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Comment Re:This is America (Score 1) 528

by shani (#28597499) Attached to: Middle-School Strip Search Ruled Unconstitutional

Each incident like this makes me realize that things have only gone downhill since I was in school.

When I went to school there were pregnant teens, drug and alcohol problems, suicides, kidnappings, attempted murders:

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/faculty_archives/principalship/d/148duncan.html

I don't recall us having any civil rights, praise be unto Reagan and his War on Drugs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_v._T._L._O.

Maybe you're a baby boomer and lived in the schools supplied by the Greatest Generation. If you're anything near my age (37) then I honestly doubt things are much worse now than they were when we were in school.

Comment Re:Trouble in the air (Score 1) 793

by shani (#28413981) Attached to: In Round 2, Jammie Thomas Jury Awards RIAA $1,920,000

You know, taking every last thing a person has leaves you with someone who has nothing to lose.

Or, as Sun Tzu said:

23. Throw your soldiers into positions whence there
        is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.
        If they will face death, there is nothing they may
        not achieve. Officers and men alike will put forth
        their uttermost strength.

24. Soldiers when in desperate straits lose
        the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge,
        they will stand firm. If they are in hostile country,
        they will show a stubborn front. If there is no help
        for it, they will fight hard.

  .
  .
  .

36. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.
        Do not press a desperate foe too hard

Okay, I admit a lot of what Sun Tzu wrote was common sense, but it's good to write such things down. :)

Comment Re:Gravel roads are cheap but need more maintenanc (Score 1) 717

by shani (#28345423) Attached to: Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel

If we're closing schools, the solution is to fund them properly from the appropriate source (those who use them)

Hm... an interesting idea that, making those who use schools - children - pay for them.

The average college graduate in the USA already starts with something like $20k of debt. This does not seem to have any ill effects that anyone can discern, so it does make logical sense to extend this to those free-loading high school students at the very least.

Since megacorporations warmed to the idea of turning children into consumers via well placed franchises, I am sure it would be easy to convince MasterCard and Visa to give "KinderCard" or "Visa Princess" cards to elementary school children. Other types of financial constructions are surely possible, since the banks are no longer free to be creative in home loans any more, they can turn their attention to this vital new sector.

The false dichotomy between lower taxes/crappy schools and higher taxes/good schools finally solved, thanks to your libertarian genius!!!
Hardware Hacking

An Open Source Coffee Machine 99

Posted by timothy from the quite-entirely-unlike-tea dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Coffee Machine [video link] is a recycled coffee machine, controlled by a PC running Beremiz, and using some MicroMod CANopen I/O nodes from Peak-System. This machine have been prepared by Peak-System and Lolitech for SCS-Paris-08 exhibition. It served free coffee during four days at Peak-System's booth, and has been donated to IUT of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France, so that students can have fun practicing automation."
Image

Physics Elevator Screenshot-sm 4

Posted by samzenpus from the exam-week dept.
This one stops at all the theoretical floors.
Earth

Bye Bye Bananas — the Return of Panama Disease 519

Posted by kdawson from the where-you-gonna-get-your-potassium dept.
Ant sends in a disturbing report in The Scientist on an imminent threat to worldwide banana production. "The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one — known as the Gros Michel — was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct. Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies — Chiquita and Dole — because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease... [Now] Panama disease — or Fusarium wilt of banana — is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions..."
Science

The Squid's Beak May Revolutionize Engineering 79

Posted by kdawson from the fortuitous-gradient dept.
Ace905 writes "For years the razor-sharp beak that squid use to eat their prey has posed a puzzle to scientists. Squid are soft and fragile, but have a beak as dense as rock and sharp enough to break through hard shells. Scientists have long wondered why the beak doesn't injure the squid itself as is uses it. New research has just been published in the the journal Science that explains the phenomenon. One of the researchers described the squid beak as 'like placing an X-Acto blade in a block of fairly firm Jell-O and then trying to use it to chop celery.' Careful examination shows that the beak is formed in a gradient of density, becoming harder towards the tip end. Understanding how to make such hardness gradients could revolutionize engineering anywhere that 'interfaces between soft and hard materials [are required].' One of the first applications researchers envision is prosthetic limbs."
Programming

Hans Reiser Interview from Prison 611

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that-paris-is-out dept.
JLester writes "Wired Magazine has an interview this month with Hans Reiser (of the ReiserFS journaling file system for Linux) from prison. It contains more details about the murder case against him. Some of the questions still go unanswered though."
Science

Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing 392

Posted by kdawson from the putting-the-standard-model-to-bed dept.
holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."

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