Comment Re:Coprolites? (Score 1) 56
Old things get buried over time, it wasn't necessarily the original owner who buried it. As for the why, my guess is that they were used against attackers.
Comment Re:$10,000?!? (Score 1) 144
That game already exists.
Comment Re:The worst kind of human beings (Score 1) 144
I'd love to have the problems of that guy who can afford to spend 10000$ a month on a game.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 313
Because no matter what profession they choose, they will work with computers. That's the way the world is going. Teaching them how to use those computers effectively will be a huge advantage to them. For example, most office workers spend their days doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Knowing how to write scripts to automate those tasks would be very useful. Teaching the basics of programming isn't equivalent of training them to be developers, it's just showing them how to use the tools they will be working with.
Wolfram Language Demo Impresses 216
theodp writes "The devil will be in the details, but if you were stoked about last November's announcement of the Wolfram programming language, you'll be pleased to know that a just-released dry-but-insanely-great demo delivered by Stephen Wolfram does not disappoint. Even if you're not in love with the syntax or are a FOSS devotee, you'll find it hard not to be impressed by Wolfram's 4-line solution to a traveling salesman tour of the capitals of Western Europe, 6-line camera-capture-to-image-manipulation demo, or 2-line web crawling and data visualization example. And that's just for starters. So, start your Raspberry Pi engines, kids!"
How An Astronaut Nearly Drowned During a Space Walk 144
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "About 44 minutes into a 6.5-hour spacewalk last July, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano noted that water was building up inside his helmet – the second consecutive spacewalk during which he reported the problem. As Parmitano worked his way back to the air lock, water covered his eyes, filled his ears, disrupted communications, and eventually began to enter his nose, making it difficult for him to breathe. 'I know that if the water does overwhelm me I can always open the helmet,' wrote Parmitano about making it to the airlock. 'I'll probably lose consciousness, but in any case that would be better than drowning inside the helmet.' Later, when crew mates removed his helmet, they found that it contained at least 1.5 quarts of water. In a 122-page report released Wednesday, a mishap investigation board identified a range of causes for the near-tragedy, including organizational causes that carried echoes of accident reports that followed the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews in 1986 and 2003. Engineers traced the leak to a fan-and-pump assembly that is part of a system that extracts moisture from the air inside the suit and returns it to the suit's water-based cooling system. Contaminants clogged holes that would have carried the water to the cooling system after it was extracted from the air. The water backed up and flowed into the suit's air-circulation system, which sent it into Parmitano's helmet (PDF).
The specific cause of the contamination is still under investigation but investigators also identified deeper causes, one of which involved what some accident-investigation specialists have dubbed the 'normalization of deviance' – small malfunctions that appear so often that eventually they are accepted as normal. In this case, small water leaks had been observed in space-suit helmets for years, despite the knowledge that the water could form a film on the inside of a helmet, fogging the visor or reacting with antifogging chemicals on the visor in ways that irritate eyes. NASA officials are not planning on resuming non-urgent spacewalks before addressing all 16 of the highest priority suggestions from the Mishap Investigation Board. 'I think it's a tribute to the agency that we're not hiding this stuff, that we're actually out trying to describe these things, and to describe where we can get better,' says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. 'I think that's how we prevent Columbias and Challengers.'"
The specific cause of the contamination is still under investigation but investigators also identified deeper causes, one of which involved what some accident-investigation specialists have dubbed the 'normalization of deviance' – small malfunctions that appear so often that eventually they are accepted as normal. In this case, small water leaks had been observed in space-suit helmets for years, despite the knowledge that the water could form a film on the inside of a helmet, fogging the visor or reacting with antifogging chemicals on the visor in ways that irritate eyes. NASA officials are not planning on resuming non-urgent spacewalks before addressing all 16 of the highest priority suggestions from the Mishap Investigation Board. 'I think it's a tribute to the agency that we're not hiding this stuff, that we're actually out trying to describe these things, and to describe where we can get better,' says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. 'I think that's how we prevent Columbias and Challengers.'"
Comment Re:isn't it used on violent prisoners? (Score 1) 326
Solitary confinement reduces the harm done to others to pretty much zero, because the prisoner is physically isolated and thus incapable of causing trouble. What other method are speaking of that can guarantee that?
Comment Re:How DARE you propose NOT to allow this? (Score 1) 146
These children wouldn't exactly be like their parents either, that's the point.
Comment Not necessarily (Score 1) 695
That's not the only alternative to money. He could be proposing communism.
Submission + - The Xamarin Maneuver: How Microsoft can win the app store game (citeworld.com)
mattydread23 writes: What if Microsoft is playing a totally different game than all the mobile pundits think? Everybody assumes that the Nokia X's embrace of Android is part of a long-term ploy to get more apps on Windows Phone.. But that's the old Microsoft: the Plaform company. The new Microsoft is a devices and services business, where the devices are all devices, and the services are all services. While Windows Phone is important to Microsoft, it's just one device, and one endpoint for a wide array of services. Those services can also target iOS and Android, whether Google's branch or the various AOSP forks. What developers need is one way of building the apps that work with those services, no matter what platform they're targeting. Simon Bisson with a very thoughtful and original post on the subject of Microsoft and Android.
Submission + - US War Machine Downsizing? 3
mrspoonsi writes: BBC Reports: Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel has unveiled plans to shrink the US Army to its smallest size since before World War Two. Outlining his budget plan, the Pentagon chief proposed trimming the active-duty Army to between 440,000 and 450,000 personnel — from 520,000 currently. The US currently spends more on defense than the combined total of the next 12 countries, as ranked by defense spending.
Submission + - Does Relying On an IDE Make You a Bad Programmer? (itworld.com) 2
itwbennett writes: Writing about his career decisions, programming language choices, and regrets, Rob Conery says that as a .NET developer he became more reliant on an IDE than he would have with PHP. Blogger, and .NET developer, Matthew Mombrea picks up the thread, coming to the defense of IDEs (Visual Stuidio in particular). Mombrea argues that 'being a good developer isn’t about memorizing the language specific calls, it's about knowing the available ways to solve a problem and solving it using the best technique or tools as you can.' What's your take? Does using an IDE make you lazy with the language? Would you be better off programming with Notepad? Does the same answer hold true for a team of developers?
Comment It's not that hard (Score 1) 117
The subculture weirdoes dress in a certain common way exactly to be easily identifiable. It's about as subtle as holding a blinking "I'm a goth." sign over their head. So while I think that the software is impressive, I wouldn't worry about the privacy implications much, it's only able to profile extroverts who want to be noticed.
Submission + - Inventor of AK-47 Dies at 94
necro81 writes: Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, an arms designer for the Soviet Union, creator of the AK-47, passed away today at age 94. Kalashnikov was born a peasant and entered the Soviet Army as a conscript. However, the self-taught tinkerer had an aptitude that took him far. The AK-47, his best-known creation, was praised for its reliability and low cost; attributes that have made it the most successful firearm ever, seeing use in homeland defense, rebellion, terrorism, and untold massacres. The inventor was himself ambivalent about the uses his creation had seen, but was nevertheless proud of his contribution to his country, where he is praised as a hero.
Reuters: RSA Weakened Encryption For $10M From NSA 464
Lasrick writes "As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned." Asks an anonymous reader: "If the NIST curves really are broken (as has been suggested for years), then most SSL connections might be too, amirite?"
