Comment Re:Fact-check please? (Score 1) 4
Ah I see. Thanks
Comment Been there, done that, evolved (Score 1) 238
Multicellular life has evolved many times, even though most attempts did not result in large creatures. One need only consider that plants and animals existed as single-celled life long before multicellularity. Plants and animals must therefore have evolved multicellularity independently.
For a thorough overview, see:
http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/biog1101/outlines/Bonner%20-Origin%20of%20Multicellularity.pdf
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Online Storage
An anonymous reader writes: I've been tasked with exploring online backup for my company, as opposed to our current tape rotation. We have around 750GB of total data, with a daily delta of around 800-1200MB. We work a regular business shift and have a 10Mbps sustained pipe, so moving the daily delta would not be an issue once we got through the pain of the initial push.
What are decent enterprise-ready backup providers that can handle this amount of data without breaking the bank?
What are decent enterprise-ready backup providers that can handle this amount of data without breaking the bank?
Submission + - Researchers Reprogram Voting Machine to Run Pacman (umich.edu)
Philom writes: Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that electronic voting machines can be reprogrammed to steal votes, so when researchers Alex Halderman and Ari Feldman got their hands on a machine called the Sequoia AVC Edge, they decided to do something different: they reprogrammed it to run Pac-Man. As states move away from insecure electronic voting, there's a risk that discarded machines will clog our landfills. Fortunately, these results show that voting machines can be recycled to provide countless hours of entertainment.
Comment Slowest news day? (Score 1) 341
A guy at Mozilla says Firefox will sometime in the future be better than all other browsers at one of several aspects of browsing?
The really interesting question here is why 18th of August appears to be one of the slowest news days on slashdot. Are people busy starting the semester and getting back to work after the holiday?
Comment Fact-check please? (Score 1) 4
Australia banned Fallout 3? As in you couldn't legally buy Fallout 3 in Australia?
Comment Not in Europe they wouldn't (Score 1) 1
In Europe, radio broadcasters are pushing to shut down the FM spectrum, to push a transition to digital radio. This is criticised by many as DAB has not lived up to its promise in audio quality and internet radios have leapfrogged the whole issue of limited room for radio channels in the FM frequency band.
Submission + - Nicola Cabibbo dies aged 75 (physicsworld.com)
Marianne013 writes: Nicola Cabibbo who at least in the particle physics community (though not by the Nobel prize committee) is considered one of the main contributors on understanding the weak interaction of quarks died August 16th. His (perceived) snub by the Nobel Prize committee in 2008 caused considerable uproar in the particle physics community at the time though he never commented.
He was also president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences .
He was also president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences .
Submission + - Old Model T Plant Transformed Into Data Center (datacenterknowledge.com)
miller60 writes: In an example of the new economy operating in the footprint of the old, Hosting.com has retrofitted a former Model T factory in Denver to house a 30,000 square foot data center. The company says the former factory's generous power supply and hefty floor loads made it ideal for conversion to a data center. Many old industrial sites also are adjacent to fiber, which tends to run along the railroads that serve industrial campuses.
Submission + - RIAA wants mandatory FM in cell phones (arstechnica.com) 1
Slaughtervillager writes: ""Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.""
Submission + - Thailand Blocks Wikileaks; Cites Emergency Rule (google.com)
eldavojohn writes: After bloody anti-government riots in 2005, Thailand enshrined Emergency Rule into its laws which has since resulted in more than a few websites being shut down. In addition to websites, Thailand's government has used this decree to 'arrest hundreds of suspects and silence anti-government media.' Now, they are blocking Wikileaks.
Submission + - Mandatory FM radio in cell phones? (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
Submission + - RIAA/NBA Lobby For FM Inclusion (arstechnica.com)
oDDmON oUT writes: Move over Google / Verizon, the RIAA and NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] are hashing out a deal to fatten each others coffers and ensure the survival of analog tech in the 21st century.
The short form is, that in return for paying only $100M / year in performance fees (rather than a more onerous amount), the RIAA will support the NAB in lobbying for the inclusion of an FM receiver in every portable device made for the US market, be it cell phone, PDA or Speak and Spell®.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage.
I for one welcome my new entertainment overlords mandating the surgical insertion of an FM receiver into my left gluteus, which is the next logical progression I see to legislation like this.
The short form is, that in return for paying only $100M / year in performance fees (rather than a more onerous amount), the RIAA will support the NAB in lobbying for the inclusion of an FM receiver in every portable device made for the US market, be it cell phone, PDA or Speak and Spell®.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage.
I for one welcome my new entertainment overlords mandating the surgical insertion of an FM receiver into my left gluteus, which is the next logical progression I see to legislation like this.
Submission + - 1978 Cryptosystem Resists Quantum Attack (technologyreview.com) 1
KentuckyFC writes: In 1978, the CalTech mathematician Robert McEliece developed a cryptosystem based on the (then) new idea of using asymmetric mathematical functions to create different keys for encrypting and decrypting information. The security of these systems relies on mathematical steps that are easy to make in one direction but hard to do in the other. The most famous example is multiplication. It is easy to multiply two numbers together to get a third but hard to start with the third number and work out which two generated it, a process called factorisation. Today, popular encryption systems such as the RSA algorithm use exactly this idea. But in 1994, the mathematician Peter Shor dreamt up a quantum algorithm that could factorise much faster than any classical counterpart and so can break these codes. As soon as the first decent-sized quantum computer is switched on, these codes will become breakable. Since then, cryptographers have been hunting for encryption systems that will be safe in the post quantum world. Now a group of mathematicians have shown that the McEliece encryption system is safe against attack by Shor's algorithm and all other known quantum algorithms. That's because it does not depend on factorisation but gets its security from another asymmetric conundrum known as the hidden subgroup problem which they show is immune to all known quantum attacks (although the work says nothing about its safety against new quantum (or classical) attacks).
Submission + - Australia considering iPhone app censorship (theaustralian.com.au) 4
srjh writes: Having raised concerns about "the classification of games playable on mobile telephones", the Australian government has now "put the wheels in motion to address this". Under current Australian legislation, video games sold in the country must pay between $470 and $2040 to have the game classified, and due to the lack of an 18+ rating in Australia, if it is not found to be suitable for a 15-year-old, it is banned outright. This is the fate met by several recent titles, such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Fallout 3. Over 200,000 applications are available for the iPhone, many of them games, and developers have raised concerns about the prohibitive costs involved, with many announcing an intention to drop the Australian market altogether if the plan proceeds. However the current loophole constitutes a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for the government, which is currently attempting to have "refused classification" content such as banned video games blocked at an ISP level.
