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Comment Re:Porn according to whom? (Score 1) 263

FTFA: ".. all images that are of little or no educational value .."

These images you mention seem to have educational value.

Yeah, there might be different opinions about how much is sufficient to be educational, but the comment is not "If this is porn/'inspiring', then it should be removed" but "little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests".

Earth

Open Source Alternative To Google Earth? 190

aws910 writes "Today, I fired up Google Earth to find that the 'points of interest' category had been removed, and a single checkbox is in its place. Certain layers are now entirely inaccessible. Google triggered a user revolt, but admitted fault, and promised to restore full functionality someday. In the meantime, I've found a lack of plausible alternatives. Bing seems nice, but Moonlight crashes the browser on any machine I use, and I'd rather use OSS anyway ... which made me realize there doesn't seem to be a good open-source alternative to Google Earth. Am I missing something?"

Comment Re:Is this good or bad? (Score 1) 214

It works, but it's not as accurate as one might think. Signals bounce, which (at least in the GPS world) is known as multipath. This both result in a longer distance (and delay) and a weakened signal. The recipient (the antenna tower) do not know how much the signal has bounced.

Actually the distortion and reflection in the GPS signal makes it possible to gather (crude) information about the location and shape surrounding buildings. I wish I could find the appropiate video :-/

Comment Re:Mixed Feelings (Score 1) 145

it will allow w3c to influence Microsoft more

Or do you mean allow Microsoft to influence W3C more?

The Sphinx: To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.

The Sphinx: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

The Sphinx: When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.

Mr. Furious: Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic? "If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right." It's...
The Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...
Mr. Furious: ...your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say. Right? Right?
The Sphinx: Not necessarily.

Comment Law of reverse service (Score 3, Interesting) 274

User from Denmark ( EU) here.

I admire the amout of (deliberately) open wifi hotspots in USA. A couple of friends traveled around the States last year and found free wifi services everywhere - except Las Vegas.

This seem to be an interesting phenomenon. At first it might seem reasonable: wherever you are expected to pay for services you are also expected to pay for Internet access.

However, this leads to some curious cases. I have experienced hotels in Denmark, England and Spain that charge for internet access. But on the other hand it is not uncommon for hostels (that are cheaper and where one would expect a lesser degree of service) to have free wifi.

The economic background is interesting. The cost of putting up a hotspot is pretty low, especially at simple hostels that probably already have internet access and wifi for the employees. But the expenses of putting up a payment solution and handling support is high.

This leads to an interesting paradox: It is the payment solution that might not be feasible at "cheap" places such as hostels; not the Internet connection by itself. The result is that since it is not worthwhile putting up a payment solution the Internet access is simply free!

In some places this leads to even more interesting results:

The suburban railway service in Copenhagen has free wifi on the the trains. These trips are usually short, hence the payment process might itself take too long to be convenient.

However the inter-city trains where travel times are usually about 1½-4 hours there is a wifi payment solution. At first it might make sense but as it is charged per minute any delays underway would lead to a larger travel time and therefore a higher total cost.

Free Internet access could partially make up for a bad travel experience with delays (one would be able to still work online, pass time by casual surf, chat and so on or update successive travel arrangements). Instead passengers are simply punished further economically when the travel is delayed underway.

Government

China Arrests Thousands In Internet Porn Crackdown 204

Clandestine_Blaze writes "Chinese police have arrested 5,394 people — with another 4,186 criminal cases in the works — in one of the largest crackdowns on Internet porn in the country. Even more arrests are expected in 2010, according to the Ministry of Public Security's website (In Chinese or Google translated into English). According to the Reuters article on the crackdown, one of the justifications was that the pornography was 'threatening the emotional health of children.' From the English translation of the Ministry of Public Security's website linked above, it appears that certain provinces are also offering 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan rewards, per person, for reporting illegal websites to the government."
Robotics

The Best Robots of 2009 51

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
The Almighty Buck

eBay For Millionaires 118

AC writes "Got $2 million in assets? Then you can join BillionaireXchange; just the place to find a 2006 Bugatti Veyron with a Start Bid of $1,050,000.00. Or perhaps you are looking for a boat like the Disco Volante (from James Bond), for example the 2000 Azimut Motor Yacht, a lovely 85-footer with a Start Bid of $2,700,000.00. On the other end of the deal, did your hedge fund leave you in the lurch? This is the place to sell those extravagant toys you thought you could afford."
Robotics

Skiing Robot May Not Be Useful, But Fun To Watch 64

kkleiner writes "Bojan Nemec from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia recently presented his skiing robot at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The robot won't be winning skiing records anytime soon and its usefulness as a ski instructor or in any other capacity seems quite a ways off. Nonetheless, the videos of this robot taking a ride down the ski slopes are well worth watching. In case you are wondering, this is a completely different robot than the one Slashdot covered earlier."

Comment Re:Serious question (Score 1) 168

Besides all the other posts, this might just be a small improvement in rare cases:

The V8 javascript engine does some clever work when performing regular expression matching. Normal engines would compare one character at a time, but whenever the possibility occurs V8 matches several characters at once (eg. for /foobar/ it will try fo match "foob" instead of just first "f", then "o", then "o"), doing comparison on longer segments than just (usually) 8 bits at a time. This usually means that comparisons are grouped together as 32 bit values matching several characters at once.

I reckon the 64-bit edition would simply match up to 64 bits as well.

There are a lot of exceptions where the engine can't just simply match long segments (unicode, case-insensitive searches and so on) and there surely are operations that are a lot more cpu intensive than just comparing strings. I'm just excited about that simple optimization :)

Image

NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis 136

NASA plans on using $50 million in stimulus funds to seed development of a commercial passenger transportation service to space. Potential space taxi inventors have 45 days to submit their proposals. The proposals will be competitively evaluated and the winners will be announced by the end of September. It is unclear what other Commodore 64 games NASA plans on making a reality, but I hope Arkanoid makes the short list.

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