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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I KNOW! Ebert's point! It is bulshit. (Score 3, Informative) 436

by riker1384 (#35002772) Attached to: 3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will

Most use stereo because we have 2 ears... and therefore only 2 channels are necessary for 3D sound. 5.1 is a gimmick. Stereo forever.

That's false. We only have 2 ears, but each of those ears can distinguish sound coming from many different directions because your head and earlobes alter the sound differently depending on where it comes from. You can only try to generate realistic soundfields with 2 channels if you use headphones. You can record sounds with microphones in the ears of a dummy head (binaural recording), or you can try to simulate these effects through headphones. Both of those methods have problems, including the fact that the sound stays the same when you turn your head.

By your reasoning, we should only need 2 pixels on a TV since we only have 2 eyes.
Science

Radiation Detection Goes Digital 58

Posted by Soulskill from the hope-it-has-sound-effects dept.
RedEaredSlider writes "In science fiction, explorers wave around a single device and pick up many kinds of radiation — think of the tricorders on Star Trek or Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver. A professor at Oregon State University is bringing that a bit closer to reality, though in this case it's for finding radioactive material. It's a radiation spectrometer, and it works on a very old principle: particles and photons that hit certain materials will make them emit flashes of light. But for decades, radiation spectrometers had been limited to detecting only one kind of radiation at a time. David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, felt that there was a need for a device that could see at least two kinds of radiation, as well as be smaller than the models currently available."
Biotech

Scientists Attach Bar Codes To Embryos 69

Posted by samzenpus from the I-got-the-number-when-I-was-young dept.
Zothecula writes "Fans of the film Blade Runner may remember a scene in which the maker of an artificial snake is identified by a microscopic serial number on one of its scales. Well, in a rare case of present-day technology actually surpassing that predicted in a movie, we've now gone one better — bar codes on embryos. Scientists from Spain's Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon."
Australia

Man Served Restraining Order Via Facebook 29

Posted by samzenpus from the worst-friend-request-ever dept.
schliz writes "An Australian man has been served a restraining order via Facebook, after unsuccessful attempts by police to reach him by phone and in person. The man was a 'prolific Facebook user' who had allegedly threatened, bullied and harassed a former partner online. He was served both interim and final intervention orders by Facebook, after a local magistrate upheld the interim order indefinitely."
United States

Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices 545

Posted by Soulskill from the prison-reform-step-by-step dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. 'By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. 'The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"

Comment Obvious consequence (Score 1) 774

by riker1384 (#33163268) Attached to: Child Porn As a Weapon
This guy should get the same sentence that the guy he framed would have gotten. However, this is the obvious consequence of severe punishments for simple possession of something that is easy to obtain, and a commodity as opposed to things like guns which can be identified, traced etc. I'm sure people do this with drugs.

Slashdot Top Deals

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League

Close