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Games

Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers 227

Posted by Soulskill from the xbox-live-proved-this-years-ago dept.
TheClockworkSoul writes "According to NewScientist, victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone — but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. Interestingly, when male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, their levels of the hormone plummeted. This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous. Against a group of strangers — be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone's effects on aggression offer an advantage. 'In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you're better for it,' says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study. However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn't make sense. 'You can't alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,' he says."
Earth

A Geek Funeral 479

Posted by kdawson from the beam-me-up dept.
We've recently talked about a geek wedding, and now reader Sam_In_The_Hills writes in with news of his brother's geek funeral. "I've not seen this topic covered here before even though it's one that will concern us all at some time: what to do with our corporeal remains after we've left for that great data bank in the sky. For my recently departed brother (long illness, don't smoke!), I thought this nice SPARCstation would be a cool place to spend eternity. Yes, he's really in there (after cremation). I kept the floppy drive cover but for space reasons removed the floppy drive, hard drive, and most of the power supply. I left behind the motherboard and power switch and plugs to keep all openings covered. The case worked quite well at his memorial party. His friends and family were able to leave their final good-byes on post-notes. Anyone who wanted to keep their words private could just slip their note into the case through the floppy slot. All notes will be sealed in plastic and placed within the case. There has been one complication. His daughters like the look of it so much they aren't now sure if they want to bury him. One more thing: the words on the plaque really do capture one of the last things he ever said. Of course as kids we watched the show in its first run."
Education

Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year 1073

Posted by kdawson from the ok-ok-fix-healthcare-but-leave-me-my-summer dept.
N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."

Comment Re:So this is Google's dirty little secret (Score 1) 152

by WeirdKid (#29581563) Attached to: Android Modder Tries To Outmaneuver Google

Good analogy, but it's no secret. Google is more than happy to take your open source, contributed works and use them for profit. It's free engineering work on components that just aren't very useful without all the proprietary other parts, and as long as there are corporate fanboys out there willing to do it, Google and Apple would be stupid to not take advantage of it.
Programming

Android Modder Tries To Outmaneuver Google 152

Posted by timothy from the only-a-link-to-a-url dept.
itwbennett writes "Google recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steve Kondik, the creator of Cyanogen, a popular souped-up version of Android, asking him to stop distributing applications such as Gmail with his modified software. 'We make some of these apps available to users of any Android-powered device via Android Market, and others are pre-installed on some phones through business deals,' wrote Dan Morrill on the Android developer blog. 'Either way, these apps aren't open source, and that's why they aren't included in the Android source code repository.' Now, Kondik thinks he's found a workaround. He plans to release a 'bare bones' version of Cyanogen without the applications, leaving it to modders to make a backup copy of the Google applications that shipped with their phone for later reinstallation before hacking away at the Android software. 'The idea is that you'll be able to Google-ify your CyanogenMod installation with the applications and files that shipped on your device already,' Kondik wrote."
Cellphones

The Kafka-esque Nightmare of Palm App Submission 332

Posted by kdawson from the next-the-hoop-of-fire dept.
MBCook writes "Jamie Zawinski, shortly after the release of the Palm Pre, wrote two free software programs for the phone: a Tip Calculator and a port of Dali Clock. In trying to get the apps published to the App Catalog, he has had to sign up to be a developer twice; fax contracts around; been told (apparently incorrectly) that he was not allowed to release free software for the phone; and told he had to give PayPal his checking account number. 'It's been two weeks, and I have received no reply. In the months since this process began, other third-party developers seem to have managed to get their applications into the App Catalog. Apparently these people are better at jumping through ridiculous hoops than I am.'"

Comment and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score 5, Insightful) 221

by WeirdKid (#29531043) Attached to: Google SideWiki Brings Comments To Everyone

I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.

I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:

Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.

Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
Programming

Is UML Really Dead, Or Only Cataleptic? 156

Posted by kdawson from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.
danielstoner writes "Recently UML was pronounced dead as a tool for all programming needs by an article posted on Little Tutorials: 13 reasons for UML's descent into darkness. The author suggests UML was killed by, among other causes, greed, heavy process, and design-by-committee. Is UML really a fading technology? Is it useful beyond a whiteboard notation for designers? Is there any value in code generation?"
Cellphones

FCC To Hold Hearings On Early Termination Fees 184

Posted by kdawson from the don't-throw-me-in-that-briar-patch dept.
Isaac-Lew sends word of an article in the Washington Post reporting that on June 12 the FCC will hold a hearing regarding cellphone early termination fees. The Commission may look at early termination fees for TV and Internet service as well. The wireless carriers are taking a Bre'r Rabbit approach toward possible FCC regulation of early termination fees — the FCC's intervention would pre-empt a number of class-action lawsuits going forward against Verizon, Sprint, and others. These suits, stemming from state regulations, could cost the carriers billions. "...the carriers have renewed a lobbying effort in recent weeks to persuade the FCC on a legal definition that would stave off the state lawsuits on cancellation fees. On May 6, 2008, Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam and the company's chief lobbyist, Tom Tauke, met with [FCC Chairman] Martin, urging him to adopt a federal policy, according to FCC records."

Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD 229

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the get-with-the-program dept.
Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."

Feed On Young Women Hooking Up (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
Does too much grab-and-go sex hurt young women, who should bask in their low libidos, free from the desire-boosting effects of video games? In Sex Drive Daily.


Space

Submission + - The Nature of Gravitation

Submitted by
hgreend
hgreend writes: "There were many attempts to explain the nature of gravitation. Scientists disputed at XVII century, whether gravitation is a consequence of external influences or it is an internal property of physical bodies? Despite of searching all new elementary particles which could be carriers of the gravitation ("gravitons"), despite of creating newest theories of multi-dimensional spaces (the theory of "membranes", etc.) essential promotion in understanding of physical essence of the gravitation phenomenon is not visible. The author is an ukrainian inventor which has created the concept of the Gyro-turbine that is a gyroscopic-dynamical system, generating plurality Coriolis's levitation forces. You can see it on www.gyro-turbine.com 1. Why the mass of the proton is so clumsy (1.67*10-27kg)? 2. What is v-graviton? 3. Why scientists not able to catch the graviton? 4. Why the gravitation constant G is equal to 6.67*10-11 N*m2/kg2? 5. etc. The author answers all these questions in his sensational article- ...INTRODUCTION/GYRO-DYNAMICAL NATURE OF GRAVITATION Also, on this page "www.gyro-turbine.com" in section "Contact Us" You can ask a question to the author of the invention!"
United States

U.S. To Certify Labs For Testing E-Voting Machines 75

Posted by Zonk from the who-certifies-the-certifiers dept.
InternetVoting writes "In a clear counter to the recent criticisms of secrecy involving Ciber labs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued recommendations (pdf) to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). NIST recommends the accreditation of two labs, iBeta Quality Assurance and SysTest Labs. The recommendation, emphasizing the need for transparency, includes on-site assessment reports, lab responses, and on-site reviews for each lab. These reports shed much needed light into the process of voting machine certification. Learn more from the Q&As About NIST Evaluation of Laboratories that Test Voting Systems."

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