their accuracy claims about Gmail filtering are a bit exaggerated.