LucasBrown - Slashdot User

Submission + - Cheap metal-insulator-metal (MiM) diode created (physorg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 30, 2010 @01:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: A progress on metal-insulator-metal diode manufacturing just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials. For the first time a high-performance "metal-insulator-metal" diode was created with cheap materials. This is a fundamental discovery. It could change the way manufacturers produce electronic products at high speed, on a huge scale, at a very low cost, even less than with conventional methods.
via epSos.de

Submission + - Can you use Wikipedia to decide who to vote for? (wikivoterguide.com) 3

Submitted by Decius6i5 on Saturday October 30, 2010 @12:14PM

Decius6i5 writes: This summer the WikiTrust team made the English language Wikipedia accessible through their Firefox plugin, which uses a reputation system to highlight untrustworthy text. I thought, made using this plugin I could read Wikipedia articles about politicians without being misled by vandals, so I created Wiki Voter Guide which uses Project Vote Smart's API to look up Wikipedia articles about candidates by ZIP code. Turns out, most local races aren't covered in Wikipedia yet, but I'd like to know what Slashdot readers think about all of this. With the help of reputation systems can Wikipedia become a useful way to research political candidates or is politically motivated vandalism an insurmountable problem?

Submission + - Fault takes out Internet in 3 different countries (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

Pop69

on Saturday October 30, 2010 @08:33AM

Pop69 writes: "Not some cut cable taking out some African countries where the infrastructure is weak. A fault in an Edinburgh exchange brought down subscribers internet connections in Northern Ireland, Scotland and northern England.

It's a worrying thing when BT, the monopoly telecom provider in the UK, has a network which is so lacking in resilience that this can happen."

You Have Taste Receptors In Your Lungs 223

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @12:02AM from the not-the-rest-of-us,-just-you dept.

timothy points out news of a study from the University of Maryland's School of Medicine that found bitter taste receptors on the smooth muscle lining airways in the lungs (abstract in Nature). Quoting: "The taste receptors in the lungs are the same as those on the tongue. The tongue’s receptors are clustered in taste buds, which send signals to the brain. The researchers say that in the lung, the taste receptors are not clustered in buds and do not send signals to the brain, yet they respond to substances that have a bitter taste. ... 'I initially thought the bitter-taste receptors in the lungs would prompt a "fight or flight" response to a noxious inhalant, causing chest tightness and coughing so you would leave the toxic environment, but that’s not what we found,' says Dr. Liggett. ... The researchers tested a few standard bitter substances known to activate these receptors. 'It turns out that the bitter compounds worked the opposite way from what we thought. They all opened the airway more extensively than any known drug that we have for treatment of asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).'"

Submission + - 7 Programming Languages On The Rise (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:06AM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner reports on once niche programming languages gaining mind share among enterprise developers for their unique abilities to provide solutions to increasingly common problems. From Python to R to Erlang, each is being increasingly viewed as an essential tool for prototyping on the Web, hacking big data sets, providing quick predictive modeling, powering NoSQL experiments, and unlocking the massive parallelism of today's GPUs."

Submission + - iOS Security - locked screen easily eploited

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:00AM

An anonymous reader writes: Note that if you have an iPhone and it is "locked" with a passcode — there's a security flaw within iOS. To demonstrate — press "Emergency Call" when locked and then enter some digits — (not 911!). After you hit the call button — click the lock button immediately. You can now see all contacts and their info. You can listen to all your voicemail. You can even make calls to any number.
-Craig Brockman

Submission + - Why Mozilla needs to pick a new fight Read more: (pcpro.co.uk) 2

Submitted by nk497 on Monday October 25, 2010 @08:58AM

nk497 writes: Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features. So what's the point of Firefox, then, wonders Stuart Turton. He suggests it could turn its community of developers to better use than battling it out for broswer market share. "I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?" And where better to start than the stagnant office suite arena: "Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?"

Submission + - Giant asteroid impact found in Aussie outback (australiangeographic.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25, 2010 @03:35AM

An anonymous reader writes: Evidence of what may be Australia's second largest impact crater — with an 80-km shock zone radius — has turned up on the border between Queensland and South Australia.

Submission + - Google Outs Summer-of-Coders Who Failed to Deliver

Submitted by theodp on Sunday October 24, 2010 @03:00PM

theodp writes: Be careful before you accept that potentially-unpaid Summer of Code assignment, kids. Fail to deliver, and not getting that final $2,250 stipend may be the least of your worries. Google may publicly name you as someone whose project failed to pass muster, posting your name on a corporate blog for all to see, probably not the best thing for your future job search. Google really shouldn't need a new Director of Privacy with a PhD to tell them this isn't a cool practice. How about doing the right thing, Google, and edit that blog entry, apologize to the poor kids, and cut them a check for the final stipend if you haven't already. After all, you don't post the names of the development team members behind Google's biggest failures for all to see.

Submission + - The 12 Most Amazing (and Useless) Wikipedia Pages 1

Submitted by

Ponca City

on Sunday October 24, 2010 @01:17PM

Ponca City writes: "When you document everything, you're going to end up with some incredible, but pointless, entries. To prove the point, Asylum has an interesting article about twelve of the most interesting but useless Wikipedia entries including Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitatenhaupt betriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, one word in German that means the Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services; Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, an arrangement of nouns, verbs, adjectives and place names that makes perfect grammatical sense describing a herd of buffalo in the city of Buffalo who intimidate ("buffalo") other buffalo beneath them; Uncombable Hair Syndrome, a genuine condition whereby an unusual structural anomaly of the hair means the mess on your scalp cannot be combed flat; and Hitler bacon or "Hitlerszalonna," a dense fruit jam eaten by Hungarian troops and civilians during World War II. Our personal favorite: The Katzenklavier, an actual piano-like musical instrument except instead of hitting tuned strings, the hammers hit special, tonally selected cats' outstretched tails, making them meow out in pain. How to use it in a sentence? "My wife Yoko Ono and I are recording an album of blues classics stripped of every third beat and, instead of guitar, a Katzenklavier.""

Submission + - Building Babbage's Analytical Engine (plan28.org)

Submitted by Dr. Eggman on Friday October 22, 2010 @06:44PM

Dr. Eggman writes: Over 170 years after Charles Babbage first described his Analytical Engine, one man seeks to build it in details faithful to its creator's design. That man is John Graham-Cumming, who you may remember for his successful campaign to get Alan Turing an apology from the British Government or maybe you'd better know him for the open source POPFile email filter. Once built, the engine will be donated to a museum. But, in order to fund the construction of this steam-powered mechanical computer, an online pledge has been established. By signing, users pledge to donate at least $10 if enough signatures are reached. The process only requires a name and an email address and has already reached a phenomenal 3,479 signatories. If build, perhaps we can finally see Ada Lovelace's program run on the the machine it was built for. Slashvertisement? No, this is a Slashdrive!

Submission + - Winning the World Series with Math (sciencenews.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22, 2010 @04:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: The fastest route around the bases, mathematicians show, is one that perhaps no major-league ball player has ever run: It swings out a full 18.5 feet from the baseline, early forming a full circle.

“I would definitely experiment with it,” says former American Major League Baseball outfielder Doug Glanville, who last played with the Philadelphia Phillies. “There’s no question in my mind that runners could be more efficient.”

Submission + - Chinese Gov't: iPad Sucks Without Pirated Music (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22, 2010 @03:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: The People's Daily newspaper in China, which is the official news organ of the ruling Communist party in China apparently recently posted a review of the iPad, where it complained about the locked down nature of the device, noting that "There are many disadvantages. For example you cannot install pirate software on them, you cannot download [free] music, and you need to pay for movies you watch on them." You would think a country that is in favor of locking down the internet so much would like a locked up device...

Submission + - Comic Book Sales Soar After Engaging 4chan Pirates (techdirt.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, 2010 @04:22PM

An anonymous reader writes: After the artist behind the graphic novel Underground discovered that someone on 4chan had scanned and posted the entire comic, rather than complaining, Steve Lieber joined the conversation, chatting with the 4channers about the comic... and the next day he saw his sales jump to unheard of levels, much higher than he'd seen even when the comic book was reviewed on popular sites like Boing Boing.

Submission + - IPv6 and SEC filing (nanog.org)

Submitted by FranckMartin on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @08:58PM

FranckMartin writes: It is likely that public companies will have to include the state of IPv6 deployment under compulsory SEC filings. When IPv4 exhaustion happens, companies may not be able to grow their business on the Internet. This seems a rather important piece of information shareholders may need to evaluate the future value of their stock?

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