Milky Way is never visible so clearly to the naked eye, its just the high exposure shot that makes it visible.

They key words are so clearly. It is definitely visible but without that many details. Also, these photos show way to many details near the horizont, even without the light pollution the thicknes of the atmosphere would have effect.

Sorry, you are wrong. In a truly dark site with well adapted eyes the Milky Way looks very much like this. I just got back from an observatory in the Oregon high desert, and the views were staggering. The dust lanes and many other details were clearly visible.

Actually I did see the Milky Way and some nebula but I don't remember which one. This was a long time ago.

The reason I could see them is that my eyes do adapt to the night really well. I can still see around me when it is really dark while most people start remarking that it is getting dark. A side effect is that when I'm well adapted to dark places and a car passes by I get blinded by the head lights.

I don't understand why this whole issue is being looked at from a feminist Angle. What would the reaction be if a guy has tweeted the same thing? I am not sure if what she did was right/wrong. deciding if she is right or wrong considering it a action of a women saddens me.

This reminds me of one of Douglas Crockford's talk. The story goes some thing like this.

* Some Russian Porn site uses jsonp using Crockford's host and he get a huge bill

* He polity asks them to host their own version and they don't reply

* He redirects the site to 'http://fbi.gov

* He receives a call from the FBI, because they have been getting suspicious traffic from some Russian site

* He then goes on to add a alert box with a annoying warning saying the site stole his bandwidth. Who cares for warnings any ways?

* He finally puts a loop in the JS file so that the other site wont load. He finally wins

Not a JS/Programming Pro here so please pardon my ignorance. One major problem faced by me in JavaScript is the weird handling of floats. This kind of application will end up dealing with floats. How should I avoid errors? or does Tangle itself handle the conversions?

You can get decent float parsing by doing Number() casting / regex cleanup, instead of parseFloat(). I don't know how tangle does it though

I'm using this js sprintf library: http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript-sprint...

Right, yeah I use this one too for anywhere I need printf a-like formatting in JS.

But isn't this the other side of the coin? Formatting numbers as strings, not parsing strings to floats? (forgive me if I'm off base on this, I'm only looking sideways at this right now.)

I could expect this out of Go Daddy, but should the people approving this patent also be blamed?

I guess you could try blaming the rubber-stamping machine they're clearly running these applications through, sure.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone have an idea of what sorts of software patent applications have not been approved?

I heard they determined The Singularity was not innovative enough.

Any one being cynical about Coursera is definitely having a perspective of the traditional college/school structure, i.e assignments, exams and grades equals knowledge. That need not be true, because any one would be enrolling in the courses just to get their curiosity fueled and gain some knowledge which or else they would have absolutely no access to. I have been enrolling in at least two courses a month and i make a point to finish all the lectures and understand them before enrolling for more, but i have had no time to actually do the assignments and take the quizzes. Ill not get a certificate of completion i.e iam a drop out, but i have access to knowledge and i free to choose what i want to learn.

Some of the cynicism around Coursera (and Udacity) isn't around the way the education is delivered, but the business model.

Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).

This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).

To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.

My guess is that they're running it free as a sort of massive beta test, once they've got the format sorted they'll start including paying courses - quite possibly as follow up to free ones (for example Scala I is free, Scala II costs you money).

And, personally, I'm very grateful to them for hosting such excellent free courses at the moment - the quality has generally been pretty high on the ones I've done, and the format is excellent. If they start making money off it, good for them.

I'd more likely expect all the content to be free, but course completion certifications to cost money.

Edit: This would be particularly useful if the certifications were convertible into course credit at participating universities.

How would that work online? Cheating is already a problem - there's nothing to stop you googling for the answer to a given assignment, or getting your clever best friend to help you out.

I wonder if it's part of a strategy of creating a huge userbase and alot of content and data all of which will help you lead the field in the future(and be the most profitable). And nothing helps more to create this sorts of things than "free".

My own experience with watching lectures is that I feel I understand everything as I listen to them, but once a week passes I have trouble explaining anything but the basic gist of what I learned. My experience with assignments is that they force me to acknowledge just how incomplete my understanding of what I learned was. With programming in particular, I feel like lectures are an important framework that help guide your learning, but that most of the actual learning takes place in the assignments.

come to think of it I should really give a shot at the assignments and see how better i retain knowledge

I am taking the scala course and I find assignments very interesting, they have also developed a cool task in sbt ( scala ) to submit the assignments from sbt console itself , they are also focusing on writing unit tests from the first program.

sbt has been around a lot longer than the course, it hasn't been developed specifically for coursera.

I think the parent is saying it's a new task within sbt for submitting homework, not that sbt itself is new.

Possibly, hadn't read it that way. (And if that's the case, my apologies.)

I understand your point of view: just watching the lectures offers an interesting high level overview.

However, the weekly quizzes offer a great learning experience. After watching the lectures for a week, keep taking the quiz over and over again until you really understand the material. Each time you take a quiz you get (mostly) different questions.

For some of the classes you also get a lot of additional material in the homework assignments.

thank you i will give it a shot :)

yes google apps gtalk is also down

Not big a news as the Title suggests. Gist: He quit as editor and started a seed fund

As awesome the _why's guide to ruby, is we shoudnt forget other things like Shoes,Hackety hack,camping among other things _why has contributed. BTW any one has read "nobody knowns shoes?" It is all a worth while read.

We're discussing merits of donating money, so I think it's worthwhile to compare.