muncadunc - Slashdot User

Submission + - BBC Discovers Doctor Who (radiotimes.com)

Submitted by

jd

on Monday December 12, 2011 @12:23AM

jd writes: "Well, two long-lost episodes (Galaxy Four part 3 and Underwater Menace part 2). The Radio Times is unimpressed, the BBC is ecstatic, and the "Missing, Presumed Wiped" conference at which they were exhibited are enthralled."

Submission + - Publicly available Russian election results show e (samarcandanalytics.com)

Submitted by

gotfork

on Sunday December 11, 2011 @05:05PM

gotfork writes: "As some Russians protest the results of the recent election, several commentators (Russian, English) have started looking at the results which are posted to the election commission web site and there's very strong evidence of fraud. Voter turnout correlates strongly with percent voting for the ruling party, United Russia, and there are a lot of polling stations with nearly 100% turnout and 100% voting for United Russia in some unusual places. The raw data is posted so you can do your own analysis."

Submission + - Romney and Gingrich Clash on Lunar Mining Colonies (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Sunday December 11, 2011 @03:07PM

MarkWhittington writes: "During a Republican presidential debate in Des Moines Iowa, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sparred over an issue that rarely comes up in political debates — lunar mining colonies. Romney said, "We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I'm not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that." The line brought laughter from the audience."

Submission + - 8 Best Free ASCII Linux Games (linuxlinks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11, 2011 @12:47PM

An anonymous reader writes: The idiom 'don't judge a book by its cover' can be extended to 'don't judge a computer game by its graphics'. Whilst the games featured in this article have extremely basic graphics, they have many redeeming qualities beyond evoking fond memories of the early days of computer gaming.

Text-based games are often forgotted and neglected in the Linux press. However, there are some real ASCII gems out there waiting to be explored which are immensely addictive and great fun to play.

The purpose of this article is to identify our favourite ASCII based games. There are no fancy graphics here, just great gameplay coupled with the urge of always having just one more play.

Submission + - Is the Earth Special?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday December 10, 2011 @03:46AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Planetary scientists say there are aspects to our planet and its evolution that are remarkably strange. In the first place there is earth's strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but has something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth's liquid outer core and without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun. Next there's plate tectonics. We live on a planet that is constantly recycling its crust limiting the amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere — a natural way of controlling the greenhouse effect. Then there's Jupiter-sized outer planets protecting the earth from frequent large impacts. But the strangest thing of all is our big Moon. "As the Earth rotates, it wobbles on its axis like a child's spinning top," says Prof Monica Grady. "What the Moon does is dampen down that wobble and that helps to prevent extreme climate fluctuations" — which would be detrimental to life." The moon's tides have also made long swaths of earth's coastline into areas of that are regularly shifted between dry and wet providing a proving ground for early sea life to test the land for its suitability as a habitat. The "Rare Earth Hypothesis is one solution to the Fermi Paradox (PDF) because, if Earth is uniquely special as an abode of life, ETI will necessarily be rare or even non-existent. And in the absence of verifiable alien contact, scientific opinion will forever remain split as to whether the Universe teems with life or we are alone in the inky blackness."

Submission + - 'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Friday December 09, 2011 @03:39PM

sciencehabit writes: A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

Submission + - Why Android Upgrades Take So Long

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Thursday December 08, 2011 @04:43PM

adeelarshad82 writes: Google released the Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" code base to the general public and the manufacturers. Though it maybe a while before it's actually rolled out to the phones. In an attempt to explain why it takes so long, Motorola and Sony Ericsson shed some light on the process involved. Motorola described the long testing process involved where as Sony explained the issue with the time consuming certification process.

Submission + - 'Merging Tsunami' Amplified Destruction in Japan

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @09:26PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The magnitude-9.0 Tohoku-Oki temblor, the fifth-most powerful quake ever recorded, triggered a tsunami that doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power at landfall, as seen in data from NASA and European radar satellites that captured at least two wave fronts that day that merged to form a single, double-high wave far out at sea. This wave was capable of traveling long distances without losing power. Ocean ridges and undersea mountain chains pushed the waves together along certain directions from the tsunami's origin. "It was a one-in-10-million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites," says study team member Y. Tony Song. "Researchers have suspected for decades that such 'merging tsunamis' might have been responsible for the 1960 Chilean tsunami that killed about 200 people in Japan and Hawaii, but nobody had definitively observed a merging tsunami until now," The study suggests scientists may be able to create maps that take into account all undersea topography, even sub-sea ridges and mountains far from shore to help scientists improve tsunami forecasts. "We can use what we learned to make better forecasts of tsunami danger in specific coastal regions anywhere in the world, depending on the location and the mechanism of an undersea quake," says team member C.K. Shum."

Submission + - You can't run from the cop car of the future (msn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04, 2011 @08:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: Police cars of the very near future will be scary smart. Equipped with eight cameras, voice commands, incredibly intelligent software, and LTE radios, perps won't get away with anything.

Motorola Solutions isn't working on building the latest and greatest Droid — that's Motorola Mobility. These guys have their fingers more in corporate and governmental pots. Engineers have done hundreds of ride-alongs, surveys, and simulations, and have applied all of their wireless knowledge into designing a police car that is so advanced it's actually very unsettling.

Submission + - The Personal Computer is Dead

Submitted by theodp on Saturday December 03, 2011 @05:37AM

theodp writes: Richard Stallman rankled many with his good riddance to Steve Jobs' 'malign influence on people's computing.' But now RMS gets an amen-of-sorts from Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain, who explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I’m sure angry.' Are Stallman's views on their way to becoming positively mainstream?

Comment Another browser would've shown up (Score 1) 246

by muncadunc on Friday October 28, 2011 @04:55PM (#37873708) Attached to: Microsoft Tried To Buy Netscape: Suppose They Had?

This is kind of a silly conjecture. It's not as if some other browser wouldn't have arisen to challenge MS-Netscape.

SourceForge Removes Blanket Blocking 147

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, 2010 @01:12PM from the power-to-the-people dept.

Recently there was much gnashing of teeth as SourceForge (which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) started programmatically blocking users in certain countries to comply with US export restrictions. Thankfully they didn't let it end there and have found a way to put the power back in the hands of the users. "Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we've ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month's change."

Comment Yes and no. (Score 1) 2

by muncadunc on Monday January 11, 2010 @02:07AM (#30720296) Attached to: Full body scanners are detailed depthmap makers

Yes and no.
You can most certainly use the image from such a scanner to create a depth-map. The quality of the image, certainly of any image you'd get from a TV screen, isn't very much use in making a good 3D model, though.
The suggestion that such a model could be "animated" seems a bit... naive. Are they concerned about the Internet Perverts wanking to one?
As well, the point made that "This was done on a very slow computer" is pretty much irrelevant. Of course you don't need a fast computer to make models from depth maps. It just takes time. Again, the video comes across as a little naive, a little overly outraged.
There's very real reasons to be mad about these devices. Worrying about skinnable 3D models being made from them does not seem like one of them.

After Berlusconi Attack, Italy Considers Web Censorship 160

Posted by timothy on Friday December 18, 2009 @07:27AM from the streisand-should-charge-a-consulting-fee dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Italian government has proposed introducing new restrictions on the Internet after a Facebook fan page for the man who allegedly attacked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday drew almost 100,000 users in under 48 hours. However, the planned clampdown on Internet hate speech sparked a heated debate over censorship and freedom of expression, leading Interior Minister Roberto Maroni to execute a partial U-turn."

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @05:53PM from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

Slashdot Top Deals