Comment Re:Rondam's top ten Geek Business Myths (Score 1) 360
And, it has a special Bonus Myth!
Things always come in neat bundles of 10?
Comment In vs. Out (Score 1) 380
Generally a pipe has two directions you can travel, in and out. Ignoring the fact that walking into a pipe is a terrible idea and probably doesn't smell like rainbows and sunshine, I find that should one feel they are "lost" in a drain they should generally travel in the opposite direction they had originally chose to travel in. Clearly things get a little hairier when you start making turns at junctions but in that case, you asked for it. In either case, they should not have been deprived of the Darwin Award.
Comment Re:Not consistent (Score 1) 427
The python script crashes my Windows 7 RC machine (build 7100) at work quite nicely. I should mention that I needed to add "import socket" and change "s = socket()" to "s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)". My software firewall is turned off as well.
Comment The point is the implicit bigotry in the stories. (Score 1) 402
Stories, generally posted by Americans, about UK CCTV schemes are often accompanied by text that states more or less explicitly, "Oh, those freedom-hating Brits! Thank God it doesn't happen here." Yet when the Americans implement even worse systems they (for some reason) don't choose to blame the entire nation for them.
It would be nice if posters could direct their ire to the place where it belongs, namely the people responsible for these policies, rather than the citizenry as a whole.
Comment Re:Make it a public task to store our culture (Score 2, Interesting) 278
>> Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
>> Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
I would argue that not all works are worth saving, in appeal to public benefit.
Comment Re:OT - your sig (Score 1) 359
Correct and a commendable sig, but your use of "loose" is an adjective, and there is also a verb "loose"; e.g. "Cry havoc and loose the dogs of war". I had a sig once that read "if you loose your money you are unwise. If you lose your money you are unlucky."
Using "Loose" when one means "lose" can inhibit communication because both words are verbs that mean completely different things.
Agreed, 100%.
Comment Maybe the question should be... (Score 4, Funny) 359
...what could possibly go right? That would at least set the correct expectations.
Comment Only a matter of time (Score 2, Interesting) 114
I don't think that a reasonably informed person could expect that this sort of thing could be kept bottled up for very long.
Comment Re:Only On Slashdot (Score 3, Insightful) 443
Where District 9 is already as great as Star Wars and a movie that's not even out sucks.
And Joss is actually thought of as a creative genius.
US Colleges Say Hiring US Students a Bad Deal 490
theodp writes "Many US colleges and universities have notices posted on their websites informing US companies that they're tax chumps if they hire students who are US citizens. 'In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements,' advises the taxpayer-supported University of Pittsburgh (pdf) as it makes the case against hiring its own US students. You'll find identical pitches made by the University of Delaware, the University of Cincinnati, Kansas State University, the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University, and other public colleges and universities. The same message is also echoed by private schools, such as John Hopkins University, Brown University, Rollins College and Loyola University Chicago."
Submission + - New From Coca-Cola ... Fizzy Milk? (foxnews.com) 3
suraj.sun writes: Cows may not think it is the real thing, but Coca-Cola is preparing to launch fizzy milk on the world.
The drink contains skim milk mixed with sparkling water, flavored with fruit and sweetened with cane sugar.
Scientists have developed the drink at the firm's laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, ensuring it will not curdle in its 8 oz. aluminium bottle.
Going under the name Vio, Coca-Cola has begun test-marketing the carbonated drink at natural food stores and delis in New York. It sells for about $2.50 a bottle, no chilling required. One of Coke's copywriters claims it tastes "like a birthday party for a polar bear."
It comes in four "natural" flavors — peach mango, berry, citrus and tropical colada — and could even be marketed as a healthy nutritional drink. But it has 26 grams of sugar a bottle, on a par with other non-diet Coca-Cola products, and 1.5 grams of fat.
The drink is part of a wider Coke initiative called Project Life to develop milk-based products. If it is a success in the United States it could be launched globally.
FoxNews : http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534917,00.html
The drink contains skim milk mixed with sparkling water, flavored with fruit and sweetened with cane sugar.
Scientists have developed the drink at the firm's laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, ensuring it will not curdle in its 8 oz. aluminium bottle.
Going under the name Vio, Coca-Cola has begun test-marketing the carbonated drink at natural food stores and delis in New York. It sells for about $2.50 a bottle, no chilling required. One of Coke's copywriters claims it tastes "like a birthday party for a polar bear."
It comes in four "natural" flavors — peach mango, berry, citrus and tropical colada — and could even be marketed as a healthy nutritional drink. But it has 26 grams of sugar a bottle, on a par with other non-diet Coca-Cola products, and 1.5 grams of fat.
The drink is part of a wider Coke initiative called Project Life to develop milk-based products. If it is a success in the United States it could be launched globally.
FoxNews : http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534917,00.html
Comment Scope creep? (Score 1, Redundant) 85
The author, Jesse Stay has accomplished something many projects and authors can't seem to avoid, scope creep.
I'm not sure that scope creep is a praiseworthy accomplishment.
Submission + - Scientists Identify Gene for Oral Sex
An anonymous reader writes: The New Scientist reports that researchers have pinpointed a gene that makes females suck up sperm through their mouths. The gene was found in the cichlid fish, where the males have evolved a way to lure females close so that they can squirt sperm into their mouths. In cichlids, females hold their eggs in their mouths and incubate them there after fertilization — a behaviour that is thought to have evolved to protect the eggs from predators. As soon as a female has spawned her eggs, she collects them up in her mouth. Normally, sperm released into the water by a male nearby will then fertilize the eggs. But males of certain cichlid species in east Africa have evolved a way to increase the odds that females take up their sperm. Oval yellow markings resembling the eggs are found on the anal or pelvic fins so that when a female approaches the male, she thinks she sees an egg on its fin, so tries to vacuum it up in her mouth — and get a mouthful of sperm from the canny male in the process. "It looks like she's eager to pick up the 'egg dummy' because she thinks she's forgotten one of her own eggs," says Walter Salzburger at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, who led the study. Researchers suspect a gene called csf1ra — short for colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor a, is responsible after extracting DNA samples from 19 cichlid species — nine that had egg spots on their fins and 10 that did not and finding that species that had evolved most recently had a mutation in the csf1ra linked to the egg spots. Salzburger says this shows that the dummy egg spots are a genetic trait that provides a selective advantage because they encourage females to participate in oral mating.
Submission + - Historians Recreate Source Code of First 4004 App
mcpublic writes: "The team of 'digital archeologists' who developed the technology behind the Intel Museum's 4004 microprocessor exhibit have done it again. 36 years after Intel introduced their first microprocessor on November 15, 1971, these computer historians have turned the spotlight on the first application software ever written for a general-purpose microprocessor: the Busicom 141-PF calculator. At the team's web site you can download and play with an authentic calculator simulator that sports a cool animated flowchart. Want to find out how Busicom's Masatoshi Shima compressed an entire four-function, printing calculator into only 1,024 bytes of ROM? Check out the newly recreated assembly language "source code," extensively analyzed, documented, and commented by the team's newest member: Hungary's Lajos Kintli. 'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.'"
