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Businesses

Submission + - World's biggest geoengineering experiment 'violates' UN rules (guardian.co.uk)

diewlasing writes: US businessman Russ George is conducting a geoengineering experiment of Canada's coast in apparent violation of two United Nations rules. From the article:

'A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a "blatant violation" of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week."

Submission + - LHC claims new particle discovery (bbc.co.uk)

diewlasing writes: Cern scientists reporting at conferences in the UK and Geneva claim the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.

Both of the two Higgs-hunting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have reached a level of certainty worthy of a "discovery".

More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.

The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) — about 133 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom.

Submission + - SETI reasearch with Very Large Baseline Interferometry (bbc.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Radio astronomers in Australia have tried a to detect a transmission from Gliese 581 using Very Large Baseline Interferometry with the Australian Large Baseline Array http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6466. The star Gliese 581 (Gl581) is 20 light years away and is orbited by at least two planets in habitable zone. While the astronomers haven't detected any signal from Gl581, they have derived a limit on the strength of the signal that could be detected from Earth. In simple terms, if a transmitter like Arecibo would have been in operation in the Gl581 system and beaming in our direction, the signal would have been picked.
This is a breakthrough method to examine extraterrestrial transmissions and will be implemented with the Square Kilometre Array, the gigantic radio interferometer that will be built in South Africa and Australia. With this technique, the SKA will lift the SETI exploration to an amazing new regime.

Comment A couple of options (Score 1) 416

First, there's always graduate school. Math is a fantastic subject to learn more about, just because (like many other things). After she could probably get into academia or industry (industry at a higher level).

Second, the people I know from undergrad with math degrees, who did not go to graduate school, chose one of three options:

1.) Work for a financial company doing number crunching of some sort

2.) Taking the actuarial exams

3.) Computer companies: but I've heard from them that at job fairs, computer companies that want to hire math majors always want to know the amount of programming experience you have

My two cents

Space

Submission + - Galaxy on collision course (bbc.co.uk)

Necroloth writes: Strap yourselves... or more appropriate, get that matter/anti-matter propulsion system you've been working on in your mother's basement done quickly and plan your escape!
The Milky Way is on collision course with Andromeda... should be a sight to see!... health warning: safer if you're standing quite far back! Also, you'll have to wait about 4billion years for it to start.. but in 6billion years, expect a single galaxy entity.

Android

Submission + - Gnuplot now Running on Android (kickstarter.com) 2

MathIsTasty writes: While it looks like the previously discussed campaign to raise funds for Octave and gnuplot development for Android is quite short of its goal, it looks like the developer has forged ahead and released a decent and only slightly buggy version of gnuplot running on Android already. Though it can create 2D and 3D plots and even output to a PostScript file, it looks like there is no pinch-zoom and similar. Maybe that is one of the things the requested funds are for. I just wonder whether the only person working on the project should have spent more time on marketing as opposed to development.
EU

Submission + - Five EU countries taken to court for failing to implement cookie law (computerworlduk.com)

concertina226 writes: The European Commission announced on Thursday that it has asked the European Court of Justice to impose fines on Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia for not transposing binding telecoms rules into their national laws. The official deadline for doing so was 25 May last year.

These telecoms rules are aimed at protecting users' privacy online. They also require companies to notify users about any data breach without undue delay and to allow customers to switch fixed or mobile phone operators without changing their phone number, within one working day.

But the main sticking point in the telecoms package appears to be the requirement for Web companies to obtain "explicit consent" from Internet users before storing cookies.

Comment Re:Sorry... (Score 1) 388

Wow, the quality of moderation and meta-moderation has gone down on this website recently. This parent post is definitely not informative, or insightful. You MAY have a point about copytight and rape (although not a strong one in terms of criminality) but the beginnings of your comment are nothing to be admired. This kind of talk does not contribute to honest discussion and debate, regardless of how you or other people feel about the political system.

Submission + - AT&T to Start Data Throttling, How Will It Aff (readwriteweb.com)

greymond writes: "AT&T has announced that starting on Oct. 1 it will throttle the data speeds of users with unlimited data plans who exceed bandwidth thresholds on its 3G network. AT&T is following in the tracks Verizon and Virgin Mobile in reducing data throughput speeds of its heaviest mobile data users. With more data-intensive apps being published everyday, how will AT&T's data throttling affect users' mobile experience?"

Comment Re:This is only a toy (Score 4, Insightful) 157

I'm not sure if you're joking or you really did miss the point of the experiment. Yes, obviously a more realistic robot would try to actually attack the sword. But this isn't the main point. The point is to see if you can actually engineer a robot to respond to different situation appropriately. And they did. I have a have a ladder that goes great with that high horse of yours.

Comment Re:Its been done before (Score 1) 478

You realize it's not all Palestinians, right? It's Hamas lobbing the rockets as you say. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a long complicated one. But if you decide to journey out of the land of ignorance, you'd see that throughout most of the history, the Palestinians have had their fate decided by everyone but them. It hasn't been until recently that Palestine has started negotiating for itself. And so far, the main leader(s) of Palestine have been inept (Yasser Arafat), likewise with the intransigence of the Israelis. My point is, it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I suggest you read the history before discussing this any further, so you can provide informed positive contributions.

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