Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score -1, Troll) 725

by hsthompson69 (#47424779) Attached to: When Beliefs and Facts Collide

Proved wrong by your blind faith assertions? :)

The fact of the matter is this - your motivated thinking on this topic has blinded you to the base requirement for science - the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. You can't quote one for AGW, and you can't make any reasoned argument that it doesn't need one to be science.

Q.E.D :)

Submission + - IN SIX MONTHS, MICROSOFT WILL PULL THE PLUG ON WINDOWS 7 SUPPORT (geekrepublic.org) 1

Submitted by criticalmass24
criticalmass24 writes: Microsoft is warning customers that the end is soon coming for Windows 7 in much the same way it came for Windows XP earlier this year. Microsoft will end free mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015.

That means no more security patches if hackers find holes, no more updated features or performance improvements.

Submission + - Open Source implementation of BioWare's Aurora Engine (xoreos.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The xoreos project that aims to create an open source game engine to play games made for BioWare's Aurora Engine (think Neverwinter Nights, Knight of the Old Republic, Dragon Age) is seeking OpenGL developers.

The project is currently being coded by Sven Hesse who also works on ScummVM and a few others, but their OpenGL knowledge is limited.

So, if you have good OpenGL knowledge and want to lend a hand you can contact Sven at drmccoy@xoreos.org or on Freenode IRC (DrMcCoy in #xoreos).

Submission + - Mathematicians Solve The Topological Mystery Behind The "Brazuca" Soccer Ball

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, teams used a new kind of ball called the Telstar made from 12 black pentagonal panels and 20 white hexagonal panels. This ball has icosahedral symmetry and its own molecular analogue in the form of C60, the famous soccer ball-shaped fullerene. In 2006, a new ball called the TeamGeist was introduced at the World Cup in Germany. This was made of 14 curved panels that together gave it tetrahedral symmetry. This also had a molecular analogue with tetrahedral symmetry among the fullerenes. Now teams at the current World Cup in Brazil are playing with yet another design: the Brazuca, a ball constructed from six panels each with a four-leaf clover shape that knit together like a jigsaw to form a sphere. This has octahedral symmetry. But here's question that has been puzzling chemists, topologists and..errr...soccer fans: is there a molecular analogue of the Brazuca? Or put another way, can fullerenes have octahedral symmetry? Now a pair of mathematicians have finally solved this problem. They've shown that fullerenes can indeed have octahedral symmetry just like the Brazuca, although in addition to hexagonal and pentagonal carbon rings, the ball-shaped molecules must also have rings of 4 and 8 carbon atoms. The next stage is to actually synthesis one of these fullerenes, perhaps something to keep chemists occupied until the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

Submission + - Gamestop's Brilliant Idea: Require Preorders To Unlock Custom Game Content (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the great universal truths of modern gaming is that preorders suck. The term refers to the practice of ordering a title at some point before it actually ships in order to get access to a variety of minor outfit tweaks, a few starting weapons, or boosts to early game play. Today, some publishers take this practice to truly ridiculous levels; the recent game Watch Dogs has no fewer than nine pre-order options. GameStop, perhaps sensing that there's pressure building against the model, wants to turn the dial up to 11 — and create preorder-locked, GameStop-specific content. According to financial analyst Colin Sebastian, "[GameStop] indicates that software publishers are more enthusiastic about partnering with it. For example, by offering exclusive content on each major game release and longer term, future models may include GameStop offering exclusive gameplay." GameStop is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment. The company has captured a greater share of the Xbox One and PS4 market than it held at this point in the console cycle last time around and it's clearly looking to increase the attractiveness of its own business. That's fine but this kind of arbitrary lopping off of content to boost sales at particular shops simply isn't going to sit well with most gamers.

Submission + - Solved: why the Moon's far side looks so different 2

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: 55 years ago, the Soviet probe Luna 3 imaged the side of the Moon that faces away from us for the first time. Surprisingly, there were only two very small maria (dark regions) and large amounts of mountainous terrain, in stark contrast to the side that faces us. This remained a mystery for a very long time, even after we developed the giant impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Moon. But a new study finally appears to solve the mystery, crediting the heat generated on the near side from a hot, young Earth with creating the differences between the two hemispheres.

Submission + - Cosmic Mystery Solved by Supersized Supernova Dust (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: How cosmic dust is created has been a mystery for some time. Although the textbooks tell us that the dusty stuff that builds the planets — and, ultimately, the complex chemistry that forms life (we are, after all, made of ‘star stuff’) — comes from supernova explosions, astronomers have been puzzled as to how delicate grains of dust condense from stellar material and how they can possibly survive the violent shock waves of the cataclysmic booms. But now, with the help of a powerful ground-based telescope, astronomers have not only watched one of these supernova ‘dust factories’ in action, they’ve also discovered how the grains can withstand the violent supernova shock. “When the star explodes, the shockwave hits the dense gas cloud like a brick wall,” said lead author Christa Gall, of Aarhus University, Denmark. “It is all in gas form and incredibly hot, but when the eruption hits the ‘wall’ the gas gets compressed and cools down to about 2,000 degrees. At this temperature and density elements can nucleate and form solid particles. We measured dust grains as large as around one micron (a thousandth of a millimeter), which is large for cosmic dust grains. They are so large that they can survive their onward journey out into the galaxy.” The surprising size of the measured dust particles means they can better survive the supernova's shockwave. This research has been published in the journal Nature.

Submission + - Single European Copyright Title on the Horizon (dropbox.com)

Submitted by presroi
presroi writes: It has been 13 years after the last harmonization effort of copyright within the European Union and this period might soon be over. After the election of a new European Parliament in May this year, Jean-Claude Juncker has been nominated to become the new President of the European Commission. He has named a unified copyright his top priority, a statement repeated today at a hearing before the Greens/EFA group in the European parliament (transscript of the question by MEP Julia Reda and his answer in German, Video recording). These statements are coinciding with the upcoming release of a report by the General Directorate in charge of copyright, of which an advanced draft has been already leaked to the internet. The report analyzes four possible policy options, one of which is the introduction of a Single EU Copyright title.

Submission + - The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test at Detecting AI (vice.com)

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it’s time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. It was named it after Ada Lovelace, often described as the world's first computer programmer.

An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke. Now here’s the kicker: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

Submission + - DHS Mistakenly Releases 840-pages of Critical Infrastructure Documents (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Whoops! The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has mistakenly released hundreds of documents, some of which contain sensitive information and potentially vulnerable critical infrastructure points across the United States, in response to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a cyber-security attack.

The Operation Aurora attack was publicized in 2010 and impacted Google and a number of other high-profile companies. However, DHS responded to the request by releasing more than 800 pages of documents related to the 'Aurora' experiment conducted several years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers demonstrated a way to damage a generator via a cyber-attack.

Of the documents released by the DHS, none were related to the Operation Aurora cyber attack as requested. Many of the 840 pages are comprised of old weekly reports from the DHS' Control System Security Program (CSSP) from 2007. Other pages that were released included information about possible examples of facilities that could be vulnerable to attack, such as water plants and gas pipelines.

When contacted by SecurityWeek, the DHS declined to comment about the situation.

Submission + - The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: On July 3 the the entire F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet was being grounded after a June 23 runway fire.

The grounding could not have come at a worse time as costs have soared to an estimated $112 million per aircraft.

One thing the grounding won't do, however, is derail the F-35, a juggernaut of a program that apparently has enough political top cover to withstand any storm.

Part of that protection comes from the jaw-dropping amounts of money at stake. The Pentagon intends to spend roughly $399 billion to develop and buy 2,443 of the planes. However, over the course of the aircrafts' lifetimes, operating costs are expected to exceed $1 trillion. Lockheed has carefully hired suppliers and subcontractors in almost every state to ensure that virtually all senators and members of Congress have a stake in keeping the program — and the jobs it has created — in place.

"An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official.

Counting all of its suppliers and subcontractors, parts of the program are spread out across at least 45 states. That's why there's no doubt lawmakers will continue to fund the program even though this is the third time in 17 months that the entire fleet has been grounded due to engine problems.

Slashdot Top Deals

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst

Close