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Comment Not a real big surprise. (Score 2) 473

Not really a huge surprise that people who are smarter and better educated have a more healthy outlook towards the one thing that will happen to us all, without exception.

I'd imagine that if you believed that there was a coin toss chance that you would not actually die, but rather spend an eternity in agonizing torment, death may be a little more worrying.

In the vast majority of cases, higher education = less of a chance that you're frightened by the myths of bronze aged, goat herding, middle-eastern desert nomads.

Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Man plays MMO on LCD screen 820 feet long (gamepron.com)

UgLyPuNk writes: A Chinese gamer has taken this to extremes. Jealous of a competitor who played Magic World Online 2 in an IMAX theatre, he decided to take things one step further, and book some time with the world’s largest LED screen, high above Beijing.

Submission + - My GPL code has been... patented! 4

ttsiod writes: Back in 2001, I coded HeapCheck, a GPL library for Windows (inspired by ElectricFence) that detected invalid read/write accesses on any heap allocations at runtime — thus greatly helping my debugging sessions. I published it on my site, and got a few users who were kind enough to thank me — a Serbian programmer even sent me 250$ as a thank you (I still have his mails). After a few years, Microsoft included very similar technology in the operating system itself, calling it PageHeap. I had more or less forgotten these stuff, since for the last 7 years I've been coding for UNIX/Linux, where valgrind superseeded Efence/dmalloc/etc. Imagine my surprise, when yesterday, Googling for references to my site, I found out that the technology I implemented, of runtime detection of invalid heap accesses, has been patented in the States, and to add insult to injury, even mentions my site (via a non-working link to an old version of my page) in the patent references! After the necessary "WTFs" and "bloody hells" I thought this merrits (a) a Slashdotting, and (b) a set of honest questions: what should I do about this? I am not an American citizen, but the "inventors" of this technology (see their names in the top of the patent) have apparently succeeded in passing this ludicrous patent in the States. If my code doesn't count as prior art, Bruce Perens's Efence (which I clearly state my code was inspired from) is at least 12 years prior! Suggestions/cursing patent trolls most welcome.
Idle

Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779

Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.

Comment It's actually kind of sad... (Score 1) 583

It really is sad and pathetic that people go to such lengths to shelter themselves from the world in order not to pop their preferred little bubble of unreason. Sure, being a parent I can understand wanting to keep unwanted and un-searched for porn from the eyes of your kids, but that's what a parent is for. By the time I allowed my kids to surf the web freely and unsupervised I had to simply accept that if they were old enough for me to grant that right to them, they should be old enough to handle anything they come across.

But this search engine is not simply a 'safe' gateway to protect kids from the evils of porn, it's a gateway to protect the fantasy's of their parents from the evils of reality.

Education

Submission + - Texas School Borad to Vote: Challange to Evolution (wsj.com) 1

tboulay writes: The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.

The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state's standards, then market those books nationwide.

"This is the most specific assault I've seen against evolution and modern science," said Steven Newton, a project director at the National Center for Science Education, which promotes teaching of evolution.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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