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Comment Language in bill (Score 1) 780

by Jabbrwokk (#27834417) Attached to: Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon
As well, it appears to refer to "real-world" bullying is the real problem:

using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior

To me, it sounds like the bill is defining cyberbullying as something that happens in addition to "real-world" bullying. I think it would be pretty rare for bullying to occur only online, and I'm not counting anonymous forum drama.
Books

Classic Books of Science? 451

Posted by timothy from the autodidacts-do-it-by-themselves dept.
half_cocked_jack writes "What are the classic books of science from throughout history? I'm currently reading On the Origin of Species on my Kindle 2, and it's sparked an interest in digging up some of the classic books of science. I'm looking for books from the ancient and medieval worlds and books from the golden ages of scientific discovery. Books like: Galileo's The Starry Messenger; Newton's Principia; Copernicus's On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres; and Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle. I know that I can likely find these books in a format I can use on my Kindle (found a few on Gutenberg already), but what I need is a checklist of these books to guide my reading. Suggestions?"

Comment Maybe 3,000 isn't so bad (Score 1) 126

by Jabbrwokk (#27697143) Attached to: Paid Online News Venture Fails To Get Subscribers
You're right. However, they managed to get 3,000 subscribers, which means at $5 per month each they can now afford to pay a full-time newsroom staff of five people, on top of whatever the advertising pays for. Not too shabby.

The Pegasus News manages to cover the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area with a total staff of 19 people.

Comment Re:But The Tyee brings in money (Score 1) 126

by Jabbrwokk (#27696087) Attached to: Paid Online News Venture Fails To Get Subscribers

The Tyee is not a news site. It is not "good journalism." It is an opinion site. They write stories with very clear opinionated slants. And people who agree with that slant gravitate to the site and call it "good journalism."

Their election "coverage" is nothing more than them asking for money to cover the election from the slant their readers want. Read their appeal again.

From your link:

We asked you to tell us which issues mattered most to you, promised to put your donation towards that area of reporting

This is no different than a consortium of advertisers requesting a newspaper cover an election issue from a particular point of view. This is the same old thing, just more obvious.

This shows me people don't want news that tries to be objective as possible, they want to read something that agrees with their opinions.
The Military

Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents 830

Posted by samzenpus from the scuttle-the-ship dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options to repel pirates including slippery foam, lasers, electric fences, water cannons and high-intensity sound — almost anything except guns. One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. 'It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate's ship very quickly,' says Roger Barrett James of the the Swedish company Unifire. Next is the Mobility Denial System, a slippery nontoxic foam that can be sprayed on just about any surface making it impossible to walk or climb even with the aid of a harness. The idea would be to spray the pirate's vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that's under attack. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a high-powered directional loudspeaker allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. 'Knowing that they've lost the element of surprise is half the battle,' says Robert Putnam of American Technology Corp. The LRAD has another feature — a piercing "deterrent tone" that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam that comes from the device. But Capt. John Konrad, who blogs for the Web site Gcaptain.com, says no anti-pirate device is perfect. 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'"
The Military

DARPA's Map-Based Wiki Keeps Platoons Alive 86

Posted by samzenpus from the a-wiki-of-one dept.
blackbearnh writes "One of the biggest problem that a platoon on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan faces is that when a new unit cycles in, all the street-sense and experience of the old unit is lost. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs, or even which families have a lot of domestic disputes, can spell the difference between living and dying. In response to this, DARPA created TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Developed as much on the ground in active warzones as in a lab, TIGR lets platoons access the latest satellite and drone imagery in an easy-to-use map based interface, as well as recording their experiences in the field and accessing the reports of other troops. In this O'Reilly Radar interview, two of the people responsible for the development of TIGR talk about the intel issues that troops face in hostile territory, the challenges of deploying new technology meant for combat areas, the specific tricks that they had to employ to make TIGR work over less-than-robust military networking, and how TIGR is impacting platoons in their day to day operations"
Image

South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein Screenshot-sm 1297

Posted by samzenpus from the respect-my-authority dept.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It's one of our biggest highlights."

Comment Standing ovation -- bah (Score 4, Insightful) 437

by Jabbrwokk (#27505403) Attached to: Star Trek Premiere Gets Standing Ovation, Surprise Showing In Austin

First screening impressions sometimes don't mean anything.

I would like to piggy-back on your comment suggesting early reviews were coloured by the excitement (which is probably bang-on) and point out that in the theatre where I watched the first screening of Star Wars: Episode I, there was a standing ovation after the movie was over.

Later I realized there was a standing ovation BECAUSE the movie was over.

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