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Comment Re:What is wrong with you people? (Score 1) 144

by Jakeula (#46371465) Attached to: How An Astronaut Nearly Drowned During a Space Walk
Seriously? I thought we were on Slashdot, a place where nerds hope real nerd worthy news is aggregated. My mistake. We must be in a middle school classroom. Here let me explain how you can find simple answers in the future: GOOGLE IT! need the link too? https://www.google.com/ - there ya go. type in "what is a quart" and you get a definition and a converter on that very page. I know, I must be some technical wizard to have solved this so fast.

Comment Re:Odd (Score 1) 335

by Jakeula (#46329725) Attached to: Why Nissan Is Talking To Tesla Model S Owners
If that is your argument its not a very strong one. I have owned many decks that are 90% touch screen over the years and I have never been in an accident that has been my fault (I was t-boned a few weeks ago when I clearly had the right of way from a green light). I know its crazy!!! the thing is you take your eyes off the road all the time. You glance at a knob before reaching for it to adjust a number of settings, the same works once you know where all the buttons will appear. You glance you see it you tap it. done. If you are cycling though more options than that while driving, you are already doing it wrong.

It takes time to learn any new device. If you had lived in said area, you would have known what stations were where, and this wouldn't have been an issue at all. Being in a new area creates plenty of confusion that is "an accident waiting to happen". Now I have seen some stupidly complex touch screen in dash systems, and I have never used Teslas, so I cannot comment on how well designed it is, but I have used plenty of them that work great. I know roughly where I am trying to go and how to get there. I sit the same distance from the dash every time I drive, so I know the area I need to hit based on all of those things, just like how you remember where the knobs are. If I miss, or its not doing what I want, I glance over and see whats up. I mean, people take their eyes off the road all the time for GPS or talking to the passenger, etc. I remember Top Gear did a challenge where they wanted to see if they could preform tasks like sewing while driving, and found that its actually pretty easy to drive while preoccupied. Obviously that isn't science, but driving is like second nature to most people, and a half second glance at the radio shouldn't cause an accident. If conditions are that bad, you shouldn't be fucking with the radio no matter how its built, and you should be focusing on the road.

Submission + - Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In a pub on the campus of London South Bank University, you may think you’re drinking an ice cold brew, but don’t be too sure. A fake pub with barstools, beer pumps, and all was built on the university for psychologists to better understand how and why we drink. Hidden cameras and a cheerful staff—who are undercover psychology students—help analyze behavior when customers, or test subjects, pay a visit.

Submission + - Are You a Competent Cyborg?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Beyond your smartphone screen lies an infinitely more interesting world, if only you could get past the myopic app view you're currently bound to. Glen Martin ponders the existential unease lying at the root of the Internet of Things "We're already cyborgs: biological matrices augmented by wirelessly connected silicon arrays of various configurations. The problem is that we're pretty clunky as cyborgs go. We rely on screens and mobile devices to extend our powers beyond the biological. That leads to everything from atrophying social skills as face-to-face interactions decline to fatal encounters with garbage trucks as we wander, texting and oblivious, into traffic.
So, if we're going to be cyborgs, argues Breseman, let's be competent, sophisticated cyborgs. For one thing, it's now in our ability to upgrade beyond the screen. For another, being better cyborgs may make us — paradoxically — more human."

Submission + - A Mathematical Proof Too Long To Check (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: We have surely got over the shock of computers being involved in mathematical proofs?
It seems not, but in this case the proof occupies a 13GByte file — bigger than the whole of Wikipedia, so perhaps we have crossed a line.
The theorem that has been proved is in connection with a long running conjecture of Paul Erdos in 1930. Discrepancy theory is about how possible it is to distribute something evenly. It occurs in lots of different forms and even has a connection with cryptography. In 1993 it was proved that an infinite series cannot have a discrepancy of 1 or less. This proved the theorem for C=1. The recent progress, which pushes C up to 2 was made possible by a clever idea of using a SAT solver — a program that find values that make an expression true. Things went well up to length 1160, which was proved to have discrepancy 2, but at length 1161 the SAT returned the result that there was no assignment. The negative result generated an unsatisfiability certificate, the proof that a sequence of length 1161 has no subsequence with discrepancy 2, is 13GBytes.
As the authors of the paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2184) write:
"[it]...is probably one of longest proofs of a non-trivial mathematical result ever produced. Its gigantic size is comparable, for example, with the size of the whole Wikipedia, so one may have doubts about to which degree this can be accepted as a proof of a mathematical statement."
Does this matter?
Probably not — as long as other programs can check the result and the program itself has to be considered part of the proof.

Submission + - North Korea Warned Of Possible Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity' (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Telegraph reports, "North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has been warned that he could face prosecution for crimes against humanity after a United Nations inquiry accused him of some of the worst human rights abuses since the Second World War. In some of the harshest criticism ever unleashed by the international community against the Pyongyang regime, a UN panel branded it “a shock to the conscience of humanity”. Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge who has spent nearly a year taking testimony from victims of the regime, said much of it reminded him of atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Yesterday his team published a 374-page report detailing allegations of murder, torture, rape, abductions, enslavement, and starvation, describing North Korea as a dictatorship “that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”. In a bid to put pressure on Kim Jong-un, 31, Mr Kirby has taken the unusual step of writing to the North Korean leader to warn him that both he and hundreds of his henchmen could one day face prosecution. " — More at BBC, including a cache of report.

Submission + - Outgoing NSA director: 'It's not our mission to spy on everyone in the world' (bgr.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: BGR reports, "...(NSA) will send its recommendations for where to store telephone metadata records to President Obama later this week ... General Keith Alexander ... did not say where he thinks the data should be held. ... “I can’t reveal that here because that’s still going through inter-agency review.” President Obama directed the intelligence community to develop a proposal for having an external party hold the telephone metadata ... Obama set a deadline of March 28th ... Alexander warned about the growing threat of cyber attacks and called for cybersecurity legislation. ... the financial sector was attacked over 340 times ... from fall of 2012 to spring of 2013. ... the systems that run America’s power grids are increasingly attacked ... Alexander also sought to dispel ... myths about the metadata collection program. ... “’Are you spying on everybody in the world?’ One, we don’t have that many people, and two, it’s not our mission.” ... NSA analysts have searched for information on fewer than 300 phone numbers in the telephone database, only 22 NSA officials can approve looking at this database, and only 35 NSA analysts can actually look at the metadata, Alexander said. He said “things get inflated” ... former Energy Secretary Steven Chu agreed. “It’s been sensationalized about how the NSA is running rampant over the rights,” ... Alexander’s speech came three days after The Day We Fight Back, an event organized to protest the NSA’s surveillance tactics. ... The event was held on the one-year anniversary of Internet-activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide and was supported by many Internet companies ..."

Submission + - Former Second Largest Linux Distributer Red Flag Software Has Shut Down (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: ZDNet reports, "Once the world's second-largest Linux distributor, Red Flag Software has shuttered reportedly due to mismanagement and after owing employees months in unpaid wages. China's state-funded answer to global software giants like Microsoft ... filed for liquidation over the weekend and terminated all employee contracts. Set up in late-1999 amid the dot-com boom, Red Flag was touted as an alternative to Windows ... It thrived in the early days, inking deals with partners such as Oracle and Dell which products were certified to support and shipped with Red Flag Software. The Beijing-based vendor was primarily funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Software Research, and later received additional funding from state-owned Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital and the Ministry of Information Industry's VC arm ... "A lack of brand awareness and sustained investments, coupled with the rise of rivals including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, led to its downfall," Eric Peng, Beijing-based research manager with IDC, said ... Peng noted that, during its hay days, Red Flag had enjoyed high adoption among government agencies, state-owned organizations, and schools."

Submission + - Dyson Become the Latest Target of Samsung's Litigation Lawyers (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: It seems like Samsung's legal eagles love a day in court. No sooner had they agreed to end their disputes with Google, hey are now targeting UK-based vacuum cleaner firm Dyson, for what Samsung called intolerable and groundless litigation which hurt its reputation to the tune of almost $10 million. Dyson says it is amazed that "a company over 100 times bigger than Dyson is so worried."

Submission + - U.S. Plunges To 46th In World Press Freedom Index... Below Romania (rsf.org) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: As one might expect, the economic decline of a nation into rule by a handful of corrupt oligarchs will have many other negative repercussions. One of these is a loss of civil rights and freedoms that many of us have taken for granted. Reporters Without Borders puts out their Press Freedom Index every year, and the 2014 ranking came out today. It was not a good showing for the USA. Specifically, the U.S. registered one of the steepest falls of all nations, down 13 slots to the #46 position, just above Haiti and just below Romania.

Submission + - What "news for nerds" sites should I use? 8

Submitted by stderr_dk
stderr_dk writes: I used to visit Slashdot quite often, but if Dice Holdings decide to switch the interface to what is currently known as "Beta", I'll have to find another site for my "stuff that matters"-fix.

So, Slashdot, what sites can you recommend for a "maybe-ex" /. user?

Submission + - Community-sourced news site, soylentnews.org, goes live 18

Submitted by umafuckit
umafuckit writes: soylentnews.org is the new way of taking the pulse of the nerd community. Soylentnews is a grassroots-based platform with the content feeds are powered by readers like you. The objective is to highlight news stories of general importance to everyone, but especially nerds. News about technology, art, science and politics: it's all there. Soylentnews is the new kid on the block and will adapt quickly to satisfy our community's needs and and push boundaries like never before. This is a real community site: no changes in format without a general consensus from the community. Stop by and see what you think of the freshly-launched site.

Submission + - Slashdot's new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Technology Lab / Information Technology
Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant
Flashy revamp seeks to draw new faces to the community—at the cost of the old.

by Lee Hutchinson — Feb 12 2014, 6:55pm E

        Web Culture

131

In the modern responsive Web Three Point Oh Internet, Slashdot stands like a thing frozen in time—it's a coelacanth stuck incongruously in an aquarium full of more colorful fish. The technology news aggregator site has been around since 1997, making it positively ancient as websites are reckoned. More importantly, Slashdot's long focus on open source technology news and topics has caused it to accrete a user base that tends to be extremely technical, extremely skilled, and extremely opinionated.

That user base is itself the main reason why Slashdot continues to thrive, even as its throwback interface makes it look to untrained eyes like a dated relic. Though the site is frequently a source of deep and rich commentary on topics, the barrier for new users to engage in the site's discussions is relatively high—certainly higher than, say, reddit (or even Ars). This doesn't cause much concern to the average Slashdot user, but tech job listing site Dice.com (which bought Slashdot in September 2012, along with Sourceforge and a number of other digital properties) appears to have decided it's time to drag Slashdot's interface into the 21st century in order to make things comfortable for everyone—old and new users alike.

Submission + - Suicide Bomb Trainer in Iraq Accidentally Blows Up His Class (nytimes.com) 4

Submitted by vikingpower
vikingpower writes: If there were such a thing, it would probably be rule No. 1 in the teaching manual for instructors of aspiring suicide bombers: Don’t give lessons with live explosives.

In what represented a cautionary tale for terrorist teachers, and a cause of dark humor for ordinary Iraqis, a commander at a secluded terrorist training camp north of Baghdad unwittingly used a belt packed with explosives while conducting a demonstration early Monday for a group of militants, killing himself and 21 other members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, army and police officials said.

Al Qaeda had already disavowedd the group, although it is not known whether this was due to....um.... "lack of terrorist professionality".

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