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Comment There is no free lunch (Score 1) 163

Well, it costs money to run all the servers and machines that deliver cat videos and the latest pictures posted by your secret crush. Who's going to pay the bills for those servers ? Someone somewhere has to pay. Either you pay upfront with cold hard cash, in which case you can make indignant noses about unlawful uses of your data. If you don't want to pay cash, and instead have a "free" service, your data is what the developers will try to monetize. And there ain't a goddamn thing you can do about it. Of course, the NSA has gone a step further with their data collection by forcing companies with even paying customers to hand the user data over to the NSA. In this case, get the Internet off the US hands. I see balkanization of the internet in the future.
Moon

Study Explains Why Lunar Craters Are Bigger On the Near Side 85

An anonymous reader writes "A new study of asteroid craters on the moon has uncovered some big differences in the composition of the crust on the two sides of the moon. 'While massive impact basins pockmark the moon's near side, its far side contains considerably smaller basins. The discrepancy in crater distribution has puzzled scientists for decades. To investigate what may have caused this difference, the team obtained data from NASA's twin GRAIL probes, which orbited the moon from January to December 2012. During its mission, the probes circled the moon, making measurements of its gravity. Zuber and her colleagues used this data to generate a highly detailed map of the moon's crust, showing areas where the crust thickens and thins; in general, the group observed that the moon's near side has a thinner crust than its far side.'"

Submission + - Mozilla plan seeks to debug scientific code (nature.com)

ananyo writes: An offshoot of Mozilla is aiming to discover whether a review process could improve the quality of researcher-built software that is used in myriad fields today, ranging from ecology and biology to social science. In an experiment being run by the Mozilla Science Lab, software engineers have reviewed selected pieces of code from published papers in computational biology.The reviewers looked at snippets of code up to 200 lines long that were included in the papers and written in widely used programming languages, such as R, Python and Perl. But some researchers say that having software reviewers looking over their shoulder might backfire. “One worry I have is that, with reviews like this, scientists will be even more discouraged from publishing their code,” says biostatistician Roger Peng at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “We need to get more code out there, not improve how it looks.”

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