Comment Re:This is probably common (Score 1) 346
I came here to mod and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum. And mod points. Well done sir.
Comment Re:Um.. They didn't exactly deny it. (Score 1) 198
I'd hardly call it irrelevant, think about it for a moment. Let's say the authorities (pick your country) decided that anyone installing a specific application (for example, the Bitcoin wallet app, or even a specific political party app if you're more inclined to believe in conspiracies) is a 'person of interest'. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to picture what a little data mining could do from there.
Comment Re:Never say (Score 1) 121
I'm talking use a pun go to jail level of enforcement.
That's awfully punitive.
Comment Um.. They didn't exactly deny it. (Score 2) 198
TFA just says they aren't doing anything with the information... for now. That doesn't mean the FBI or whatever 3 letter agency can't put a shunt between the Internet and their SmartScreen servers. It's a sniffing vector.
Comment Education more art than science (Score 2) 190
"Fair enough, but in its essence, teaching is a performance art." - Amy Farrah Fowler
Can Anyone Catch Khan Academy? 190
waderoush writes "Even as name-brand universities like MIT and Harvard rush to put more courses on the Web, they're vying with an explosion of new online learning resources like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, Dabble, Skillshare, and, of course, Khan Academy. With 3,200 videos on YouTube and 4 million unique visitors a month, Sal Khan's increasingly entertaining creation is the competitor that traditional universities need to beat if they want to have a role in inspiring the next generation of leaders and thinkers. Lately Khan's organization has been snapping up some of YouTube's most creative educational-video producers, including 'Doodling in Math Class' creator Vi Hart and Smarthistory founders Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Universities are investing millions in software for 'massive online open courses' or MOOCs, but unless they can figure out how to make their material fun as well as instructive, Khan may have an insurmountable lead."
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a related article about the above-mentioned Coursera, and how they plan to make money off of free courses. A contract the company signed with the University of Michigan suggests they aren't quite sure yet.
Ask Slashdot: Is Outsourcing Development a Good Idea? 403
New submitter penmanglewood writes "I am a developer at a small IT company, and we primarily make software and games for the education market. I used to work with a team of developers, but for reasons outside the scope of this question, my boss and I are the only ones left. My boss says that our new strategy is to use outsourced developers to do the 'monkey work' for us. To me, this sounds like a bad idea. Do we give the developers access to our internal libraries? How will they be able to work on parts of our product without having access to our repository. I could think of a hundred more objections, but maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Is there a smart way to outsource development, or is it just a bad idea?"
Methane Producing Dinosaurs May Have Changed Climate 264
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that huge plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth's climate. Scientists believe that, just as in cows, methane-producing bacteria aided the digestion of sauropods by fermenting their plant food. 'A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,' says study leader Dr Dave Wilkinson. 'Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources — both natural and man-made — put together.' The key factor is the total mass of the animals which included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tons. Medium-sized sauropods weighed about 20 tons and lived in herds of up to a few tens of individuals per square kilometer so global methane emissions from the animals would have amounted to around 472 million tons per year, the scientists calculated. Sauropods alone may have been responsible for an atmospheric methane concentration of one to two parts per million (ppm), say the scientists and studies have suggested that the Earth was up to 10C (18F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era. ''The Mesozoic trend to sauropod gigantism led to the evolution of immense microbial vats unequaled in modern land animals. Methane was probably important in Mesozoic greenhouse warming. Our simple proof-of-concept model suggests greenhouse warming by sauropod megaherbivores could have been significant in sustaining warm climates.'"
Comment Didn't this kill Mars exploration for years? (Score 1) 61
After all of the newspaper headlines reading 'MARS IS DEAD, NO LIFE FOUND!' killed public interest of Mars back during the 70s after the Viking probes' questionable experiments, I'm not sure firing six small static probes at a sizable planet to look for DNA is a good idea. If history is any indicator it seems like a big risk to the entire exploration effort.
Software Engineering Is a Dead-End Career, Says Bloomberg 738
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece at Bloomberg:
"Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35. Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills — such as the latest programming-language fad — or 'not suitable for entry level.' In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40. Employers have admitted this in unguarded moments. Craig Barrett, a former chief executive officer of Intel Corp., famously remarked that 'the half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years,' while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior."
30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette 247
MrSeb writes "Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. As far as I can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. The Optical Disc Archive might be good as extensible storage for TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+ — but as yet, we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap."
Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 235
I agree 100% about the ending, but honestly I had problems with the whole thing. The writing in Mass Effect 3 with the Crucible was one big Deus Ex Machina (the plot device, not the game of the same name) and the ending was a tacked on, rushed out, last minute hack job similar to Deus Ex:Revolution (the game this time, not the plot device).
I'm a little shocked more people didn't have issues with the ME3 storyline considering the whole Crucible plot device was never alluded to or foreshadowed in the previous games. Bioware has fallen from where they once were in the pantheon of gaming development companies that would consistently produce tightly written, well thought out stories. Perhaps EA is to blame and based on what came out of Bioware after Dragon Age 2 was shoved out the door that's not a bad theory.
Comment Translation (Score 1) 235
BioWare strongly believes in the team’s artistic vision for the end of this arc of the Mass Effect franchise. The extended cut DLC will expand on the existing endings, but no further ending DLC is planned.
Translation:
EA believes we've spent enough money on an ending. We're getting dinged on fan review sites like Metacritic so we're going to throw another bandaid on it for as little cost as possible.
Doctors "Fire" Vaccine Refusers 1271
phantomfive writes "In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal. Pediatricians are getting tired of families avoiding vaccines, which puts their children at higher risk of disease. From the article: 'Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients.
Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers.'"
Comment They Live... (Score 1) 311
You could potentially help Rowdy Roddy Piper stop the alien invasion!
