Comment Re:Gobby to the rescue (Score 1) 328
Yes. He's using 'literal' in its figurative sense.
Comment Re:Not necessarily water... (Score 4, Informative) 186
Carbon Dioxide won't condense to water because
1) It's not water; and
2) if you're meaning 'liquid' CO2 doesn't appear in a liquid form at pressures below 5.1 (Earth) atmospheres of pressure. On Mars it will only appear as either gas or 'dry ice.'
Of course, there are plenty of other liquids it could be, and that's why no-one in the know has actually identified it as water.
Comment Re:Always-on Emacs (Score 1) 412
With the latest CVS Emacs you don't even need to start Emacs from inside a screen session. If you run `emacs --daemon` it'll start in headless mode, and you can use emacsclient to access the one instance from anywhere.
It's the first thing I run when I boot my machine, and the response time is just about zero when I need the editor. What's more, all my files, IRC flame wars, email and whatever else are right where I left them.
Comment Re:Not convicts ... sheep. (Score 2, Interesting) 184
When deciding whether to allow them to have access to my first kid I bought their course materials. I have no problem at all with kids learning bible stories (I'm a amateur wannabe bible scholar myself), or being taught to be kind to one and other (in fact if the catholics we here I might let him go). But that is not what is being taught. The course has been cleverly designed to inculcate the kids with fear and an unshakeble belief in God as the evangelists see him (complete with creationism).
Hmm, I know the problem. I fixed that in my kids' school---I teach the Scripture lessons. Few of the kids in the classes I teach (11-12 year olds) had heard of evolution until I taught it to them last week.
It wasn't strictly in the curriculum, but it's nothing that's not (officially) in the school curriculum anyway, so I think I'll keep my job. If I stop posting on
RIAA Web Site Moved To Linux 188
xseedit writes "The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow's Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven't moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years. Will Mindshift do a better job hosting one of the most reviled, and therefore most attacked, Web sites in the world? I wonder if anybody at the RIAA or TST would care to comment on the reasons behind this sudden move. Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?"
Submission + - Kryptonite a reality
ickeicke writes: A team of researchers from mining group Rio Tinto have discovered a mineral in a Serbian mine in Jadar that has the same chemical composition as kryptonite. However, the mineral cannot be called kryptonite under international nomenclature rules because it has nothing to do with krypton — a real element in the Periodic Table that takes the form of a gas. Instead, it will be formally named Jadarite when it is described in the European Journal of Mineralogy later this year.
"I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either — although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange," Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum told BBC News.
"Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide — and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns."
"I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either — although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange," Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum told BBC News.
"Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide — and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns."
Submission + - Rise of Web-Based Malware
Michael writes: HNS is running a story about the results of the new Sophos research into worldwide cybercrime activity during the first three months of 2007. The findings reveal that the overall number of new pieces of malware has grown dramatically, with the majority of malicious code writers selecting the web as its playground of choice. From January to the end of March on average 5,000 new infected webpages were identified every day.
Feed More Calls For Web Traffic Audits (techdirt.com)
There's been some questions raised in the past about just how reliable the traffic and user stats thrown around by plenty of web sites are, and as ad dollars have flowed online, there's a growing interest among marketers in verifying those stats. Besides sites having good reasons to inflate their figures, there are other issues: for instance, there are plenty of different ways to count traffic (such as unique visitors vs. page views), and different stats packages often report very different numbers. Even the third-party measurement services that many companies use can't agree on traffic levels, so the Interactive Advertising Bureau is asking comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings to submit to outside audits of their services and methods, so publishers have a more transparent view of how the companies count their audience. The IAB's president notes that the companies have resisted calls for such an audit since 1999, so he understands he's facing an uphill battle. But with publishers wanting more transparency so they can be assured their audience isn't being undercounted, and publishers demanding more transparency to be sure that audience isn't overcounted, it's likely that something will have to give. The amount of money flowing into online advertising makes it a certainty that better and more accurate traffic stats will emerge, whether from comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings, or other, more willing providers -- particularly since a number of large advertisers have set a deadline of 2008 for sites on which they buy ads to have their ad impressions audited by a third party.
Feed MAKE offers up open source hardware primer (engadget.com)
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Those that have yet to wrap their head around the notion of open source hardware may want to mosey on over to the MAKE blog, which has put together a quick primer that attempts to clear things up for you and set you off on the right foot. Among other things, it sorts out the partially open source hardware like D-Link's WRT54GL router from the truly open source gear like MAKE's own Daisy MP3 player (pictured above), and provides a few suggestions to ensure that your own open source hardware creations remain as such. True to its nature, the primer is also admittedly a work in progress, so you know what to do if you see room for improvement.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Submission + - Microsoft pushing limits for robotics?
vinitM writes: "Robotics is on a verge of another major revolution, and the only company that can push the robotics industry is Microsoft, claims Joe Pinto, robotics industry observer and angel investor who backs startup companies. Microsoft is well known for the boost it provided to the PC industry two decades ago. The firm has released Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 for free downloads on it's site. As of now software written for a specific robot cannot run on any other robot, but if MRS is widely adopted a third-party robotics software market could emerge.
http://www.pclaunches.com/industry_buzz/microsoft_ pushing_limits_for_robotics.php"
Submission + - 'Kryptonite' Discovered in Serbian Mine
Rubinstien writes: A mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum was contracted to help identify an unknown mineral found in a Serbian mine. After its crystal structure was analyzed and identified, the researcher was shocked to find the material already referenced in literature. Says Dr. Chris Stanley, "Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide — and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns." "I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either — although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange," he told BBC News.
More details can be found in the BBC News article.
Submission + - ZX Spectrum 25th anniversary
Steed K writes: Read the BBC story marking the 25th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6572711.stm
Cloning the Smell of the Sea 143
An anonymous reader wrote in with an article that opens: "Scientists from the University of East Anglia have discovered exactly what makes the seaside smell like the seaside — and bottled it. The age-old mystery was unlocked thanks to some novel bacteria plucked from the North Norfolk coast." The responsible substance, dimethyl sulfide, in addition to smelling like the coast, also acts as a homing scent for birds looking to feast on plankton.
Slashdot CSS Redesign Winner Announced 882
The winner of the contest is Alex Bendiken. He will receive a new laptop as well as bragging rights as the creator of the new look of Slashdot. You can see his winning design in a near complete form now. Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues. We plan to take this live in the next few days. There will undoubtedly be a few minor glitches, but please submit bug reports and we'll sort it out as fast as possible. Also congratulations to Peter Lada, our runner up. He gets $250 credit at ThinkGeek. Thanks to everyone who participated- it was a lot of fun.
First Ever Wild Grizzly/Polar Hybrid Shot 227
tavilach writes "Jim Martell has a license to hunt polar bears, but when his latest kill had "white fur [that] was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly," officials seized the body in order to conduct DNA tests. These tests confirm that the dead bear had a polar bear mother and grizzly father, the first documented grizzly-polar hybrid in the wild. This was lucky for Jim, who was facing a fine and jail time for possibly killing a grizzly. Scientists who would have liked to study the bear are not so lucky."
