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Comment Re:Forget about it. (Score 1) 90

by buravirgil (#42426883) Attached to: Odds Favor Discovery of Earth-Like Exoplanet in 2013
I'm unsure why "going there" is so typically the response to news like this. Galileo (16th century) kicked off a method to simply COUNT the planets in our system. By the 20th century, science had methods to determine what COMPRISED those countable objects. Since my childhood, the age and dimension of the universe has ONLY been extended. Given our advancement through WAR, imagine beings beyond such waste and what empirical method grants... Keep Watching the Skies, because it's a sure bet they're Watching You! Moreover (doesn't everyone love to say 'moreover'?), the 20th century SUCKED at describing LIFE. Early biologists used to capitalize the damn concept. Louise B. Young countered this hubris by capitlizating the term 'Form' in her book, The Unfinished Universe, 1986. The pretense of 'sustainable conditions' didn't predict ocean floor smokers. Our understanding of bacteria (the 'third' world) is inane and we've attempted to communicate with dolphins by holding them in what is essentially an echo-chamber. I love the book and movies of Solaris, and I've just told you why. Can we "go" there. Really? What makes you think it would be allowed?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you promote a mobile app

Submitted by
mininab
mininab writes: "I recently did http://partynear.me/ a website to find events around one's geolocation. Nothing new but html5 made possible things that were cumbersome before. I am now thinking about promoting it, tried facebook ads with little to no result, tried contacting blogs but they all want $50 to talk about it ( I suspect they don't even look at the stuff ). I tried all I could think of, and I'm hoping the slashdot crowd might have suggestions. I'm up against a few companies starting the same kind of service, and I'm afraid I can't compete with their well-funded marketing. I'm a lone dev, I'd hire a designer if I had money, so how can I promote on the cheap ?"
Space

Submission + - Killer Asteroids Are Good for You

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "NASA reports that according to a study by Rebecca Martin and Mario Livio asteroid collisions with planets may provide a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life on earth delivering water and organic compounds to the early Earth and accelerating the rate of biological evolution with occasional impacts to disrupt a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies. "Too many asteroids, and you’ve got an unrelenting cosmic shooting gallery, raining fiery death from above," writes Fraser Cain. "Too few asteroids, and complex life might not get the raw material it needs to get rolling. Life never gets that opportunity to really shake things up and evolve into more complex forms." Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The asteroid belt in our solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter, is a region of millions of space rocks that sits near the “snow line," which marks the border of a cold region where volatile material such as water ice are far enough from the sun to remain intact. "To have such ideal conditions you need a giant planet like Jupiter that is just outside the asteroid belt [and] that migrated a little bit, but not through the belt,” Livio explains. "If a large planet like Jupiter migrates through the belt, it would scatter the material. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve.""
Education

Submission + - Publisher of Free Textbooks Says It Will Now Charge (chronicle.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprising blow to the movement to create free textbooks online, an upstart company called Flat World Knowledge is dumping its freemium model. The upstart publisher had made its textbooks free online and charged for print versions or related study guides, but company officials now say that isn't bringing in enough money to work longterm.
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox 16 pulled due to Security Vulnerability

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has removed Firefox 16 from it's installer page due to security vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could allow "a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited"...one of temporary work-around, until a fix is released, is to downgrade to 15.0.1

Submission + - Nikkei: SoftBank in talks to acquire Sprint for $20 billion (bgr.com)

Submitted by redkemper
redkemper writes: Why is Sprint (S) suddenly less interested in MetroPCS (PCS)? According to a new report on Thursday, it’s because Japanese carrier SoftBank is in talks to acquire the United States’ third largest carrier for approximately 1.5 trillion yen, or $19.22 billion...

Submission + - UC study finds flirting can pay off for women

Submitted by ACXNew
ACXNew writes: To determine whether women who flirt are more effective in negotiating than men who flirt, researchers asked 100 participants to evaluate to what extent they use social charm in negotiation on a one-to-seven scale. Women who said they used more social charm were rated more effective by their partners. However, men who said they used more social charm were not regarded as more effective.
Flirtation that generates positive results is not overt sexual advances but authentic, engaging behavior without serious intent. In fact, the study found female flirtation signals attractive qualities such as confidence, which is considered essential to successful negotiators.
Read about the study at http://www.allgoodread.com/first/2012/10/uc-study-finds-flirting-can-pay-off-for-women.html
Graphics

Submission + - Cirque du Soleil Does 3D In CSS (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: "A new Chrome Experiment proves you don't need a Kinect to create a Natural User Interface and you don't need a 3D rendering system like WebGL to create stunning 3D scenes.
Movi.Kanti.Revo http://www.movikantirevo.com/ is a JavaScript experiment that is designed to look good in the Chrome browser. If you take a look at it then you probably think that it is WebGL and more 3D graphics magic — it doesn't work that way.
The whole thing makes use of the new CSS 3D facilities and it proves that you can create stunning 3D using nothing but HTML/CSS and a little JavaScript.
You may well be aware that CSS does 3D but you may not, until you have seen this example, have been aware that it could be used to create scenes of such quality — the thought occurs "who needs Flash".
This probably would have been enough of a technology test, but the experiment also makes use of your machine's video camera and microphone. The user is asked for permission to make use of them, but after that the browser code just gets on with the job — no need for add-ons or anything special. It makes use of the getUserMedia function defined as part of the WebRTC standard. A JavaScript face detection library is used to track the user's head position and the 3D scene is updated to move in the direction the head is pointing in. This is the sort of technique that you usually need some sort of depth camera, like the Kinect, to implement.
All this is great, but for the moment its greatness is confined to Chrome. The other browsers will eventually catch up, but probably not Internet Explorer which is rapidly looking not just like last year's technology but last century's."
Security

Submission + - Ultra sensitive sensor technology can detect human breathing

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OKI recently developed a human-detecting sensor technology capable of distinguishing between large movements (for example, a person walking about a room) to minute movements like breathing. This technology can detect even the minute movements of otherwise motionless persons, making it suitable for use in various applications, including advance warnings of health problems. OKI is currently seeking to apply this technology to areas ranging from security to the monitoring of elderly or people requiring long-term care.

Submission + - Intelligence agencies turn to crowdsourcing (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IARPA — the sister agency to DARPA — is sponsoring researchers to examine crowdsourcing as a method to derive better intelligence predictions. The article says that this research will eventually be transitioned to the intelligence community to improve national intelligence estimates. Anyone can participate — even the general public. www.globalcrowd.com
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu: Through the Eyes of a Travel Blogger (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: As travel bloggers, our main tool is our computer. We are on the road 365 days of the year and on our machine at least a couple of hours a day. We need it to perform to its best ability in order to maintain efficiency while on the road. Most of all we can't be bothered with a slow operating system, or worrying about the threat of viruses.

Here are 5 reasons why we made the decision to have Ubuntu installed on our Lenovo Netbook:
Software

Submission + - Meet Siri's Little Brother, Trapit (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream. Well, it turns out there's more where that came from. Trapit, a second spinoff of SRI International's groundbreaking CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), is preparing for a public beta launch this fall. The Web-based news aggregator lets users set up persistent 'traps' or filters on specific topics. Over time, the traps learn to include more articles that match users' interests and exclude those that don't. Philosophically, it's the exact opposite of social-curation news apps like Flipboard or Pulse, since it uses adaptive learning and sense-making technologies to learn what users like, not what their friends like. 'Just as Siri is revolutionizing the human-computer interaction on the mobile device, Trapit will revolutionize Web search as we know it today,' the company asserts."
Communications

Submission + - USPS Losing Battle Against the E-mail Age (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An article in the NY Times explains how the United States Postal Service is in dire financial straits, and will need emergency action from Congress to forestall a shutdown later this year. Postmaster General Patrick Donahue said simply, 'If Congress doesn't act, we will default.' Labor agreements prohibiting layoffs are preventing one avenue for reducing costs, and laws forbidding postage rates from surpassing inflation rates keeps income down. On top of that, the proliferation of e-mail and online bill-paying services have contributed to a 22% reduction in snail-mail volume since 2006. They're currently hoping for legislation that would relax their economic requirements and considering an end to Saturday delivery.

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