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Comment Re:Or... from the article, it's inevitable (Score 0) 341

by idioto (#44718565) Attached to: The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise

it's not really a band aid solution, but a practical one, verbatim:

After weighing the potential benefits and costs, the commission came down pretty squarely against the idea. “Given the enormous cost, limited effectiveness, questionable feasibility, and probable significant adverse economic and ecological impacts of such a project, it does not seem prudent to seriously further consider such a proposal,” the report concluded.

But that was before the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that a three-foot rise in sea levels is almost CERTAIN by 2100.

Comment Our dog got valley fever and died last year in AZ (Score 2, Interesting) 243

by idioto (#44310513) Attached to: The City Where People Are Afraid To Breathe

Your pets can get this too, especially if they eat dirt. It's something to be aware of, since the vets took a couple of months figuring it out. It's the sort of thing if you want an expedited diagnosis you probably have to bring up yourself, so it's good to see it getting a little publicity so maybe doctors will become more aware in other parts of the country/world.

Comment AZ: I don't think my voted will be counted (Score 0) 821

by idioto (#41898161) Attached to: U.S. Election Day In Progress: What's Been Your Experience?

I went to the polling place with my voter ID card and driver's license. Was on the list for the polls, but since they supposedly sent me an absentee ballot which I did not request, I was put on a provisional ballot. Had to wait an hour to actually cast a vote. Got a receipt from the polling guy who was handling provisionals. Took it back and read it later. Turns out it needed my signature, and the one of the poll worker. He didn't handle the provisional ballot correctly, and I am extremely pissed off. I shouldn't have had to cast a provisional ballot in the first place, and the polling worker did not handle the ballot properly. I am going to go back there and raise some hell later.
Software

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Image

OH Senate Passes Bill Banning Human-Animal Hybrids 197

Posted by samzenpus from the no-centaurs-allowed dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The sci-fi movie Splice seems to have scared the Ohio's State Senator Steve Buehrer. The Ohio Senate has passed Sen. Buehrer's bill banning 'the creation, transportation, or receipt of a human-animal hybrid, the transfer of a nonhuman embryo into a human womb, and the transfer of a human embryo into a nonhuman womb.' So much for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."
Intel

The Big Technical Mistakes of History 244

Posted by kdawson from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."

Comment uc santa cruz rules (Score 0) 502

by idioto (#31268864) Attached to: Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

i went there, and while i'd love to dork out with you and drop street cred. if you went to uc santa cruz you'd also be exposed to gamelan music and all sorts of ear raping sounds.

anyhow, i can pick out composers with startling accuracy. and i don't listen to classical music with the exception of when i dated a girl who was studying classical music. yeah, it's just formulaic. but whatever, i'm also a really good musician and have a kind of perfect pitch, it doesn't matter.

all music is a formula, and it's about looking cool. and part of that is dropping my slashdot karma way down so mod it for me you frickin nerds
Encryption

How To Replace FileVault With EncFS 65

Posted by timothy from the for-secretive-tweakers dept.
agoston.horvath writes "I've written a HOWTO on replacing Mac OS X's built-in encryption (FileVault) with the well-known FUSE-based EncFS. It worked well for me, and most importantly: it is a lot handier than what Apple has put together. This is especially useful if you are using a backup solution like Time Machine. Includes Whys, Why Nots, and step-by-step instructions."
Music

Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57

Posted by kdawson from the music-of-the-exploding-spheres dept.
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

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