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Comment The Scopes Trial (Score -1) 1100

Likening this to the scopes trial is disingenuous and whoever made the correlation first (I heard it on NPR this morning) doesn't know their history.

First off, scopes LOST the trial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial#End_of_the_trial.

Second, the trial was about "did scopes teach evolution" (which violated the Butler act) not "is evolution true". Now, Clarence Darrow did try to bring in evidence for evolution, but it was disregarded because it was irrelevant.

Games

Blizzcon 2009 Wrap-Up 297

Last year's Blizzcon was tremendously popular. So much so that their servers were unable to handle the strain of fans competing for 15,000 available tickets. This year, Blizzard was more prepared; they made an additional 5,000 tickets available and set up a queue so that the transaction servers weren't overwhelmed. CEO Mike Morhaime said during the keynote address that if you weren't able to get into the queue within 30 seconds of its opening, the tickets were sold out before your turn came. Tens of thousands more chose to order the pay-per-view coverage, demonstrating the extraordinary enthusiasm felt for Blizzard's games. Their presentations didn't disappoint. Read on for details on the status of StarCraft II, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the new Battle.net. It's divided into sections by game in case you're only interested in one or two of them.

Comment Re:not-so-good? (Score -1, Flamebait) 646

If you want us to stay out of the schools, stop funding the schools with tax dollars and let us use our tax money to send our kids to our own private schools. Sound fair? Our small, private, Christian schools outperform your public schools by an order of magnitude the way it is. >Nobody expects the preacher to give equal time to Darwin on Sunday. Again, our religion isn't (and never will be if we have anything to say about it) funded by taxpayer dollars.

Comment A couple considerations (Score -1) 431

I think that the big reason software is moving toward the cloud is that the SAAS business model is much more friendly than the traditional buy-it-once-use-it-forever desktop app model for a couple of reasons. Not to say that there aren't advantages of the other way, but I can understand why companies want to move toward the web as a platform. 1) You control the machines you are updating. No need to worry about rolling out patches. 2) If you test against IE7, you can be certain that your app will work in the vast majority of cases. You don't have to worry about .net framework versions, 1000 different versions of JRE or if they have applied all their windows updates. 3) You don't have to worry about selling upgrades or extending the maintenance agreement every year to keep the bottom line healthy. Either the company pays up every billing cycle or get their accounts suspended. 4) You don't have to build in license key management or worry about companies making more installations than they have licenses for.
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Tax Imminent?

jhigh writes: "Proposals to tax the Internet are gaining steam as state legislators see a giant pot of money just waiting to be dipped into. "At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.""
Privacy

Submission + - British civil liberties film is released

An anonymous reader writes: BBC News has an article about a British film likely to attract the attention of civil liberties supporters. The film, "Taking Liberties", is a documentary about erosion of civl liberties in present-day Britain. From the article:

Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms. "This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist... Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back," says Atkins.
The film can be seen at cinemas in major cities. Will the film lead to privacy reforms in Britain, or will most of the viewing population just shrug and go home?
Privacy

Submission + - Photo Tagging: A Privacy Problem? (harvardlawreview.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging. The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion. First, traditional tort law does not recognize invasions of privacy that occur in public, such as the taking of a photo in any public location. Second, the few public invasions that do constitute torts involve celebrities or other individuals who have commercial interests in their likenesses. Third, courts have severely limited privacy protections in order to ensure that privacy claims do not limit the free flow of ideas.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Feed Good Decision-makers May Be Made, Not Born, Study Suggests (sciencedaily.com)

People who do well on a series of decision-making tasks involving hypothetical situations tend to have more positive decision outcomes in their lives, according to a study by decision scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp. The results suggest that it may be possible to improve the quality of people's lives by teaching them better decision-making skills, which are separate from intelligence.
Media

Submission + - Poland: Held by police for translating movies

michuk writes: "Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org were held for questioning by the Polish police forces this Wednesday. They will be probably accused of publishing illegal translations of foreign movies (which is forbidden by Polish copyright law). Napisy.org website was shut down immediately afterwards by the German forces (since the servers were located in Germany). The service was the most popular Polish on-line portal where users were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies."
Education

Submission + - Hadron Super Collidor - Detailed Profile

davco9200 writes: "For those that need their physics a little pre-chewed, the New York Times has a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider (reg. required). The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews the scientists and goes into detail on the expected experiments. There are photos, video and nifty interactive graphic."
Software

Submission + - MIT Media Lab Releases New Programming Language

An anonymous reader writes: Efforts to make computer programming accessible to young people began in the late 1970s with the advent of the personal PC, when another programming language with roots at MIT — Logo — allowed young people to draw shapes by steering a turtle around a screen by typing out commands. But the path to mastering most programming languages has been strewn with obstacles, since students needed to figure out not only the underlying logic but also master a brand new syntax, observe strict rules about semicolons and bracket use, and figure out what was causing error messages even as they learned the program. By contrast, Scratch — a free download at scratch.mit.edu — is easy enough for kindergarten-age children to use.

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