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Comment One positive comment about the redesign (Score 1) 2219

by denominateur (#46194585) Attached to: Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!

One thing that I just noticed that I like about the redesign is what happens when the display width is reduced below around 800 pixels. The fact that the right-hand sidebar disappears and is replaced by a left-hand button is a bit strange. That button should be on the right for consistency reasons.

Comment The new design is terrible! (Score 1) 2219

by denominateur (#46183301) Attached to: Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!

I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.

1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish....
2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site.
3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.

Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...

Comment The beta interface is terrible! (Score 2) 100

I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.

1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish....
2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site. Look at this, I made three paragraphs and there's about an INCH of space between them!
3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.

Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...
Space

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.
krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Mars

Mars Images Reveal Evidence of Ancient Lakes 128

Posted by timothy from the older-I-get-the-wetter-mars-was dept.
Matt_dk writes "Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago, a period that was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the surface, according to research published today in the journal Geology. Earlier research had suggested that Mars had a warm and wet early history but that between 4 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, before the Hesperian Epoch, the planet lost most of its atmosphere and became cold and dry. In the new study, the researchers analysed detailed images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the red planet, and concluded that there were later episodes where Mars experienced warm and wet periods."

Submission + - Thorium, the next nuclear fuel? (wired.com) 1

Submitted by mrshermanoaks
mrshermanoaks writes: When the nuclear choices were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches. So why are we not building these reactors?
Moon

Did Chandrayaan Find Organic Matter On the Moon? 141

Posted by CmdrTaco from the regolith-wasn't-in-my-spellchecker dept.
Matt_dk writes "Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon's surface. 'The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,' Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA's chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea."
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"
Science

New Graphical Representation of the Periodic Table 140

Posted by kdawson from the thulium-and-thalium dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The great power of Mendeleev's periodic table was that it allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. But can this arrangement be improved? Two new envisionings of the periodic table attempt to do just that. The first uses a new graphical representation that shows the relative sizes of atoms as well as their groups and periods. The other uses the same kind of group theoretical approach that particle physicists developed to classify particles by their symmetries (abstract). That helped particle physicists predict the existence of new particles, but may have limited utility for chemists who seem to have discovered (or predicted) all of the elements they need already."

Submission + - Swedish hackers in a squat fight eviction (hackerspaces.org) 4

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: The newly opened Abbenay Hackspace in Stockholm has released a call for support in their struggle to keep their space. It was an empty office building until squatters moved in. The discussions with officials have stalled completely and the squatters live under the constant threat of police raids. Abbenay Hackspace is asking people to contact the landlord, and explain why creative spaces such as hackerspaces are important to them. Is there room for hackerspaces in major cities? Or is squatting the only viable strategy for hackerspaces in expensive areas?

Comment Re:Evil. (Score 4, Interesting) 390

by denominateur (#29298773) Attached to: Google Patents Its Home Page

I remember reading somewhere that there are processes in place for a patent submitter to deprecate a patent and forcefully render its content public domain. Am I remembering incorrectly? If not, then that would surely be a sign of goodwill as it would render the given content unpatentable.

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