Comment Re:Why not just scarp US Intelligence (Score 2, Insightful) 230
Can't we just outsource it? All our other intelligence is outsourced.
Comment Re:You don't (Score 1) 704
How exactly are you supposed to know what *He* wants to do unless you have him try it out? Most kids are pretty open to all things interesting and fun. If you can make coding interesting and fun...there you go. If he doesn't like it after your best shot, after getting the best advice you can, then go try something else. While there is not much connection between playing games and coding, at least there is *A* connection. Better that than "Ooooh my kid likes WOW maybe he will end up being a Blacksmith"
New Estimates Say Earth's Oceans Smaller Than Once Believed 263
Velcroman1 writes with this snippet from Fox News: "Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big? As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume — the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute set out to more accurately answer that question — and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles. And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor."
Lower Merion School's Report Says IT Dept. Did It, But Didn't Inhale 232
PSandusky writes "A report issued by the Lower Merion School District's chosen law firm blames the district's IT department for the laptop webcam spying scandal. In particular, the report mentions lax IT policies and record-keeping as major problems that enabled the spying. Despite thousands of e-mails and images to the contrary, the report also maintains that no proof exists that anyone in IT viewed images captured by the webcams."
MIT Unveils First Solar Cells Printed On Paper 125
lucidkoan writes "MIT researchers recently unveiled the world's first thin-film solar cell printed on a sheet of paper. The panel was created using a process similar to that of an inkjet printer, producing semiconductor-coated paper imbued with carbon-based dyes that give the cells an efficiency of 1.5 to 2 percent. That's not incredibly efficient, but the convenience factor makes up for it. And in the future, researchers hope that the same process used in the paper solar cells could be used to print cells on metal foil or even plastic. If they're able to gear efficiencies up to scale, the development could revolutionize the production and installation of solar panels."
Comment Re:these are pretty common, aren't they? (Score 1) 58
It could be that he has had an idea floating around in his head for years, that he thinks that he could code in 48 hours. While there is still a limit to what can be coded in that time period, he could still have an innovative and interesting game in mind.
Comment Re:Look forward, not backward (Score 1) 115
Yar! That LFNB (it sucks we need that acronym) article he wrote was sad and true. I wasn't expecting the world to transform into ponies and rainbows when I voted for Obama, but I sure as hell didn't expect this.
Comment Re:sustainable growth (Score 1) 432
Do not forget Apple loves to make new hardware incompatible with older hardware. My Mac Pro can not run newer video cards. My only thinking at the time, is that GPU's become too slow over the long term, CPU is just fine still. We'll they prevented me from using the new cards even though they'd run fine in Windows on the same hardware.
So I went out and built a more powerful machine than my Mac Pro, and I dont have to buy shiny new video cards, I just go SLI with a second one of the type I bought with the machine I built. Then upgrade to a new shiny card, when a single model blows my SLI pair out of the water.
I went with Linux, then Mac, then back to Windows 7. What I have learned, you can use anything and make it work, but Linux shines for servers, Apple is a trap to be avoided, and Windows has finally gotten their act together.
Comment Re:For What It's Worth $999 in 1998 = $1333 Today (Score -1, Offtopic) 293
Well what it's worth the first tech demos about it were disclosed 4-5 months ago and more details now an month ago. They usually disclose technical things earlier on rather like Apple who goes fully by PR and marketing (and where it makes sense to disclose products and have strict NDA's to keep it secret just prior launch to keep all the fanboys hype it)
Comment Re:Please let me use the same password (Score 2, Informative) 497
find a scheme
like if it is October 2010 make your password
11Nov2010Ber!!
If it is December
12Dec2010Ber!! ect
Passwords that have rationale behind them are very easy to remember, can be very complex and sometimes easy to type.
Comment $200 doesn't really include.. (Score 2, Insightful) 531
The sysadmin to go with it.
Ubuntu is all well and good until you need something that is not covered by its package manager. It's all well and good until some piece of hardware only has limited support via some hack.
The problem with Linux is that even with all the advancements, it's still a fragmented platform that only works properly if you stay within it's narrow selection of hardware that is known to work.
Comment Re:Privacy fears (Score 1) 527
Posting this as anonymous coward adds weight to which side of the argument?
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Comment Re:JS needs threads (Score 1) 531
What goes on in the back-end is irrelevant. What matters is that your script is single threaded. All functions are atomic and busy waits will prevent any other JS from executing. If an event happens, the browser will wait until the current function is done executing before notifying the callback for the event. This actually makes programming for JS very easy and does not really hinder the event-driven nature of client-side browser scripting at all. At best, I think you can think of callbacks to the server as worker threads (work is being done by the server), though when your client-side code is called back, it will be sequential and it won't execute concurrently with any of your other code.
Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 3, Insightful) 531
The javascript hate probably isn't coming from people that have done web development.
It's probably coming from people that have done web browsing.
