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Comment Recommendation (Score 3, Insightful) 205

by 955301 (#30967036) Attached to: Solutions For More Community At Work?

You are fighting an impossible cause. We aren't designed to know and care about this many people. If you intend to let your business grow beyond 10 individuals (Yes! Ten. Those people each have at least 3 people they care about, making the minimum count 30 already) then you will fail to accomplish what you are looking for. More importantly, if some of them fall for it and begin to trust others at the office, they run the risk of being *deceived by someone they are attempting to trust*, while at work. You will have effectively attached their desire to work there to the outcome of any one relationship they build at work. If *one* relationship goes sour, the person is that more likely to leave altogether. This is why you want all relationships to "not mean anything" at work. It's important to the business.

Other than that, best of luck.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
Science

Darwinian Evolution Considered As a Phase 313

Posted by kdawson from the everything-you-know-is-wrong dept.
LucidBeast tips a mind-bending report at New Scientist on the latest paradigm-breaking work of Carl Woese, one of whose earlier discoveries was the third branch of life on Earth, the Archaea. Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld argue that, even in its sophisticated modern form, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth. Woese and Goldenfeld believe that horizontal evolution led to the rise of the genetic code itself. "At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer — in which organisms acquire genetic material 'horizontally' from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself."
NASA

NASA Prepping Plans For Flexible Path To Mars 175

Posted by kdawson from the getting-there-is-half-the-fun dept.
FleaPlus writes "A group at NASA has been formulating a 'Flexible Path' to Mars architecture, which many expect will be part of the soon-to-be-announced reboot of NASA's future plans. NASA's prior architecture spends much of its budget on creating two in-house rockets, the Ares I and V, and would yield no beyond-LEO human activity until a lunar landing sometime in the 2030s. In contrast, the Flexible Path would produce results sooner, using NASA's limited budget to develop and gain experience with the technologies (human and robotic) needed to progressively explore and establish waypoints at Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moon Phobos, Mars, and other possible locations (e.g. the Moon, Venus flyby). Suggested interim goals include constructing giant telescopes in deep space, learning how to protect Earth from asteroids, establishing in-space propellant depots, and harvesting resources/fuel from asteroids and Phobos to supply Moon/Mars-bound vehicles."

Comment It's the people avoiding patterns to fear. (Score 1) 344

by 955301 (#30875312) Attached to: Crazy Firewall Log Activity — What Does It Mean?

This just doesn't seem like a big deal. The countries he points out are all in the same timezones so it's probably just their normal day starting. So this probably correlates to dns refresh or some other aspect (vertical) of general internet operations landing on the same hour.

He needs tcp port analysis and to compare days - the pattern is probably the same from day to day.
Transportation

Skydiver To Break Sound Barrier During Free-Fall 311

Posted by Soulskill from the some-velocities-are-more-terminal-than-others dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Over fifty years ago, American Joe Kittinger made history by leaping from a balloon at 102,800 ft, and although many have sought to repeat the feat, all have failed. Now, BBC reports that Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner will try to break the long-standing record for the highest ever parachute jump, skydiving from a balloon sent to at least 120,000 ft, and it is likely that 35 seconds into in his long free-fall of more than five minutes, he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine. 'No-one really knows what that will be like,' says Baumgartner. Although challenges in the endeavor include coping with freezing temperatures and ultra-thin air, a key objective for Baumgartner will be to try to maintain a good attitude during the descent and prevent his body from going into a spin and blacking out. 'The fact is you have a lot of different airflows coming around your body; and some parts of your body are in supersonic flow and some parts are in transonic flow. What kind of reaction that creates, I can't tell you,' adds Baumgartner."
Spam

By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam 198

Posted by timothy from the much-of-the-rest-might-as-well-be dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The European Network and Information Security Agency released its new spam report, which looks at spam budgets, the impact of spam and spam management. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports. Over 25% of respondents had spam accounting for more than 10% of help desk calls. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries."

Comment Heart in the right place, but you are human (Score 1) 366

by 955301 (#30840678) Attached to: How Do You Volunteer Professional Services?

Sadly enough, you will either end up building up a temporary dependency on your skills, donate time an energy and decide the recipients are ungrateful, or have some other less than fullfilling and beneficial experience.

If you have a compassion itch to scratch, collect all of your friends and family, choose one particular family or person to help, then *help them fully*. That means bring them up to the level of your peers and yourself in a way that is permanent and causes them to become another close friend. If you do this with friends the interconnections will make your more successful as a group.

Don't swing your personal energy around haphazardly. It doesn't help as much as you would hope.
Businesses

How Do You Volunteer Professional Services? 366

Posted by timothy from the with-caution dept.
keefus_a writes "My wife and I usually take a week long vacation in the Spring and I tossed out the idea of volunteering abroad. Neither of us has a problem with doing manual labor, or whatever task is needed. However, I thought it might be of some value, and substantially more rewarding than our daily grind, if we could volunteer our professional services (I'm a network guy and my wife has a master's degree in counseling). The problem is that I haven't found any resources for doing so on a short-term basis. So I ask Slashdot. Has anyone ever done short-term volunteer work in your professional field? What organization did you contact? Or are we better off donating money to a particular cause and just working on a tan?"
The Military

Sound Generator Lethal From 10 Meters 314

Posted by Soulskill from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
penguinrecorder writes "The Thunder Generator uses a mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in turn generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 meters away. At that range, the weapon is relatively harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten meters, the Thunder Generator is capable of causing permanent damage or killing people."

Nano-Scale Robot Arm Moves Atoms With 100% Accuracy 266

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the human-tetris-anyone? dept.
destinyland writes "A New York professor has built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell. But because of its size, it's able to build nanoscale structures and machines — including a nanoscale walking biped and even sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays!"
Businesses

Office Work Ethic In the IT Industry? 709

Posted by kdawson from the asok-could-tell-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As a recent graduate entering industry for the first time at a large software and hardware company, I have been shocked at what seems to be a low standard of work ethic and professionalism at my place of employment, especially in this poor economy. For example, at my company, the large majority of developers seem to each individually waste — no exaggeration — hours of time on the clock every day talking about football, making personal phone calls, gossiping, taking long lunches, or browsing the Internet (including, yes, Slashdot!). Even some of our subcontractors waste time in this manner. Being the 'new guy,' I get stuck with much of the weekend and after-hours grunt work when we inevitably miss deadlines or produce poor code. I'm not in any position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently. Management seems to tolerate it. I would like to ask Slashdot what methods others have used to deal with office environments such as this. Is my situation unique or is it common across the industry?"

Comment Re:TFA is full of flaws itself (Score 1) 275

by 955301 (#30547982) Attached to: The Science of <em>Avatar</em>

I'd add one more point regarding the "noble savage" excuse the technology gap keeps landing on.

The Na'vi *can't* be more technologically advanced. Since the planet is almost completely alive and the Na'vi plugged into it, they can't put a shovel into the ground without killing something dear to them. For them to make an advancement at the detriment of something living, it would have to be worth it to them. Eating to survive is worth it, so they have thanksgiving at every kill, but kill nonetheless.

The one exception I could think of would be digging unobtanium off the side of one of the floating mountains to create some sort of flying vehicle. But they already have flying vehicles that perform their own maintenance! And the superconductor hovering would only work in highly magnetic regions.

So I'd argue they are technologically advanced. They have a standing army, worldwide network, flying vehicles. Their technology - carbon fiber skeletons & fibre optic adapters come naturally.
The Internet

Australian Govt. Proposes Internet "Panic Button" For Kids 434

Posted by timothy from the panic-panic-panic dept.
CuteSteveJobs writes "Children who feel they are being bullied, harassed or groomed online could call for help instantly using a 'panic button' on their PCs under a plan by the Australian Government's cyber-safety working group. The button shall look like a 'friendly dolphin,' who will connect the child victim instantly to police or child protection groups. Australian Internet Censorship Advocate Hetty 'Save the Children' Johnson says the Internet needs something like 000 or 911. Will this be another scheme wasting taxpayer dollars in lieu of parental supervison, or could it actually work? Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet? Can flaming and trolling be classified as bullying?"
Software

Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language 831

Posted by kdawson from the blatently-bracist dept.
Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in: "For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures. There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept. ... One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements. ... Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design. The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently. ... The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."

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