It's true, coal burners and mud sharks are destroying Europe.

They're just testing the post net neutrality internet, citizen.

I always think of Plasteel whenever I hear about this.

I can think of better things to do with one hand.

I should clarify, I don't think Free Software as a movement is a dangerous idea. What I am saying is that there are huge numbers of people out there that truly expect from 100's of man hours of work to simply get done in less than a week for peanuts. Free Software was never about the idea that people shouldn't get paid for their work, and those who think it is were missing Stallman's point.

As someone who has been paid for the last ten years to write open source software (mainly through research grants), what people should understand is that a large (the majority?) of open source projects are funded at least partially by government and large commercial interests so that they can cooperatively meet shared goals. Another source of resources for open source projects is well-paid developers who have enough free time to work for free on projects they enjoy. The training and skills they bring to their hobby is paid for by good jobs. Without a thriving, well-paid community of developers, the huge amount of free software out there simply wouldn't exist. This is a huge factor that drives open source development, and we should keep this in mind when we hear stories about the mythical coders in their mom's basement who are writing tons of free software. I'm not dismissing the many great projects that have simply been created to scratch an itch or do good in the world, just raising the serious point that developers need to get paid, and we can end up screwing ourselves if we paint a picture that gives people the expectation that we work for free.

Right, all those almanac records have just up and disappeared. It's a "conspiracy".

We should also look at who produces most of the code. If we simply slap the label of developer on anyone who writes code, we may come away with the idea that because 40% of DEVELOPERS are hobbyists, that 40% of actual DEVELOPMENT/implementation is done by hobbyists. It would be like saying 80% of authors, defined as someone who spends 10 or more hours a month writing text (could be emails, could be text messages, etc.), are hobbyists.

Considering just how skewed productivity is among programmers, it wouldn't surprise me if this 40% collectively gets much less done than the pro's. That's not saying we shouldn't encourage people to make coding a hobby, but I think it's dangerous to present the idea to the world that code is a freely available resource that can easily be obtained for an extremely low cost or for free. I have to fight this quite a bit as a professional, because the expectations of some customers and employers is just incredibly out of line. Many of them will expect a project that requires 50K+ lines of code (and as a result, potentially hundreds of man hours of work)to take a couple of weeks and cost maybe $500 (to see what I mean look at sites like rentacoder).

I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.

It works great if the risk taker is poor or middle class and cash strapped, and I think that's what it is (or should be) intended for. Otherwise, I agree, it's ridiculous for a billionaire to use this method for funding, but that's why he's a billionaire (along with all the other billionaires). It's because he knows how to work the system and has few scruples.

if you value your privacy, but prefer google's search results to duck duck go's, then startpage will anonymise and encrypt your searches, send them to google, and return the results. Fsck the NSA!

I *gasp* read the actual document (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/12/1221464110.full.pdf+html) and it sounds like some pretty complicated work. It relies on a bunch of separate microphones to listen in an absolutely silent room for the exact same noise and the echos of bounces. Since you know where the microphones are in relation to each other you can compute when the initial sound and echos hits each microphone and from there reverse construct where the sound must have originated and the echos tell you what it bounces of off.

The math is a bit beyond me after being out of university for so long, but it seem similar to transliteration using in GPS where thanks to very fast sensor readings you can figure out where you are in relation to a fixed signal. To compute the shape in the in a noisy environment I wonder if you can use a "known" sound where you could listen for only that and filter out the regular noise. Either way the computation involved would be impressive but maybe not for the elusive "5 years time" computer.

It would be cool to have something like this in my fishing boat where instead of a dot on the screen I could get something that tells me where the fish are and what kind too. :-)

Maybe you could arrange them in a golumb ruler layout to further speed up processing... *sigh* Making websites pays well, but I miss computers science.

I can say... wait, what was the question?

Automation is making unions MORE relevant than ever.

Wrong, you haven't been reading closely enough. Boxing is actually safer than playing lineman, which is a total surprise. They are finding the worst injury in players that don't normally have a lot of concussions, but instead who play positions where they are constantly running into someone else at slower speeds, like lineman. When you play line, you have about 2 feet between you and the other guy, so you aren't building enough momentum to knock them out or to even realize that it's causing injury, but you are hitting them every play. It's a huge number of very small blows that is causing the most damage. No one knew this. Again, this is happening in players that have never been knocked out or shown any signs of trauma. It's a complete (literal) game changer because it means that ANY amount of repeated trauma, no matter how slight, has a cumulative effect that won't show up until much later.