Comment I'm With the CEO (Score 2, Interesting) 1313
As a guy who worked for a company with its headquarters in France, I'm siding with the CEO on this.
Craters Quickly Hidden On Titan 39
MightyMartian writes "NASA scientists say Cassini has discovered that far fewer craters are visible on Titan than on the other moons of Saturn. The craters they have discovered are far shallower than other moons' craters and appear to be filling with hydrocarbon sand. On top of being another reason Titan's active geology is very cool, it adds to the mystery of where all the methane on Titan is coming from. 'The rain that falls from Titan's skies is not water, but contains liquid methane and ethane, compounds that are gases at Earth's temperatures. ... The source of Titan's methane remains a mystery because methane in the atmosphere is broken down over relatively short time scales by sunlight. Fragments of methane molecules then recombine into more complex hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere, forming a thick, orange smog that hides the surface from view. Some of the larger particles eventually rain out onto the surface, where they appear to get bound together to form the sand.'"
Comment Didn't Work Out Too Well Before (Score 3, Interesting) 94
Football is fundamentally different from baseball and basketball. It has a lot more strategy, deception, teamwork, and on-the-fly communication between players. Something that happens innocently on one side of the field often has tremendous consequences on the other side. All this is very hard to quantify in a statistical model. For example, if your star receiver is shut down for a game, that might be because he's drawing double or triple coverage. Sure, his stats are low, but your slot and split ends can now have a field day.
The San Francisco 49ers tried a sabermetrics in their crappy years this past decade. Pioneered by the head of player personnel Paraag Marathe, they fielded a bunch of
Comment Anything That's Intellectually Stimulating To You (Score 1) 514
In the 80's, I was told we would all be speaking Japanese very soon, and I needed to learn it.
In the 90's, it became Spanish.
In the Aught's, it became Chinese.
We're not all speaking Japanese, and in the US, unless you're in landscaping or the fast food business, how often do you need Spanish?
Don't pay attention to the so-called futurists that have such a great vision of future society. Pick something you like and go for it. I grew up in the Western US and learned German in high school. Never did me a lick of good until I went to Germany for a few days this past summer, but it was fun to learn and close enough to English to not be hugely difficult to learn. Learning Hebrew's on my list this year. It's pretty much going to be useless because I'm not Jewish, but what the hell. It's interesting to me.
Comment Conspiracy theory... (Score 3, Insightful) 342
And Larry Ellison's good buddies with Steve Jobs. Coincidence? I think not.
Comment Business Model Still an Issue? (Score 1) 306
Last I checked, the hosting was either going to be you download and run it on your own server, or you pay them X dollars for them to host it for you. Is that still going to be the case? If so, this thing is dead in the water because Aunt Jane has no idea what a web server is, and she's not going to buy hosting from Diaspora when Facebook is free.
Scientists Cut Greenland Ice Loss Estimate By Half 414
bonch writes "A new study on Greenland's and West Antarctica's rate of ice loss halves the estimate of ice loss. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. 'We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted,' said researcher Bert Vermeeersen."
Comment Re:Somewhere, a coder is polishing his resume (Score 0, Flamebait) 291
2010 and we still have the "I'm a Programming God So Get Out of my Way, Managers" mentality. Great.
Comment Uh huh. (Score 5, Funny) 251
And 2011 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Comment Screw Yelp (Score 3, Insightful) 53
If they were on the up and up to begin with, they wouldn't have to "clarify" anything.
Stop using Yelp. They have no credibility. Google Maps is now aggregating reviews of businesses. Use them instead.
Comment Re:Shining Example (Score 1) 389
http://www.heavingdeadcats.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/religiousness-breakdown.png
Citations at the bottom.
IQ's citation goes to a page on top50states.com which cites a Morgan Quitno study and describes the methodology that gave the score. Although the chart shows California in a 4-way tie for third worst, the citation breaks down the score into tenths, and has California as third worst.
Comment Re:Shining Example (Score 1) 389
Did you know that Californians, on average, have the 3rd lowest IQ in the country? Only Louisiana and Mississippi have lower average IQs than California.
When I read stories like this one about post-Escalante Garfield, I'm not surprised.
High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542
krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"
Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste 344
separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"
Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server? 539
hacker writes "I have a heavily-hit public server (web, mail, cvs/svn/git, dns, etc.) that runs a few dozen OSS project websites, as well as my own personal sites (gallery, blog, etc.). From time to time, the server has 'unexpected' outages, which I've determined to be the result of hardware, network and other issues on behalf of the provider. I run a lot of monitoring and logging on the server-side, so I see and graph every single bit and byte in and out of the server and applications, so I know it's not the OS itself. When I file 'WTF?'-style support tickets to the provider through their web-based ticketing system, I often get the response of: 'Please provide us with the root password to your server so we can analyze your logs for the cause of the outage.' Moments ago, there were three simultaneous outages while I was logged into the server working on some projects. Server-side, everything was fine. They asked me for the root password, which I flatly denied (as I always do), and then they rooted the server anyway, bringing it down and poking around through my logs. This is at least the third time they've done this without my approval or consent. Is it possible to create a minimal Linux boot that will allow me to reboot the server remotely, come back up with basic networking and ssh, and then from there, allow me to log in and mount the other application and data partitions under dm-crypt/loop-aes and friends?"
Read on for a few more details of hacker's situation.
