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Comment Tinker Bell is an Engineer Now (Score 1) 298

In Disney's 2008 "Tinker Bell" Tinker Bell is an engineer. She spends much of the movie fighting "her destiny" because, basically, the "tinkers" are not cool. The general theme though is that she has a powerful gift for engineering and that she should recognize that. The climax of the film is Tinker Bell frantically producing blueprints while schematics and equations float around her head. She saves the day, wins the admiration and respect of the community, her friends and her self. She also earns the privilege of participating in a group activity she though the was going to be excluded from because she wasn't cool.

Personally, it chokes me up a little bit to imagine 6 year old girls saying, "When I grow up I want to be an engineer just like Tinker Bell."

Firefox

Firefox Lorentz Keeps Plugin Crashes Under Control 115

pastababa writes "A beta of the Firefox Lorentz project is now available for download and public testing. Eming reports Firefox 'Lorentz' provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in plugins. Plugins run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. The process-isolation feature has been in Google's Chrome from the beginning. Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, and the crash of one tab does not affect the running of the rest of Chrome browser. Firefox currently isolates only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page. Mozilla encourages users to test Firefox 'Lorentz' on their favorite websites. Users who install Firefox 'Lorentz' will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included."

Comment Good ol' false dichotomy (Score 1) 239

Why can't we have all of that?

Development is not homogeneous. Some people may still be subsistence farmers with little access to clean water. 150 miles away, someone in a city may have running water, electricity and an office job. But her business is hampered by astronomical communication costs. Her business profits provide tax revenue to the government. If tax revenues go up, the government can do things like improve the roads to the farmer's town so he can get more crops to market and not be a subsistence farmer anymore an just be a farmer who can afford school fees for his children.

Submission + - Twitter survey causes tweet-alanche (skepticblog.org)

JLavezzo writes: Brian Dunning, host of the Skeptoid podcast, decided to combine a survey he needed data for with an experiement into the dynamics of Twitter's social networking. Did it work?
'The good parts worked better than I hoped,' he says 'and unfortunately, undesired side effects ... which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me ... were just as potent. Now, before I describe what happened, let me state outright that it was shockingly naive of me not to foresee what would happen. It was dumb, it annoyed a lot of people, and I have no excuse other than failure to think it through very well. So, my apologies, and I offer no defense of what turned out to be a giant mess.'
Read on so you'll be prepared when your marketing director asks you to set up the same thing.

Submission + - How Not To Do A Twitter Survey (skepticblog.org)

JLavezzo writes: Brian Dunning posted an article on what he calls his 'greatest clusterfuck of the year: the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment, which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me.
I have an upcoming Skeptoid podcast episode for which I want to include some informal survey data. I've also been thinking a lot about Twitter for its potential to virally spread information. So I thought it would be a clever idea to combine my survey with Twitter, which (I thought) would be a lot of fun for everyone and would accomplish two goals:
1. Virally spread awareness of my podcast, Skeptoid
2. Get a huge number of respondents to my survey
Well, it worked. The good parts worked better than I hoped, and unfortunately, undesired side effects were just as potent.'
As one commenter put it:
'Turning Twitter's echo chamber into a denial-of-service attack. How fiendishly clever.'

Submission + - Lawyer demands jury stops Googling (itwire.com) 1

coomaria writes: So lawyers want to get juries to sign, on threat of prison, that they won't Google the case they are hearing. Apparently it could influence their decision, and only lawyers are allowed to do that, right?
Space

Submission + - Planck Satellite Releases First Images (wordpress.com)

davecl writes: The Planck Satellite has released its first images. These are from the 'First Look Survey' and show a strip of the sky scanned at a range of radio and submillimetre wavelengths. The results are already better than what was seen by the previous microwave background satellite, WMAP. ESA's coverage of the results can be found here, with more details and images available in English and French. The Planck Mission Blog contains more details of the project and continuing coverage. I maintain the mission blog but even I am impressed with these first images!
Education

Submission + - CERN boss targets linear collider (physicsworld.com)

Hamish Johnston writes: "The boss of CERN wants the next big experiment in particle physics after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be built at the Geneva lab. Speaking in a video interview with physicsworld.com, Rolf-Dieter Heuer says that CERN should host the experiment, which would collide electrons and positrons in a linear accelerator. Although a design for the machine has not been finalized by the international particle-physics community, Heuer is keen to bring the collider to CERN. "I would be a bad director-general if I did not push for CERN at least bidding for the next global project," Heuer told physicsworld.com. "CERN is a fantastic place. [It] has proven that it can host such a project and therefore I think CERN should do it." However, Heuer is aware that it is far from certain that CERN will host the facility — Fermilab in the US is likely to be a contender — and the CERN chief is looking forward to bids from rival labs. "Competition is always welcome," he says. In a separate interview, CERN's head of communications James Gillies rejects claims that the initial switch-on was over-hyped, putting down the extensive media interests to the fear of black holes and Dan Brown's Angel and Demons. Gillies said, "We didn't over-hype it. The hype was there and we lived with it.""

Submission + - GeoCities closing October 26, 2009 (yahoo.com)

angkor writes: "End of an era: On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files..."

Comment Re:Bad summary (Score 1) 187

I think you're describing PL4 security. That's not the trick here. When they say different sources, they mean different TYPES of sources, geospacial, dates, ip addresses, telephone logs, video metadata, random XML, SQL. Dogpile searches multiple sources of unstructured text.

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