Comment it didn't? (Score 1) 585
perhaps it did, and heaven is just like the world was ...
Comment Fred Hoyle? (Score 1, Informative) 199
Didn't Sir Fred Hoyle say this in, what, 1982?
Comment Monkey! (Score 1) 396
I always liked the cloud platform Monkey zipped around on....
Comment hypnotizing? (Score 1) 179
Now wait for the first instance of a hacker hypnotizing an entire office to act like chickens, via the light fitting internet system...
Comment alternate fridays (Score 1) 162
I thought progress was only made every alternate Friday, usually from about 3pm onwards....
200 Students Admit Cheating After Professor's Online Rant 693
Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."
The World's Smallest Legible Font 280
hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"
Comment Re:cheaper/safer CAT scans? (Score 1) 122
but what about for thinner body parts, like hands or feet? A quick scanner for those might still be useful for replacing the need for xrays in some situations.
It might be possible to have the light sent to include positioning information (for example, send a string instead of a single pulse) and correlate where it was seen with where it was sent from.
Comment cheaper/safer CAT sacans? (Score 2, Interesting) 122
I've had this idea for a while now that low-heat, very bright LEDs are available as light sources:
1. take an existing CAT scanner: Xray source, detector, mounting system (with the rotating arm) and image processing software.
2. replace the Xray source with a bank of LEDs
3. replace the Xray detector (a scintillation screen? whatever it is) with a CCD
4. start scanning
Obviously there's a whole bunch of experimentation needed to calibrate diffusion due to different types of tissue/bone/marshmallow but the software should be mostly unchanged, the mechanical mounting system would be mostly unchanged, and we'd be replacing a radioactive source with a low-power, low-heat light.
Is anybody working on this? I've asked a couple of professor at a biomedical engineering department but much silence ensued.
The ability to use off-the-shelf components seems like a big plus to me...
There would also be a need to check at what intensity cold light is detrimental to cells (and other small issues like that)
Comment Re:Southern Sky? (Score 1) 140
Seeing how it is AT&T, what hemisphere were you expecting?
http://www.corp.att.com/ap/about/where/australia/ ok, they don't mention satellite phones, but as the previous chap said: Frikking Northernhepisphereocentrics. And 'Southern Sky" _is_ usually taken to be the sky above the southern hemisphere
Zombie Ants and Killer Fungus 125
nibbles2004 writes "An article in the Guardian newspaper shows how parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control ants they infect, ultimately leading the ant to its death. The fungus controls the ant's movements to a suitable leaf and causes the ant to grip onto the leaf's central stem, allowing the fungus to spore, which will allow more ants to become infected."
Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
'Weekly Episodes' Coming To Star Trek Online 62
As Star Trek Online ramps up for its Season 2 patch, the game's executive producer, Daniel Stahl, spoke in an interview about an interesting new feature: weekly episodes. Quoting:
"The team has wanted to capture the spirit of the TV shows by having something new to look forward to each week. We all remember when the various series were in full swing and there was the anticipation of tuning in every week to see what happened next. It wasn't always a continuing story, but it was always Star Trek in some way or another, and over time you became familiar with the characters and plots that developed. We are curious to see if this can be replicated through the game. Every week we plan to have something new for players to do. Sometimes it could be getting an assignment to resolve a trade dispute between two races. Other weeks it could be making First Contact with a new alien race. Other weeks you might find yourself deep in trouble and have to find a solution to your predicament."
Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System 325
Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"
