Comment I think there is a world market for maybe ... (Score 5, Insightful) 386
... five computers.
Comment Hardly a breakthrough (Score 0) 308
I'm sure these girl's work has some merit, but this is hardly a breakthrough. Rhizobial inoculation of soybean is a common agricultural practice around the world.
Comment Re:Im all for human rights... (Score 1) 1482
So Communists believe in restricting economic freedom. Should we call for the boycott of companies that hire communist employees? Wait! That already happened. It was called McCarthyism.
You fight political ideas by convincing the majority of people that these ideas are wrong, not by trying to silence the proponents of the ideas you oppose.
Comment CMMI utterly useless in my opinion (Score 4, Interesting) 228
I live in Argentina, where any software company getting a CMMI certification can apply for a tax cut. Because of that, CMMI was all the rage around eight years ago or so. Turns out CMMI was so utterly useless and cumbersome that at this point most companies prefer to forget about the tax cuts rather than bother with being CMMI certified. Only companies seeking government contracts continue doing so.
Comment Goiânia Accident (Score 5, Informative) 98
Glad it was already found.
To understand the risks that this type of events involve check what happened in Brazil several years ago when radioactive medical material went missing and ended up killing several people
Submission + - A Javascript Editor That Doesn't Suck
kreide33 writes: Most code editors provide features such as syntax highlighting and auto completion, but the programmer still needs to mentally execute the code to understand how it will actually work. This blog entry describes a code editor that in addition to all the usual bells and whistles also visualizes the actual code execution, live while the user is editing. The implementation is done using Rhino and the article goes into detail on how the Rhino debugger API is used to single-step through the JavaScript code to simulate its execution and the result is then displayed side-by-side with the code.
Comment Take the test yourself (Score 5, Informative) 263
Here
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/
You can take a sample test yourself. See how basic the questions are and feel appalled to see the % of students in your country that managed to pass each level.
For example, only 11% of students in my country (Argentina) were able to reach level 3 (identify the smallest value in a table). Highest rank for that question was Shanghai-China (89%). USA was 48%.
Comment Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours (Score 1) 248
Well, he obviously can't. That's why he is asking the US government to do it for him.
Comment Re:Call me skeptical (Score 2) 215
Ironically, in 2009 Chavez ordered to confiscate one of these body exhibitions that was on tour in Caracas, because he said it was immoral to put unsepulchered bodies on display.
http://news.sky.com/story/676071/chavez-blocks-venezuela-dead-body-art-show
In case you understand Spanish, you can hear it from the man himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2MfLT-U2qo
Submission + - Winemaking Waste Could Become Biofuel Starter (acs.org)
Tator Tot writes: Grape pomace, the mashed up skins and stems left over from making wine and grape juice, could serve as a good starting point for ethanol production, according to a new study (from the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry).
Due to growing interest in biofuels, researchers have started looking for cheap and environmentally sustainable ways to produce such fuels, especially ethanol. Biological engineer Jean VanderGheynst at the University of California, Davis, turned to grape pomace, because winemakers in California alone produce over 100,000 tons of the fruit scraps each year, with much of it going to waste.
Due to growing interest in biofuels, researchers have started looking for cheap and environmentally sustainable ways to produce such fuels, especially ethanol. Biological engineer Jean VanderGheynst at the University of California, Davis, turned to grape pomace, because winemakers in California alone produce over 100,000 tons of the fruit scraps each year, with much of it going to waste.
Submission + - Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end patent wars (metro.co.uk)
concealment writes: "So-called patent wars have raged in the smartphone and tablet era, with Apple and Samsung most consistently at loggerheads over their products.
The tech giants have had mixed results in the courtroom, however, as Apple secured a significant legal victory in the US but Samsung won comparative cases in South Korea and Japan, with many more lawsuits not yet heard.
Mr Bezos told Metro that innovation and society itself was threatened by the patent lawsuit culture."
The tech giants have had mixed results in the courtroom, however, as Apple secured a significant legal victory in the US but Samsung won comparative cases in South Korea and Japan, with many more lawsuits not yet heard.
Mr Bezos told Metro that innovation and society itself was threatened by the patent lawsuit culture."
Submission + - New Proof That the Moon Was Created in a Massive Collision 2
derekmead writes: New proof that the giant impact hypothesis is correct: A paper published today in Nature shares findings of a chemical analysis of Moon rocks that shows fractional differences between the makeup of the Earth and Moon that most likely were caused by the collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planet around 4.5 billion years ago.
Although the two are quite similar, it’s been previously shown that Moon rocks lack volatile elements, which suggests they may have evaporated during the incredibly intense heat and pressure created during an impact event. But if the hypothesis that light elements actually evaporated from Moon rocks during their formation is correct, you’d expect to find evidence of elements being layered by mass — heavier elements would condense first, and so on.
That process is known as isotopic fractionation — a concept central to carbon dating — and the Washington University team's results suggest they found exactly that. They compared the blend of zinc isotopes in Moon rocks and Earth samples, and found that the Moon rocks held slightly higher proportions of heavier zinc isotopes. If the Moon was indeed once part of Earth — which has been shown by extensive modeling — the difference in the balance of zinc profiles would most likely be explained by lighter zinc isotopes evaporating away following a collision.
Although the two are quite similar, it’s been previously shown that Moon rocks lack volatile elements, which suggests they may have evaporated during the incredibly intense heat and pressure created during an impact event. But if the hypothesis that light elements actually evaporated from Moon rocks during their formation is correct, you’d expect to find evidence of elements being layered by mass — heavier elements would condense first, and so on.
That process is known as isotopic fractionation — a concept central to carbon dating — and the Washington University team's results suggest they found exactly that. They compared the blend of zinc isotopes in Moon rocks and Earth samples, and found that the Moon rocks held slightly higher proportions of heavier zinc isotopes. If the Moon was indeed once part of Earth — which has been shown by extensive modeling — the difference in the balance of zinc profiles would most likely be explained by lighter zinc isotopes evaporating away following a collision.
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What happens if you Open Source, and in doing so violate a Patent? 1
An anonymous reader writes: We have developed a fairly useful Video Processing algorithm that we are thinking of open sourcing in 2013. There is one snag however: There are hundreds of imaging and image/video processing Patents that have been granted over the years, and some (small) part of our algorithm may violate one or more of these patents accidentally. Checking our work against the mountain of imaging patents out there is unfeasible. It would take a team of 5 months to do that. It doesn't help that many of these patents use obscure mathematical notations and formulae that make it difficult to decipher quickly precisely what the patent holder has patented. Now suppose that we open source our algorithm, and it turns out that it violates one or more patents. Could we get sued for damages because we open sourced it, and hundreds or thousands of people are now using it for free? It could take the patent holder months or years to identify that their patent is being violated, by which time our algorithm may have thousands of users. To sum it up: If you open source something that — accidentally — violates somebodys patent somewhere, what happens to you? Do you get sued for damages or forced to pay a high license fee? Do you have to shut the Open Source project down and take all files offline? Has anyone been in such a situation before? Are there any legal mechanisms or protections that shield you in a case like this? Thanks for any advice!
Submission + - Alpha Centauri has an Earth-sized planet
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers have announced that the nearest star system in the sky — Alpha Centauri — has an Earth-sized planet orbiting one of its stars. Alpha Cen is technically a three-star system: a binary composed of two stars very much like the Sun, orbited by a third, a red dwarf, much farther out. Using the Doppler technique (looking for very small changes in the velocities of the stars) astronomers detected a planet orbiting the smaller of the two stars in the binary, Alpha Centauri B. The planet has a mass only 1.13 times that of the Earth, making it one of the smallest yet detected.However, it orbits the star only 6 million kilometers out, so it's far too hot to be habitable.
The signal from the planet is extremely weak but solidly detected, giving astronomers even greater hope of being able to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a star in its habitable zone."
The signal from the planet is extremely weak but solidly detected, giving astronomers even greater hope of being able to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a star in its habitable zone."
Submission + - Conway's Game of Life Freed from the Pixel Grid (revolutionanalytics.com)
Guillermito writes: What happens when you take the well known Conway's Game of Life and modify the rules so they can be applied to a continuous world, instead of the original, pixel-based, discrete one? Well, that is the question the authors of the SmoothLife project are trying to answer: They have generalized Conway's Game of Life to a continuous domain. Rather than working with discrete square cell, the software works at the level of points in a continuous 2-D space. A cell lives or dies depending on how much of a small disk in its immediate neighbourhood is filled, and also the density of a ring surrounding the cell. You can see some amazing 2D and 3D animations created with this software that really resemble living cells under a microscope.
