Submission + - Data confirm it: Tech workers are *really* unhappy (computerworld.com)
cweditor writes: IT job satisfaction has plummeted to a 10-year low, one survey found. Another on general job satisfaction rang in at a paltry 45%.
Submission + - Minnesota introduces world's first carbon tariff (boingboing.net)
hollywoodb writes: The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean renewable energy Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff.
Sources: BoingBoing, Scientific American, TreeHugger
Sources: BoingBoing, Scientific American, TreeHugger
Submission + - 'God of War 3' only possible on the PS3? 2
alaskana98 writes: According to this article from Playstation University, Sony states that the much anticipated Sony title God of War III can only be run
on PS3 class hardware. More specifically, they claim that only the PS3's Cell SPU can handle the advanced light rendering employed
throughout the game.
What do you think, fellow Slashdotters? Is this just more 'fanboy fuel' marketing hype, or is there actual weight to this claim?
on PS3 class hardware. More specifically, they claim that only the PS3's Cell SPU can handle the advanced light rendering employed
throughout the game.
What do you think, fellow Slashdotters? Is this just more 'fanboy fuel' marketing hype, or is there actual weight to this claim?
Submission + - Researcher Exposes Google's Spyware Connections
Task Heavy writes: A prominent anti-spyware researcher is calling on Google to sever its ties with an advertising partner that covers popular sites with pop-up PPC advertisements promoting those same sites. According to Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and a staunch anti-spyware advocate, Google is charging advertisers for what he described as "conversion-inflation" traffic from the WhenU spyware program.
Comment Re:What would these kids grow up to be? (Score 1) 1345
"Higher education" is really a medieval style guild system, and it has no place in modern society. With ubiquitous internet access anyone with sufficient talent and motivation can teach themself any subject to any level. The only remaining step is to decouple the certification from the training.
It's true that some people will learn better with a teacher and fellow students, but there's no reason this has to be within academia. Students could save a lot of money by cutting out the middle-men and hiring teachers directly.
Maybe, but the problem is sufficient motivation. I was definitely NOT motivated when I first enrolled in college for a Computer Science degree. I quit after about three semesters. After a few years of partying my ass off, I decided to get a real job. After a few years of manual labor I began to appreciate the value of an education. When I say "the value of an education" I mean the ability to get a sufficiently challenging and satisfying position (clue: most of them require a degree). Now I'm enrolled again at 27 years old, with about three years to go before I graduate with my first degree in Electrical Engineering. I enjoy it, and I'm now taking it seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm motivated enough to learn all this material, all the fundamental concepts and higher level applications, without people who know what the hell they're talking about within easy reach. Try as you might, you can't replace real human interaction with the motivated types you find in a good engineering program with internet access.
Comment What does this lead to? (Score 1) 2
If Google does this (turns over the IP address), and they are consistent (same IP addresses that create the account consistently access the account without deviation), is there anything the court can even do with them?
Submission + - Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists (wikileaks.org) 2
An anonymous reader writes: A California court has issued a subpoena demanding Google reveal the IP addresses of journalists writing for a corruption busting journal from the Caribbean.
The August 28 subpoena, issued by the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, as part of a "libel tourism" action taken by non-US property developers, demands detailed information about the operators of "tcijournal@gmail.com". The account is the main email address of the TCI Journal, the most influential journal covering the Turks & Caicos Islands. The Islands are a tourist mecca and tax haven in the Caribbean sea, and until August 14 were an independent British protectorate.
The August 28 subpoena, issued by the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, as part of a "libel tourism" action taken by non-US property developers, demands detailed information about the operators of "tcijournal@gmail.com". The account is the main email address of the TCI Journal, the most influential journal covering the Turks & Caicos Islands. The Islands are a tourist mecca and tax haven in the Caribbean sea, and until August 14 were an independent British protectorate.
Submission + - Mac OS X 10.6 vs. Ubuntu 9.10: Benchmarks (phoronix.com)
AllieLS writes: Phoronix has posted Mac OS X 10.6 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 benchmarks. They ran tests from ray tracing to 3D gaming to compilation. Their tests show Ubuntu 9.10 winning a number of such tests but there are some slowdowns in performance and still multiple wins in the favor of Mac OS X 10.6 — the end result is mixed.
Submission + - Disney Buys Marvel
whisper_jeff writes: Disney has announced they will be purchasing Marvel.
"Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company /quotes/comstock/13*!dis/quotes/nls/dis (DIS 26.52, -0.32, -1.19%) has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today."
"Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company
Submission + - RadioShack relaunches with vulgar talk radio
An anonymous reader writes: Celebrating its name change to The Shack, RadioShack chose a strange way to promote its new image. Streaming live from New York and San Francisco, the three-day "Summer Netogether" began with a crude radio talk show that would put Howard Stern to shame. The majority of the "Sarah and Vinnie" show featured such broad topics as breasts (in every shape and size), sex with celebrities and coffee enemas. Interesting way to promote the new brand.
Submission + - Current Freely Available Applications for Windows (wade82.com)
hollywoodb writes: "I've put together what I feel to be the best and brightest free software for Windows. Included are sections to accommodate most users' needs; notably omitted is a Games section. In putting together this list I found that some of my favorite Linux applications are available on Windows, and I discovered some new apps as well. Not all these apps are open source, but many are. It's exciting to find out how many more open source applications are available for Windows today compared to the last time I used the Windows platform eight years ago. What are some of your favorite free and/or open source Windows applications?"
Submission + - Netflix Announces Second Data Mining Contest (netflixprize.com)
John Snodgrass writes: "Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, has announced on the Netflix Prize Forums that they are planning to hold a new data mining competition. The second competition will have some twists and is expected to be shorter in duration. It will feature two grand prizes, to be awarded in a 6 and 18 month time frame. A previous competitor still active on the board has already dubbed it: The Sparse Matrix: Reordered" and "The Sparse Matrix: Factorizations"."
Submission + - Google Chrome 3.0 beta: Tested & benchmarked (cnet.co.uk) 1
An anonymous reader writes: A recent feature on CNet proves Google partially correct: Chrome 3.0 is significantly faster than the current version according to benchmarks against other browsers, making it the world's fastest Web browser, with an 11% lead over the competition (Google claimed a 30% improvement over the current stable build of Chrome 2.0). Actually, Chrome 2.0 jointly takes second place with Safari 4.0.2 for Windows, which was pushed out earlier this week.
Submission + - Ten things we still don't understand about humans (newscientist.com) 6
ParticleGirl writes: "New Scientist has an article examining 10 human features (bugs?) that we still don't understand, like blushing, laughing and nose-picking. There are some interesting speculative evolutionary explanations in there."
Submission + - Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV (dailygalaxy.com) 3
Linuss writes: About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.
What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures; they published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.
A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV — one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.
Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.
At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.
Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.
After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.
What's especially intriguing, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. In Darwin's Radio, certain portions of these "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated by aminoglycosides.
In the novel, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA?
What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures; they published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.
A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV — one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.
Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.
At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.
Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.
After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.
What's especially intriguing, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. In Darwin's Radio, certain portions of these "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated by aminoglycosides.
In the novel, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA?
