leonia - Slashdot User

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2009 @09:40PM from the nice-feed dept.

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.

Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus 205

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @02:40PM from the concealed-carry-in-australian-waters dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"

Comment Universities with parental workload relief (Score 1) 616

by leonia on Sunday March 15, 2009 @10:52AM (#27199899) Attached to: Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families

Some universities do offer assistance to primary care givers. For example, Columbia University has "parental workload relief" programs (http://worklife.columbia.edu/parental-leave-policies-resources) that provide faculty with a semester of no-teaching and a delayed tenure clock. Still does not make it easy to combine kids and faculty careers. The policy is gender-neutral and there's a small fraction of new fathers who have used the program.

Comment Mandatory competition (Score 1) 647

by leonia on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @02:37PM (#26800725) Attached to: WSJ Says Gov't Money Injection Won't Help Broadband

The article fails to mention that in both Korea and Japan, the government played a major role: In Japan, by forcing the incumbent to allow multiple IP operators to use the fiber at very low rates and in Korea, by construction subsidies. This isn't really technology competition as the article calls for - all the countries with cheap broadband use fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-apartment-complex, with CATV playing a relatively small role. (There's very limited WiBro, the local version of WiMax, deployment in Korea, which plays almost no role.) And, as far as I know, all those countries have deployed such cheaper and more advanced infrastructure without violating network neutrality.

The argument about population density might explain the absence of DSL and fiber in Montana, but doesn't exactly explain the high cost of FiOS in New Jersey (or its limited availability). The population density of New Jersey is very similar to that of Korea, at around 400-500 people/sq km.

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