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Comment Re:Jim Wetherbee (Score 1) 199

by quisxt (#28069159) Attached to: Obama Taps Charles Bolden To Lead NASA
While there is no question that some great technical discoveries and inventions have come out of the space program, it's an open question whether funding NASA is a good way to use the limited amount of money our country is willing to spend on basic science and technology research. We aren't in a space race with the Russians anymore, and astronauts are not longer rockstars who get ticker tape parades when they return safely to earth. These days NASA has to compete at the trough for public funding like everyone else. Them's the breaks. Our country has lived beyond its means for decades. Instead of going to space the challenge the next generation will be faced with is cleaning up all the financial and environmental messes our generation and previous generations created.

Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 993

by quisxt (#27598193) Attached to: "Apple Tax" Report Backfires On Microsoft

Really the question I have is why would anybody NOT buy a mac? What benefit do Windows or Linux offer (for a user/developer machine!!! (not server))?

Can you buy a netbook with OS X on it? How about a thin and light laptop with an excellent keyboard, or an expandable desktop that doesn't cost at last $2.4k.

OS X is a great operating system, but it also locks you in to Apple's very limited choices for hardware.

Comment Thanks but no thanks (Score 5, Insightful) 204

by quisxt (#27582993) Attached to: <em>World of Warcraft</em> 3.1 Patch Brings Dual-Specs, New Raid
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, but I'm not an undergraduate in college anymore, and after spending 8+ hours at work sitting on my butt in front of a computer, coming home and sitting on my butt for 4 more hours for a Nax raid or whatever doesn't sound like fun. It just seems like such a waste of time. Gah, I must have grown up a little when I wasn't looking :)
Government

Clear Public Satellite Imagery Tantamount to Yelling Fire 230

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the daily-dose-of-unbridled-stupidity dept.
TechDirt pointed out a recent bit of foolishness as a followup to California Assemblyman Joel Anderson's push to force Google and other online mapping/satellite companies to blur out schools, churches, and government buildings. When pushed, apparently his justification was that leaving these buildings un-obscured is the same as shouting fire. "News.com ran an interview with Anderson, where he attempts to defend his proposed legislation as a matter of public safety. He claims that there is no good reason why anyone would need to clearly see these buildings online, and that it can only be used for bad purposes. [...] Apparently, Anderson is the final determiner of what good people do and what bad people do with online maps."
Medicine

Asthma Risk Linked To Early TV Viewing 266

Posted by kdawson from the near-the-carpet dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "The number of children with asthma has been rising for many years. About 1 in 10 children in the UK develop asthma, compared with about 1 in 25 in the 1960s. The reason for this isn't clear, although several theories have been put forward such as keeping our homes cleaner, and having central heating and more soft furnishings where house dust mites can multiply. Now based on more than 3,000 children whose respiratory health was tracked from birth to 11.5 years of age, researchers have found a new correlation with young children who spend more than two hours glued to the TV every day doubling their subsequent risk of developing asthma. 'This study has shown for the first time a positive association between increased duration of reported TV viewing in early childhood and the development of asthma by 11.5 years of age in children with no symptoms of asthma in early childhood,' said the researchers, led by A. Sherriff, from the University of Glasgow. It's not clear exactly how sedentary behaviors like television watching are tied to asthma, but there is some evidence to suggest exercise and deep breaths that come with it stretch the smooth muscles in the airways, while lack of exercise may make the lungs overly sensitive. The results add asthma to a catalog of undesirable outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, smoking, and promiscuity, tied to TV viewing."
Math

Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances 684

Posted by timothy from the philosophy-of-science dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."
Google

Google Challenging Proposition 8 1475

Posted by kdawson from the not-being-evil dept.
theodp writes "Coming the day after it announced layoffs and office closures, Google's California Supreme Court filing arguing for the overturn of Proposition 8, which asks the Court not to harm its ability to recruit and retain employees, certainly could have been better timed. Google's support of same-sex marriage puts it on the same page with Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's man in Silicon-Valley, who joined other tech leaders last October to denounce Prop 8 in a full-page newspaper ad. But oddly, Microsoft HR Chief Mike Murray cited religious beliefs for his decision to contribute $100,000 to 'Yes On 8', surprising coming from the guy who had been charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint. "
Apple

Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple 429

Posted by timothy from the get-well-soon dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Network World: "A number of sites are reporting that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence till June at least. Speculation over Jobs' possibly failing health has run rampant in the past few weeks. Prior to the recent MacWorld show, Jobs said he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight. In a memo today Jobs told workers his health issues are more complex than he thought." Reader Bastian227 adds a link to this letter from Steve Jobs on Apple's website, which also says that Tim Cook will be responsible for daily operations, though Jobs will remain involved with major strategic decisions.
The Internet

Internet Not Really Dangerous For Kids After All 445

Posted by kdawson from the nevermind dept.
Thomas M Hughes writes "We're all familiar with the claim that it's horribly dangerous to allow our children on to the Internet. It's long been believed that the moment a child logs on to the Internet, he will experience a flood of inappropriate sexual advances. Turns out this isn't an accurate representation of reality at all. A high-profile task force representing 49 state attorneys general was organized to find a solution to the problem of online sexual solicitation. But instead the panel has issued a report (due to be released tomorrow) claiming that 'Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.' The report concluded that 'the problem of child-on-child bullying, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.' Turns out the danger to our children was all just media hype and parental anxiety." Those who have aggressively pushed the issue of the dangerous Internet, such as Connecticut's attorney general Richard Blumenthal, are less than happy with the report.
Hardware Hacking

A Sony Camera Running Linux 209

Posted by kdawson from the answer-is-yes dept.
jonr writes "At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show, Sony presented the new camera from its Cyber-shot product line. The DSC-G3 comes with a Zeiss lens with 4x zoom, a large 3.5" touch display, and 4GB of internal memory. Most interesting is the camera's software that includes, among other things, face and scene recognition, based on Busybox and Kernel 2.6.11 for the Access Linux Platform. The camera also has built-in Wi-Fi."
Education

MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls 317

Posted by timothy from the at-that-tuition-it-should-be-massage-tutoring dept.
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

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