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Submission + - Mystery meteorite may not be from Mercury after all (npr.org)

Submitted by gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: A strange green meteorite found in Morocco caused a stir in the press earlier this month, when scientists reported that it might be the first chunk of Mercury ever found here on earth. But scientists who've been puzzling over the stone since then say the accumulating evidence may point in a different direction. The 4.56-billion-year-old rock might have come from the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. If true, then it would provide clues about the origin of the solar system as a whole instead of the origin of the innermost planet.

Submission + - Is Tech City beginning to look like a true Silicon Valley rival? (instituteofopinion.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It was always going to be difficult for the UK to emulate Silicon Valley, but time has passed and you’d have hoped that progress has been made towards meeting that goal. The government has continued to push Tech City and with news breaking that Yahoo has acquired London based Nick D’Aloisio’s app, Summly, for around $30 million, many have seen this as a sign that the city can rival Silicon Valley as a centre for tech and innovation. However, this could in fact be a sign that the country has even further to go than we expected, with London right to be excited, but remaining the old-fashioned bicycle to the Valley’s state-of-the-art driverless cars

Submission + - Seattle Dance Clubs Fundraise to Pay Microsoft's Tax Bill (jeffreifman.com)

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: After granting Microsoft amnesty on its $1.5 billion Nevada tax dodge ($100 million in annual savings for the company), state tax collectors are aggressively targeting Seattle dance clubs and night clubs over an obscure 'opportunity to dance' tax. The 'Opportunity to Dance' is not in any law. It is only the Department of Revenue's interpretation of the law in its rules. Auditors search the Internet to find out whether people dance at specific clubs. One clubowner reports an auditor told him: 'You have the opportunity to dance, and we verified it by 8 or 10 different references on Yelp.' The Century Ballroom, a popular dance club, is holding ongoing fundraisers to offset its $250,000 in back taxes.

Comment Re:Still going (Score 1) 488

by flirno (#41990709) Attached to: The Empire In Decline?

This applies to kitchens as an analogy. Do you want to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner in a kitchen with a little 3x3 counter in it or do you want a kitchen lined with a lot of counter space? With more space you can actively work on more things faster. Period.

Comment Re:Still going (Score 1) 488

by flirno (#41990685) Attached to: The Empire In Decline?

Nah office monitors work like real life desk real estate.

If you don't have the extra space you adjust by flip flopping through windows/piles of papers/folders and basically micromanaging the layout. It has a time and cognitive cost to do all that paging through crap to find what you want.

If you do have the extra space you make use of it more or less unconsciously/automatically. You will notice when it is gone however when you want it or notice you are spending more time fudging around flipping between things when you try to get work done.

If you do have the extra desk space/extra desktop monitors then you are able to spread things out more, support more stacks or smaller stacks and buffer information you want to be visible longer. It cuts down on visual search time and cognitive cost of searching because things are split (think sorting algorithms, same idea in a binary or similar search in that you already have multiple buckets when you start your search cutting down how much initial work you have to do to find something). 2d desktop spread allow you to your mapping memory more naturally.

It is not just pile X on monitor A and pile Y on monitor B but upper right corner of A has pile X but pile Y is in lower right corner of monitor B. All this is made easy because the human brain automates it without you having to think it through. It is leveraging the human brain ability to buffer information spatially.

This will be even greater with 3D desktops whenever that happens. The future for high bandwidth computer use is not even more restrictive 2d layouts (or in the case with metro 2d mapped to 1d -- ugh), but 3d desktops layouts. Currently we just do a 3d mapped/flattened into 2d but I would like to see a full 3d environment some day for desktop/tier 1 object organization.

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