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Idle

Submission + - Study Finds The Sight of Meat Calms Men Down (laweekly.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Interesting Idle Story for Friday — "Forget massages, soothing music or aromatherapy. If you want to calm down a stressed-out man, just show him a few photos of meat. Preferably just-cooked hunks of beef filet, lamb chop and T-bone steaks, still sizzling and etched with blackened grill marks. Okay, perhaps not those exact cuts of meat, but researchers at McGill University in Canada did find that images of meat actually calmed men down and made them less aggressive."

Comment Re:Peering Agreement (Score 1) 315

by Erioll (#34433442) Attached to: Time Warner Defends Comcast In Level 3 Dispute

It depends on who's lying. Level 3 said they wanted the additional fee for video. Comcast says it's just an imbalance in the amount of data in their existing peering agreement, REGARDLESS of the type of traffic.

Personally, I'm more willing to believe Comcast here. Imbalances can happen for a huge number of different reasons. This one is obvious: they're going to be taking on a HUGE amount of extra data from Level 3 specifically because of Netflix.

Think of it this way, if roughly the same amount of data is going back and forth, they both can say "it's about even, so we're not going to charge each other." But if suddenly a LOT more is going one way than the other, then they can start charging more. It's no different than me going to my ISP and saying "I'm going to increase the amount I'm uploading by 10x, but you'll still charge the same right? You mean you want to charge me more now? But YOU are requesting a bit from me still! What do you mean no?" That's what Level 3 is doing by the sounds of it.
Science

Submission + - Pollutant Changes Sexual Preference (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have long known that mercury in the environment can harm wildlife. A new study shows it can also change their sexual preference. Researchers collected 120 white ibis chicks from the wild and raised them in captivity for 3 years. They fed some of the birds a diet laced with mercury, a common pollutant from coal-burning power plants. 55% of male birds in the group exposed to the highest level of mercury formed mating pairs with other males. Though the mechanism is unknown, the study suggests that mercury may threaten the survival of ibises and other species, as no laws exist to protect them from exposure.
Education

Submission + - Portland School Locks Out Robotics Club (thebeenews.com)

Submitted by IonOtter
IonOtter writes: From the Portland Bee: For seven years, members of “Mahr’s Metal Beavers”, the club’s brand name, were proud to say they were from Franklin High School. But now, going into their eighth year, the students and volunteer mentors find themselves physically locked out of the disused auto repair shop they once called home, in the bowels of the Inner Southeast high school. To make matters worse, school officials tried to claim the club money.

"We do our own fundraising, and have eleven club mentors, most of whom are professional engineers, working with us." said Rebecca LohKamp, the club's main mentor. "The last printout from the school I saw shows they are holding $7,500, funds dedicated to ‘Team 1432’,” LohKamp added. “Now they claim the money that we raised was given to the school, and might now belong to the school district."

Franklin High Business Manager, Steve Matthews, told The Bee that Franklin High is supporting the MESA program instead of the FIRST, and "can't do both". This is odd, because MESA, a supplier of military and law enforcement robots, doesn't offer any educational support on their website, while FIRST is specifically designed for educational institutions. Since the story hit The Bee, it was picked up by Fark, subsequently reddited, and even Tweeted by Mythbuster's Adam Savage and Grant Imahara
Government

Submission + - Porno-activist ordered to wear clothes by TSA (feminisnt.com)

Submitted by Cigarra
Cigarra writes: Self proclaimed "pornographer, sex worker, and atheist" Furry Girl tried to make things easier to Sea-Tac Airport TSA officials by wearing as few clothes as possible (video there!) for the (now standard) enhanced pat down, but she was ordered (against TSA rules!) to put her jacket on again.

It seems the TSA can only handle so much transparency when searching for weapons and explosives.
Intel

Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA 188

Posted by Soulskill from the made-to-order dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs."
Games

Submission + - Desert Bus for Hope (desertbus.org)

Submitted by MZeora
MZeora writes: What is Desert Bus for Hope? We are a charity fundraiser for Child’s Play. We raise money by playing the world’s worst video game, Desert Bus, in exchange for donations. The more money raised, the longer we play. That said, it would be pretty boring just to watch a bunch of people play the world’s worst video game. That’s why we have contests, live auctions, silent auctions, incredible prizes and a complete lack of self respect. We’ll also be accepting challenges to do all manner of silly things (Songs, Dances, Poems, Readings, etc) in exchange for donations.

Submission + - Upscale underground shelters make doomsday sexy (khou.com)

Submitted by
Death Metal Maniac
Death Metal Maniac writes: "McCarthy describes his properties as shelters, not bunkers, because Radius offers more than a place to hide. Each one has an internal generator for power, an air purification system, plumbing and septic. Multiple shelters can be connected through customized tunnels.

McCarthy said he came up with the idea for the company while working on an engineering degree. He says he met a young girl at the time whose family had a suicide pact in the event of a nuclear attack.

“It scared the daylights out of me,” McCarthy said.

Today he believes that many major threats still exist.

“We have missiles missing from China, we have uranium missing from the Soviet Union, and we have people in the Middle East who hate our guts,” McCarthy said. “It is a very bad combination.”"
Power

Submission + - Nuclear Fusion Possible Within 2-3 Years? (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Even with all the developments taking place in the areas of alternative energy such as solar and wind power, nuclear fusion still remains the holy grail of clean electricity generation. However, after decades of worldwide research costing billions of dollars, the goal of achieving “net-gain,” where more energy is produced than is required to trigger the fusion chain reaction, still remains elusive. Now researchers at Sandia Labs are claiming a breakthrough that could see break-even fusion reactions in as little as two to three years.

Submission + - Is this evidence that we can see the future? (newscientist.com) 2

Submitted by afabbro
afabbro writes: "Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal. What's more, sleptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws."
The Internet

Submission + - The REAL connection speeds for Internet users (pingdom.com)

Submitted by
climenole
climenole writes: "real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet.This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users."
Science

Submission + - The Myth of The McDonald's Burger That Won't Rot (seriouseats.com)

Submitted by gambit3
gambit3 writes: Remember that story about the McDonalds burger that would rot? The blogger claimed it was because it was a "chemical food". The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem. Well, someone decided to use science to verify those claims, including testing eight other home-made burgers. The result? The burger doesn't rot because it's small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there's no mold or bacterial growth.

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