Comment What's the Point? (Score 1) 301
Weird. I'm pretty sure I've bought many copies of 2600 at B&N.
Comment Only Locally (Score 1) 372
This "niceness" requires physical interaction (the ability to evaluate the person's physiological response, through mirror neurons and such). Most of us are hesitant to shove a gun in someone's face and tell them they can't smoke that joint, or they have to pay someone else's medical bills, or they can't marry that guy. However, we are perfectly happy to send government to do those same things. Just as long as we can't see it. Out of sight, out of mind.
US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition 630
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"
LG Launches Watch Phone In India 109
roh2cool writes "If you are a watch freak and also happen to be a fan of ultra rare (and expensive) gadgets, this might just interest you. The LG GD910 watch phone looks like a normal watch – except for the fact that it can double up as your mobile phone when needed. 'It is quite thin at just 13.9mm and packs in 3G and Video Calling capabilities as well. The phone is quite stylish and the front fascia is covered by scratch-proof tempered glass. It comes with a Bluetooth headset so you don’t have to keep talking like David Hasselhoff talked to his super-car KITT in the “Knight Rider” series.'"
Scientists Develop Financial Turing Test 184
KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the "financial Turing test." The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. "Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition."
Comment New (Score 5, Informative) 385
because President Obama just put taxpayers on the hook for new nuclear power plants in Georgia
The keyword there is "new".
Swiss Geologist On Trial For Causing Earthquakes 258
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Markus Haering's company had been working with the authorities in Basel, Switzerland to try to convert the heat in deep-seated rocks into electricity, but the project was suspended in 2006 when drilling triggered earthquakes, one of them with a magnitude of 3.4, leading Haering's company to pay out $9M in damages. Haering's team planned to drill a series of holes penetrating up to 3 miles (4.8 km) underground with water being pumped onto rocks with a temperature of more than 195C. Basel's location on top of a fault line – the upper Rhine trench – had been deliberately chosen because the heat was closer to the Earth's surface. A risk assessment has since shown that the prospect of further quakes is too high to continue drilling in the city. Haering faces up to five years in prison if the judge finds he intentionally damaged property. Haering has admitted the 3.4 magnitude earthquake was stronger than he had expected and that his team 'had very little knowledge of seismicity' before starting to drill, but called the quakes 'a learning process for everyone involved.' Despite Haering's trial, the Swiss appetite for geothermal projects has not diminished. Engineers are beginning preliminary drilling in Zurich to see whether that area was suitable for a similar scheme, and St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland, plans to start work on its own geothermal project next year. Drilling efforts are being closely watched in the US, where the energy department is sponsoring more than 120 geothermal energy projects in several states."
The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza
282
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."
Building a Global Cyber Police Force 155
dasButcher writes "One of the biggest obstacles to fighting hackers and cyber-criminals is that many operate in the safe harbors of their home countries, insulated from prosecution by authorities in foreign countries where their targets reside. As Larry Walsh writes in his blog, several security vendors and a growing number of countries are now beginning to consider the creation of a global police force that would have trans-border jurisdiction to investigate and arrest suspected hackers."
Google Launches Public DNS Resolver 540
AdmiralXyz writes "Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service, called Google Public DNS. According to their blog post, Google Public DNS uses continuous record prefetching to avoid cache misses — hopefully making the service faster — and implements a variety of techniques to block spoofing attempts. They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard, and will not redirect you to advertising in the event of a failed lookup. Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google's true motivations behind knowing every site you visit."
Comment Re:Ahh Slashdot (Score 3, Funny) 550
How can you be charged with obstructing government administration when government administration's purpose is seemingly to obstruct. Sounds anti-competitive to me.
Comment Re:I love Drupal (Score 1) 122
I see. Thanks. Not exactly what I was hoping for.
What I really want is the ability to customize a site for users based on a group of some sort. So say that group was by city. I want Baltimore users to see the Baltimore page, Atlanta users to see the Atlanta page, etc. They would sort of have their own site, which news and such specific to their group (city). But they would also be able to communicate with other users in limited ways. Does anybody think this is possible with Drupal?
What I really want is the ability to customize a site for users based on a group of some sort. So say that group was by city. I want Baltimore users to see the Baltimore page, Atlanta users to see the Atlanta page, etc. They would sort of have their own site, which news and such specific to their group (city). But they would also be able to communicate with other users in limited ways. Does anybody think this is possible with Drupal?
Comment Re:I love Drupal (Score 1) 122
Would you be willing to explain a little more about this? Are you saying you have one database and one install of the web application, but are able to run multiple web sites off of that?
If so, can users log in to the different sites with the same log in? Can they communicate with each other in any way?
Or do you just mean that you are running multiple installs of drupal for various websites.
If so, can users log in to the different sites with the same log in? Can they communicate with each other in any way?
Or do you just mean that you are running multiple installs of drupal for various websites.
Spain Codifies the "Right To Broadband" 312
Reader adeelarshad82 writes to lets us know that Spain has now codified a "Right to Broadband," thus following the lead of Finland. Spain's industry minister announced that citizens will have a legal right from 2011 to be able to buy broadband Internet access of at least 1 Mb/sec at a regulated price wherever they live. The telecoms operator holding the so-called "universal service" contract would have to guarantee it could offer "reasonably" priced broadband throughout Spain.
Comment Quit (Score 1, Informative) 1006
Your employer is stealing. Quit.
