Comment Re:Bring rope, lots of rope. (Score 1) 373
Also, beware of shooting bystanders. This can sometimes lose you points.
Comment Re:Freelance decker (Score 1) 373
In reading my sibling comments, I'm deafened by the sound of *whooosh*
Whether the number of children I have is a natural number depends on your preference. I personally prefer the definition which does not include the cardinality of my offspring set.
Comment Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score 1) 818
I'm not necessarily saying you're not right, but I do have several comments. You seem to think that multiple medical conditions are being falsely diagnosed. If you are right, then I have nothing else to say. On the other hand, what evidence do you have to support your argument? That more children are being diagnosed than were when you were growing up? That's certainly not evidence. You may claim that none of this happened in your day, and everybody got on just fine. But do you actually know if they got on just fine? It's perfectly possible that undiagnosed children from your generation looked like they were doing fine, but were seriously struggling with life.
Having said all this, I do tend to agree that a lot of children are being overly pampered, but I also think we should be careful not to ignore real issues just because we did in the past.
Comment Re:Shrimp free zone? (Score 1) 643
I'm tired of the government mandated bullshit where everyone ELSE has to accommodate, bend over for, and kiss the ass of the one.
I've not RTFA (this is
The point is, sometimes it's perfectly possible to cater for the disabled at only a minor inconvenience to everyone else. In such cases, I feel a good attempt should be made to cater for the disabled (it really sucks being disabled, and so able-bodied people should at least be accommodating to them), when practical.
In the case in question, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a small fraction of seats marked as a disable-friendly zone. Such a zone would then be minorly customised for the passenger, and the other passengers in that small fraction would work on a greatest-common-divisor-basis. So, for example, the seats would be more spacious (to accommodate people in wheel chairs, or who are tall enough that sitting in normal seats would cause non-trivial discomfort), they would be located close to the stewards' quarters, and they would have braille notices for the blind, and written copies of instructions for the deaf. In the special case discussed in the article, people in this section would be asked not to eat nuts, and perhaps a curtain would be put up.
The main point is, the solution outlined above is easy. Normally the section would not require any extra attention than standard first-class seating. Do you think all people with disabilities should be excluded from everything just because they're a slight inconvenience?
Comment Re:MRI technology? (Score 2, Funny) 100
which means that if you can't do it now, you'll probably be able to do it on your cell phone in 10 years.
I can't solve the TSP for 1000 cities on my desktop computer today, but I suspect in 10 years time I'll be able to solve it on my mobile phone.
USGS Develops Twitter-Based Earthquake Detection 95
sprinkletown writes "A team of seismologists at the US Geological Survey has found that Twitter is the fastest way to get information out of an earthquake area, especially in those less densely populated. Seeing the Twitter community as an untapped resource, the USGS has developed a new way to track earthquakes by clustering quake-centric tweets."
Factorization of a 768-Bit RSA Modulus 192
dtmos writes "The 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 has been factored. 'The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus. This result is a record for factoring general integers. Factoring a 1024-bit RSA modulus would be about a thousand times harder, and a 768-bit RSA modulus is several thousands times harder to factor than a 512-bit one. Because the first factorization of a 512-bit RSA modulus was reported only a decade ago it is not unreasonable to expect that 1024-bit RSA moduli can be factored well within the next decade by an academic effort such as ours . . . . Thus, it would be prudent to phase out usage of 1024-bit RSA within the next three to four years.'"
8% of Your DNA Comes From a Virus 478
An anonymous reader writes "About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to an article by University of Texas at Arlington biology professor Cédric Feschotte, published in the Jan. 7, 2010 issue of Nature magazine."
Ocean-Crossing Dragonflies Discovered 95
grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."
Massive Solar Updraft Towers Planned For Arizona 572
MikeChino writes "Australia-based EnviroMission Ltd recently announced plans to build two solar updraft towers that span hundreds of acres in La Paz County, Arizona. Solar updraft technology sounds promising enough: generate hot air with a giant greenhouse, channel the air into a chimney-like device, and let the warm wind turn a wind turbine to produce energy. The scale of the devices would be staggering — each plant would consist of a 2,400 foot chimney over a greenhouse measuring four square miles. The Southern California Public Power Authority has approved EnviroMission as a provider, although there’s still plenty of work to be done before the $750 million, 200 megawatt project can begin."
Comment Re:I almost missed some important mail! (Score 1) 115
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Moderators, please note: he's not being funny --- he's being insightful.
Quantum Encryption Implementation Broken 133
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."
Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning 238
The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000, but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone."
The Nuking of Duke Nukem 325
Rick Bentley writes with more on the story behind the meltdown of Duke Nukem Forever, the game that will now live on only as a cautionary tale: "Although the shutdown was previously reported on Slashdot, this new Wired article goes in-depth behind the scenes to paint a picture of a mushroom cloud-sized implosion. Developers spending a decade in a career holding pattern for below market salary with 'profit sharing' incentives, no real project deadlines, a motion capture room apparently used to capture the motion of strippers (the new game was to take place in a strip club, owned by Duke, that gets attacked by aliens), and countless crestfallen fans. *Sniff*, I would have played that game."
Music By Natural Selection 164
maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
