Comment Re:beta.slashdot.org sucks! (Score 1) 67
Mod parent up.
Comment Re:Gladwell (Score 1) 192
True that. Can't argue with you, Mark[something].
Comment Re:Gladwell (Score 1, Troll) 192
Clearly it didn't take you 10000 hours to learn how to dash off a snarky rebuttal with no detail or supporting evidence.
Bravo to you sir - you are a Slashdot commentor! The sky's the limit for you!
Comment Re:Speak for yourself, Mr. Emanuel (Score 1) 478
I have a wife who is a board member for the local hospice, so I get to accompany her to a lot of functions. Many of the board members are approaching or have passed the age of 70 and still seem to be going strong. Note I said "board members" - those who are managing the entire affair (quite effectively from what I can gather), not those in need of care. Your friend may have experienced some selection bias because of his work. That doesn't mean his observations apply to everyone. In fact I'm sure they don't.
Comment Speak for yourself, Mr. Emanuel (Score 3, Insightful) 478
You lost me when you assigned an arbitrary number as your cutoff rather than defining the cutoff on reasonably definable measures of physical and mental health. I exercise, eat healthy, avoid smoking and drugs etc. because these activities provide *measurable* benefits to my health based on measurements made by my doctor. Not to mention that I feel better.
Does the fact that I do things that measurably improve my health and prolong my life as long as possible mean I am "obsessed"? Does "I don't smoke, overeat, take drugs or engage in dangerous life-threatening activities (extreme sports, for example)" mean I am obsessed? I find it completely rational, and my insurance company sure loves it because I'm a low risk according to their actuarial tables. Because science.
If I take your advice, I should just sit around and passively wait to die after reaching a certain age rather than doing things that measurably increase my ability to be "vibrant and engaged". Sorry, but no thanks. Save me a place when I get to the Pearly Gates - I might be a little late to the party. And when I get there, we're going to blow the roof off of that sucker.
2 Mars Missions Set For Arrival, Both Prepare for Orbital Maneuvers 65
As reported by the BBC, NASA's Maven Mars orbiter has nearly reached the red planet, and will undergo a 33-minute rocket burn to slow its course.
Monday's big manoeuvre on Maven's engines will place the satellite in a high, elliptical, 35-hour orbit around the planet. Confirmation of capture should be received on Earth shortly after 0220 GMT (2220 EDT Sunday; 0320 BST). "We should have a preliminary answer within just a few minutes after the end of the burn," said [principal investigator professor Bruce] Jakosky. In the coming weeks, engineers will then work to bring Maven into a regular 4.5-hour, operational orbit that takes the probe as close as 150km to Mars but also sends it out to 6,200km.
India's first mission to Mars faces a critical test as it does a similar maneuver -- firing of a rocket to slow its travel as it approaches Mars orbit.
Comment Re:what is this even talking about? (Score 1) 112
But it's not just about the source... it's about the community, the support from the original authors, the available knowledge and comprehension that transcends wiki docs, as well as having a team large enough to be able to realistically continue its development in the foreseeable future. To lose these things abruptly doesn't mean that all the source code was deleted but rather that the virtual ecosystem was.
Feh. Those things you mention (the original authors, the development team, the community, website and other resources) aren't guaranteed regardless of how badly one would like them to persist. The source and the freedom to do something with it are what the licence grants. Everything else is gravy. Without the source the virtual ecosystem is useless; with the source one person can continue the project, even if only for personal use. The virtual ecosystem can be recreated by anyone who wants badly enough to continue developing the software, just like it was the first time. So it is really just about the source.
Comment Waste of time (Score 1) 46
I haven't read all of the posts since the original story hit the front page, so I may be touching on something that's already been discussed, but
I don't understand how this is different from people just being unaware of their surroundings. I have been to many places in the last 20 years where people will just stop right in the middle of the sidewalk/thoroughfare/pathway to have a conversation or family dispute. The concept of stepping to the side out of the way so that the other 1000 people who aren't having a family issue doesn't seem to occur to them. Cell phones? Just the latest distraction. Oblivious people are forever.
Comment Re:A WiFi router re-flashed with OpenWRT or DD-WRT (Score 1) 238
I'll second this - currently running OpenWRT flashed on to a TP-Link WDR-4300. It replaced a very old beige-box PC running IPCop and has been doing very well for the past year.
Comment Re:this is how most funding works. (Score 1) 215
When scientists write grant proposals, they are actually showing they've already done what they are asking for funds to do.
Not quite (though maybe that's more common now than a decade ago). If the work is already done, you can be sure it's being prepared for publication, since published work is even more valuable than grant money (because it gets you more, possibly bigger grants, plus tenure). What usually goes into a typical grant proposal are the obvious next steps following up on recently published work (used to illustrate why awarding the grant money is a good risk). Work that hasn't been done yet, but is likely to be successfully completed by a typical grad student. Then there are the more speculative "stretch goals" which are less certain, but probably the most fun if things work out. And by the time the next grant deadline rolls around, the scientist can describe how well that worked (to justify the next speculative leap) or how it didn't quite work out, but how this alternate theory ('based on what we have since learned') will likely yield good results (ie. the "new" obvious follow-on steps to the previous work).
Smart scientists generally have several somewhat boring but steady grants running (often funded by the government and possibly with eventual military applications) to keep the lights on, and use a little bit of that funding to support the more speculative, but more fun work.
Maybe long-term Kickstarter success will involve a similar strategy: get funding for less exciting but predictably do-able games that are turned out on schedule while diverting some time to work on getting a working prototype produced for the revolutionary game that was the real goal all along.
How Astrophysicists Hope To Turn the Entire Moon Into a Cosmic Ray Detector 74
KentuckyFC writes One of the great mysteries in astrophysics surrounds the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which can have energies of 10^20 electron volts and beyond. To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour. Nobody knows where ultra-high energy cosmic rays come from or how they get their enormous energies. That's largely because they are so rare--physicists detect them on Earth at a rate of less than one particle per square kilometer per century. So astronomers have come up with a plan to see vastly more ultra high energy cosmic rays by using the Moon as a giant cosmic ray detector. When these particles hit the lunar surface, they generate brief bursts of radio waves that a highly sensitive radio telescope can pick up. No radio telescope on Earth is currently capable of this but astronomers are about to start work on a new one that will be able to pick up these signals for the first time. That should help them finally tease apart the origins of these most energetic particles in the Universe .
Moto 360 Reviews Arrive 87
An anonymous reader writes: Reviews for the Moto 360 smartwatch have started to roll in. David Pierce at The Verge praises the design: the circular display is framed by an unadorned, stainless steel shell, and fastened to your wrist with a simple leather strap. At the same time, he criticized the battery life, saying the device averaged around 12 hours of use before it needed to be charged. Pierce adds, "The Moto 360's most impressive feature is that I stopped noticing it almost immediately. Whenever I wear the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live, I'm constantly compelled to fidget with it; there's this unexplainable feeling of having something alien on my wrist that is there because I need to use it. The 360, on the other hand, just vanished into the spot left on my wrist by the Seiko watch that conveniently died this week." AnandTech takes a deeper dive into the device's hardware, noting that the TI OMAP 3 processor is built on a somewhat old 45nm process, which necessitates higher power consumption than newer, smaller processes. The Wall Street Journal says it's easy to get used to speaking into your watch for basic functions, but the software — and thus, the Moto 360 as a whole — still isn't quite ready for prime time. However, almost all the reviews agree that the smartwatch's time is coming.
Comment Re:JAVA (Score 3, Insightful) 230
The applications you mention are all Open Source, which people on here keep insisting are secure.
Nope. This is a varied community, so people here believe lots of things, but probably not as many believe this simplistic view as you think.
FLOSS applications have the *potential* to be more secure than proprietary/closed source. They also have the potential to become more secure over time if the community/contributors have more resources available to fix security problems than a proprietary vendor. Most importantly, FLOSS applications can be scanned by anyone for bugs and security problems, and fixed by anyone. Those activities are limited for proprietary code to those who have access to it and allowed (by privilege or managerial decree) to fix it or even publicise that there's a problem in the first place.
Depending on the situation (skillset of the development team, size of the team, interest in maintaining and fixing the code), this can either lead to a particular piece of FLOSS or proprietary code being more secure. *In general*, it seems that FLOSS code tends to be more secure because greater resources can be brought to bear, particularly over time as proprietary vendors stop supporting code for older products and move their teams on to something new (gotta keep paying the bills). In some cases that doesn't hold true and proprietary code is more secure.
Comment Re:Citation for "book deserts" ... (Score 1) 116
Yeah, that's pretty much the only use of the phrase I found when searching as well. One other was this: http://laschoolreport.com/comm...
Comment Re:How short our memories... (Score 1) 116
Indeed. I first started reading ebooks on my original Motorola Droid (the backlit screen allowed me to read in bed without disturbing my wife with the bedside lamp on). It was a decent enough experience with the phone held in landscape position and using a reasonable font size. I had quite a little library on the microSD card. And plenty of apps and games too.
The only problem was not being able to have most or all of the text equating to a printed page on the screen at once, which prompted me later to get a tablet, which is a much better form factor for reading. But I still have books on my current smartphone (bigger screen than the Droid, but much smaller than the tablet) for those times when my tablet isn't with me.
