Comment Re:He's Banned Now (Score 1) 176
Well, they'll probably do what they did to fbpurity, block all links to his site from facebook. You can't post a link to it.
Comment Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score 1) 479
you don't have to do this with tex, unless you are coding in a unrelated, plain, word editing program. It isn't necessarily instant live update, but it is a far cry from paper and markers. Also, cascades shouldn't progress beyond section breaks, and you can force even finer cascade breaks.
Comment Re:packet radio? (Score 1) 371
Would not a cryptographic signature not be enough to protect these kinds of communication?
Comment Re:volume (Score 1) 172
His wife must read /.
Comment Re:check the weather out west (Score 2) 235
Excepting when it comes off the gulf, or from Canada.
Or when it becomes suddenly severe.
But yes, typically it does come from the west.
Comment Re:Good idea (Score 1) 147
it depends what you call passed. 50%, 65%, 80% (here, that's the min undergrad, honours, grad grade to "pass"). Passing means you know enough to do that material, not that you understand it well enough to apply it without effort while learning the next level, so if you stopped there you could be considered to know the material.
Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep Into Facebook Data 70
Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in January, when Wolfram Alpha launched an updated version of its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, the self-billed 'computational knowledge engine' asked users to contribute their detailed Facebook data for research purposes. The researchers at Wolfram Alpha, having crunched all that information, are now offering some data on how users interact with Facebook. For starters, the median number of 'friends' is 342, with the average number of friends peaking for those in their late teens before declining at a steady rate. Younger people also have a tendency to largely add Facebook friends around their own age — for example, someone who's 20 might have lots of friends in the twenty-something range, and comparatively few in other decades of life—while middle-aged people tend to have friends across the age spectrum. Beyond that, the Wolfram Alpha blog offers up some interesting information about friend counts (and 'friend of friend' counts), how friends' networks tend to 'cluster' around life events such as school and sports teams, and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older — as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics. 'It feels like we're starting to be able to train a serious "computational telescope" on the "social universe,"' the blog concluded. 'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'"
Comment Re:Not an EA fan but (Score 1) 569
Loosing (karma) is Fun.
Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 10 For Windows 7 321
An anonymous reader writes "Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is out. Windows 8 may suck but now you can at least enjoy (most of) that version's Internet Explorer. IE10 for Win7, originally not planned, has seen the light of day after all — four months after it debuted in Windows 8. It is available via Windows Update as an optional update; however, if you've already installed a pre-release version, it will be updated automatically as an 'important' update. IE10 on Win7 requires a platform update to bring some Windows 8 APIs to the more mature Windows, and it will not feature embedded Adobe Flash as the Windows 8 version does (use the plug-in version from Adobe, as usual, instead)."
Comment Re:$4.30 MSP430 Launchpad for starters (Score 2) 228
I started with arduino, and I had no microcontroller experience. The community, examples from the absolute ground up, and vendor (sparkfun, adafruit, etc) support is excellent. It all makes for a really enjoyable experience.
Digikey and mouser get you parts fast. Ebay and random asian websites get you parts slow but cheap.
If you want graphics (eg. TV, or monitor) though, best go with the pi. A pi costs less than an arduino graphics shield. Ethernet is doable at least.
Comment Re:$4.30 MSP430 Launchpad for starters (Score 1) 228
There is also an arduino style IDE for it. http://energia.nu/
SpaceX's Grasshopper VTVL Finally Jumps Its Own Height 111
cylonlover writes "The SpaceX Grasshopper vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL) testbed has successfully flown to a height of 40 meters (131 ft), hovered for a bit and subsequently landed in a picture perfect test on December 17, 2012. The Grasshopper had previously taken two hops to less than 6 m (20 ft) in height, but the latest test was the first that saw it reach an altitude taller than the rocket itself, which is a modified Falcon 9 orbital launch vehicle. The flight lasted 29 seconds from launch to landing, and carried a 1.8 m (6 ft) cowboy dummy to give an indication of scale."
Catfish Strands Itself To Kill Pigeons 115
A reader writes "In Southwestern France, a group of fish have learned how to kill birds. As the River Tarn winds through the city of Albi, it contains a small gravel island where pigeons gather to clean and bathe. And patrolling the island are European catfish—1 to 1.5 meters long, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent. These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey. In the process, they temporarily strand themselves on land for a few seconds. Other aquatic hunters strand themselves in a similar way, including bottlenose dolphins from South Carolina, which drive small fish onto beaches, and Argentinian killer whales, which swim onto beaches to snag resting sealions. The behavior of the Tarn catfishes is so similar that Julien Cucherousset from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse describes them as 'freshwater killer whales.'"
Comment Re:What is the fascination with this case? (Score 1) 219
Hans Reiser
Comment Re:No, not really... (Score 1) 180
goodreader (ios) can cut margins. Its not automatic, but it is very quick and it remembers. I can comfortably read papers on my ipod, although scrolling (with helpful jump buttons) is necessary.
