kdawson - Slashdot User

Google vs. Bing — a Quasi-Empirical Study 356

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 13, 2011 @04:19PM from the unbearable-lightness-of-bing dept.

eko3 writes "SearchEngineLand.com is featuring an article that compares Google's result query relevance performance to Microsoft's Bing. Through the author's methodology and very small sampling, he argues Bing returns slightly more relevant results than Google. The article suggests that Google is riding its current market success based on its legacy namesake when internet search used to be a lot more painful than it is today."

Submission + - Proven Focus Fusion Could Power Civilization (pesn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2011 @11:41AM

An anonymous reader writes: Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) LLC has announced that they have indisputable evidence that they have achieved 1 billion degrees via plasma confinement . With another year of experimentation followed by three years of development, they could be ready to bring to market a 5 MW plant (size of the largest wind turbines) that only costs $300,000. Slashdot reported previously that LPP had achieved billion-degree results. But critics had said that the previous set-up could not rule out the possibility that this temperature was merely a function of the beam they were creating. The new results show definitively that "confinement" is indeed happening, and is the source of the temperature, which is a key attribute needed to develop a practical commercial reactor. The reults will be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Fusion Energy describing the basic theory guiding LPP's pursuit of useful fusion energy from the dense plasma focus, as well as featuring these first experimental results from the team's Focus Fusion-1 experimental device in Middlesex, NJ.

Dual-Core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011 244

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 13, 2011 @11:10AM from the waiting-for-the-triple dept.

An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer."

Scientist Says NASA Must Study Space Sex 389

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 13, 2011 @04:06AM from the mars-needs-women dept.

Velcroman1 writes "NASA has always been tight lipped on the subject of sex in space — which makes people all the more curious. How would it work? Has anyone done it before? Can a child be conceived in zero-G? With few animal tests (and virtually no human testing), there's been next to no scientific analysis of the issue. Until now. The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue detailing the mission to Mars, which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars, Dr. Rhawn Joseph from the Brain Research Laboratory in California discusses everything from the social conditions that would push astronauts to have sex to the possibility of the first child being born on another planet. Such an infant would be the first real Martian — at least by nationality, the researcher pointed out. 'On Mars, the light's going to be different, the gravity will be different, it's a completely different atmosphere,' he said. 'So if you put an infant on Mars, they would adapt to varying degrees of the new environment. And after several generations, you'd have a new species,' he said."

Winners of Mozilla Open Data Competition 19

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @08:19PM from the and-the-winner-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, "How do people use Firefox," we really didn't know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them. In all, we received 32 high-caliber submissions. The visualizations took a number of forms, from tools to easily query the data to interactive web applications. They also covered a broad range of important topics, from plugin memory consumption to user web activities."

Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook 55

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @04:35PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

J. Ayen Green writes "When the request came for me to review Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook by Bhavin (Vin) Patel, I was excited. I've been a software developer forever, a Web developer for as long as there's been a Web, and a Drupal developer since D6 was imminent. I have two Drupal books myself, and am working on one about D7 Views, but with all that, one glaring hole in my self-education has been Panels; it would be my first chance to use it." Keep reading for the rest of J. Ayen Green's review.

AMBER Alert Partners With Facebook 205

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @03:55PM from the alert-status dept.

wiredmikey writes "The AMBER Alert program, credited with the safe recovery of 525 children across the country, has a new ally today: Facebook. Facebook users are able to sign up to receive AMBER Alert bulletins for their state which will be sent to them through the Facebook 'News Feed' feature. An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing every year. AMBER Alert is a voluntary partnership involving law-enforcement agencies and broadcasters. The new Facebook AMBER Alert pages represent an important expansion of the secondary distribution system and will enable AMBER Alerts to dramatically increase the reach of and impact of these life-saving bulletins."

Goodbye Bifocals — Electronic Glasses Change Focus 166

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @01:48PM from the see-what-i-see dept.

kkleiner writes "Move over Ben Franklin, we finally have a replacement for bifocals. Virginia-based Pixel Optics has developed a composite lens that can change the range of focus electronically. The emPower! glasses were created in cooperation with Panasonic Healthcare, and allow you to switch between long distance and short distance vision in a split second. Rather than having a lens divided into two sections, emPower! uses an LCD overlay that can change the focal length of the glasses via electric current. When the LCD layer is off, your lenses are good for intermediate/long distances. Turn the LCD layer on, and a section of the lens is suddenly magnifying close-up images – perfect for reading."

Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ 247

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:18PM from the skipping-five dept.

netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. 'It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. 'Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.'"

Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant 318

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @11:42AM from the end-of-an-era dept.

coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."

Autism-Vax Doc Scandal Was Pharma Business Scam 541

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @09:42AM from the oh-this-again dept.

Sockatume writes "In his second report, Brian Deer exposes how MMR-autism prophet Andrew Wakefield aimed to profit from the vaccine scare. Two years before the research that 'discovered' the MMR-autism link, Wakefield began courting interest in a hundred-million-dollar diagnostics firm. The doctor hoped to seed the company with government legal aid money and profit by charging 'premium prices' for new diagnostic tests to be used in vaccine injury lawsuits. By the time Wakefield published, the proposals had expanded into producing new 'safe' vaccines, two businesses to gather legal aid funding, and interest from partners including Wakefield's own hospital. The scheme ultimately disintegrated with the arrival of new leadership at Wakefield's hospital and ongoing scrutiny into his research."

Tunisian Gov't Spies On Facebook; Does the US? 221

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @10:34PM from the bet-you-a-few-lire dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Tunisians logging into Facebook encountered extra JavaScript, probably a sign of their repressive government's attempt to spy on them. The question is: does the US government do the same thing, just more subtly? We're not talking about agents friending you on Facebook to get more information about you; we're talking monitoring your supposedly private information behind the scenes."

Evolution of the Batmobile 102

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @05:43PM from the mostly-four-wheels dept.

I noticed this sweet graphic tracking the evolution of the Batmobile that I just spent a fairly ridiculously long time staring at. I've read my share of Batman, but there are tons of designs that I'd never seen.

In the Google Navy 129

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @04:17PM from the thats-a-lotta-boats dept.

theodp writes "Having already assembled a private Air Force, Google's top execs now seem to be turning their attention to building a personal Navy. At last count, CEO Eric Schmidt's wife had assembled a stable of three classic racing boats — the Swan 80 Selene, the 46-foot W-class Equus and the Alerion Mischief. Perhaps not to be outdone, the press is reporting that Google founder Larry Page just snapped up a $45 million superyacht called Senses from New Zealand businessman Sir Douglas Myers, who referred to the ostentatious-yet-awesome yacht as his 'adventure boat.' As Google likes to say, 'just the latest steps in Google's commitment to a clean and green energy future.' So, do Google execs eat their own carbon footprint calculator dogfood?" All I know is if Larry wants to go fishing, I'll bring bait — or he can come here and fish on Zen's pontoon boat. It only leaked once, the engine usually starts right up, and while there's no helipad, I'd love to watch someone try.

ISPs Warn Europe — Website Blocks Don't Work 210

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @01:26PM from the where-have-we-heard-that-before dept.

Mark.JUK writes "The European Internet Services Providers Association has today warned the European Union that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for members of Parliament to consider permanently removing Internet-based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction."

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