Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Television

Submission + - Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" to return (discovery.com)

Submitted by
Epeeist
Epeeist writes: "In 1980, the landmark series COSMOS premiered on public television. Since then, it is estimated that more than a billion people around the planet have seen the series. Now the Science Channel brings the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning COSMOS back, digitally remastered and with enhanced computer graphics."
Security

Submission + - TSA limits lithium batteries on airplanes

Submitted by yali
yali writes: The U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has issued new rules limiting travel with lithium batteries. As of January 1, no spare lithium batteries are allowed in checked luggage. Batteries carried in the cabin are subject to limitations on per-battery and total lithium content, and spare batteries must have the terminals covered. If you're returning home from the holidays with new toys, be sure to check out the new restrictions before you pack.
Math

Submission + - MIT Student disproves Stephen Wolfram

Submitted by Richard Pritches
Richard Pritches writes: MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS). Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit. Richard
Education

Submission + - 'More sex needed' to boost sperm (fun-on.com)

Submitted by
tapiros
tapiros writes: "Some men should have sex every day to maximise the chances of getting their partner pregnant, researchers say. It is known for couples with fertility problems to abstain from sex for several days to boost sperm numbers before trying to conceive. However, the Sydney University team, addressing the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference, said this could mean poorer quality sperm. One UK expert said daily sex might be better for men with damaged sperm. The Australian scientists studied 42 men whose sperm had been found to be an abnormal shape when examined under the microscope. They were told to ejaculate daily for seven days, and these samples were compared with those taken from them after three days' abstinence. All but five of the men had less sperm damage in their daily samples compared with the post-abstention sample. Fertility myth Dr Allan Pacey, the secretary of the British Fertility Society, said that while not having sex allowed the numbers of sperm to build up, there was a "trade-off" between quality and quantity. "This research shows that when you put people on a daily ejaculation regime, it reduces the figure for DNA damage. "If you can go from 30% to 20% that is quite a big shift and that should have some implications for fertility. "There are men out there who think, or whose partners think, that limiting ejaculation will make them more fertile. "I remember one couple in which the woman would only let the man ejaculate when she was in her fertile period, so the poor chap was going without for almost a month at a time." that if a couple was initially trying to get pregnant, an interval of two to three days was probably advisable — whereas a man with high DNA damage and a "decent" sperm count should try more often."
Education

Submission + - Wikimedia COO a felon (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by
ArrayIndexOutOfBound
ArrayIndexOutOfBound writes: "physorg.com has an article about Carolyn Doran, COO of Wikimedia. "Before she left [Wikimedia] in July, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, 45, had moved up from a part-time bookkeeper for the Wikimedia Foundation and spent six months as chief operating officer, responsible for personnel and financial management. At the time, she was on probation for a 2004 hit-and-run accident in Virginia that had landed her seven months in prison. Doran had multiple drunken-driving convictions, and records show earlier run-ins for theft, writing bad checks and wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest.""
Government

Submission + - Australia ratifies Kyoto (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From BBC news:

Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd has been sworn in as prime minister, following a landslide victory in parliamentary elections last week. Immediately after the ceremony, he signed documents to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, reversing the previous administration's policy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7124236.stm
Television

Submission + - 20/20 airing Hans Reiser interview on eve of trial 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ABCNews 20/20 television magazine will broadcast an interview tonight with Hans Reisier, the author of the Linux ReiserFS filesystem, who is accused of killing his wife, although no body has been found. Jury selection is complete, and the trial is schedule to begin next week.
Programming

Submission + - Moonfall: Lua + CSS (moonfalll.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CSS Purist might hate this: Simple to use CSS with variables, combining LUA and CSS. A simple LUA domain specific language that generates CSS dynamically as a cgi script or statically for maximum performance.
Editorial

Submission + - But Mom! The other 61-year-olds get an allowance! (reuters.com)

Submitted by
deweycheetham
deweycheetham writes: "ROME (Reuters) — A Sicilian mother took away her 61-year-old son's house keys, cut off his allowance and hauled him to the police station because he stayed out late. http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idU SL0288587220070802 The article goes on to say "Most Italian men still live at home late into their 30s, enjoying their "mamma's" cooking, washing and ironing.". Well Pack my bags, I am moving to Italy."
Windows

Submission + - Acer CEO Cites Vista as a 'Disappointment' (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Quite surprisingly the head of Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has spoken out against Vista saying that the entire PC industry is 'disappointed' with it. He claims not only stability issues but also talks frankly about his number one concern: sales. Is it Microsoft's responsibility to make sure that its operating systems sell computers? I don't think so but Lanci disagrees, while talking about Vista doing nothing for sales: "The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista. And that's not going to change in the second half of this year. I really don't think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista." Well, it's clear to me now why PC makers might be shying away from Linux, I've never had to buy a new computer when I upgraded to a new kernel — in fact, my first computer I built in 1999 is still running Linux flawlessly with nothing changed but the hard drive."
Networking

Submission + - Setting Up a small linux cluster

Submitted by Davemania
Davemania writes: I am working for a research group that requires to do a large amount of data analysis (each of these files could be up to 1 gig in size). We're planning on buying up to 10 pc with linux on them to do these scientific processing (matlab, etc ) but what would be the best configuration for these 10 linux boxes ? Preferably, we would like to maintain all the data on one server and send it out to the Linux box for processing automatically. What approach would be the best, clustering ? OpenMosix, Rock Cluster ? or just simply drop files into the share folder and remote desktop in ?
Enlightenment

Submission + - GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 (fsf.org)

Submitted by
chessweb
chessweb writes: "Here is a rather enlightening article by Richard Stallman on the GPLv3 that puts the previous Tivo post into the right context and explains the implications and limitations of upgrading from GPLv2 to GPLv3."
The Internet

Submission + - So we just closed all our libraries. Good or bad?

Submitted by
mrcpu
mrcpu writes: "Voters in Jackson County, OR just pulled the plug on funding their library system, opting to close all the branches (all built brand new within the last few years, 15 of 'em), rather than cutback. Of course, this has created much division in a couple areas. One is that "I have the Internet, what do I need a library for"? With pro's and con's to each side. The other issue was the funding mechanism, with the loss of some federal funding, the county leaders decided to attempt to strongarm a levy with no backing. But be that as it may, in this day,
and age, are libraries useful? Do we still need them? Do you buy most of your books? Have you been to a non-school/university library recently? Did using a library change your life in any significant way? Or are they an anachronism, and a throwback to a day when information wasn't readily available?"
Editorial

Submission + - The Long Term Effects of Plastics on the Earth

Submitted by
lostraven
lostraven writes: "Nearly 40% of our ocean surface contains floating heaps of predominately plastic? So it seems, at least according to Charles Moore and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. And the effects that plastics potentially have on life both on and off shore are alarming. From studies of how bisphenol A affects insulin output to findings of dead seabirds "packed with plastic", the "60 billion tons" of plastic created each year effects much of the biosphere. While the article leans slightly towards being an opinion piece, it serves to point out that manufacturers and consumers should be more aware of the effects plastic has on the Earth and its inhabitants."

Slashdot Top Deals

Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.

Close