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Moon

Submission + - Death of the last great amateur scientist (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The death of amateur astronomical legend Sir Patrick Moore surely marks the end of the era when amateurs could make an impact on science that would rival the professionals. Though many of Moore's ideas were disproved by space-borne probes, his impact on planetary astronomy was deep and profound, while his efforts at popularising astronomy were unmatched.
Education

Submission + - Should we teach 11 year olds to write mobile apps? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "New proposals, commissioned by the UK government from the British Computing Society (BCS) for a computing (ICT) curriculum for schools in England have been published and they are a huge step forward from the existing teaching, now widely discredited, of how to use various "office" products.
But there is some confusion about what they actually contain: the formal proposals do not contain some of the ideas that have been spun to the media. Most eye-catchingly, this morning's reports suggest 11 year olds will be taught how to write apps for cell phones but no such proposal is in the paper from the BCS — are we about to see a new form of corporate lock-in with Google, Apple and Microsoft battling to get their technology adopted even while the real world moves on to completely new multicore paradigms?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft accuses webkit of breaking standards and becoming the next IE 6 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: In a bizaare, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using webkit stagnated open standards and innovation on the web. Microsoft is espcially concerned in the mobile market where many mobile sites only work with Android or IOS with -webkit specific extensions on its call to action in their Windows Phone Developer Blog. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which are being written as -webkit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market Webkit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliancy and not use the proprietary (yet opensource) webkit. Is webkit in both Android, Chrome, and iOS really that proprietary is it all hot air from someone who fell from grace?
Crime

Submission + - Officials "used malware to spy on opposition" (civil.ge)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Senior officials in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia have been charged with using malware to use computer cameras and microphones to spy on a wide range of opposition politicians and organisations. The charges follow a particularly brutal election campaign — lost by the previous ruling party — which was dominated by secretly filmed recordings of abuse of prisoners (damaging to the then government) and of opposition politicians supposedly considering cutting deals with criminal families. Electronic spying is nothing new in Georgia but previously it seemed to be confined to more "old-school" techniques of hidden microphones and cameras.

Comment Re:New criteria for government action (Score 2, Interesting) 184

by 00_NOP (#41727985) Attached to: Amazon Overcharging Publishers For Tax

Because they are actively selling goods they must know to be unfit for purpose.
What if a retailer sold you something they said was wine when it was simply water? Would you not think that was an issue even if they did it thousands of times and refused to stop when the problem was pointed out to them?
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Time to stand up against Amazon (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "Amazon are taking fire in the UK for insisting that publishers pay them for 20% VAT (sales tax) when in fact the online retailer is only paying 3% VAT. Given that the Kindle is rubbish at displaying maths and science and that Amazon are as dangerous a monopoly as Microsoft ever was, is it not time that regulators and consumers stood up to them?"
AI

Submission + - Unreal Tournament to highlight AI breakthrough (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "This coming week is to see AI researchers battle it out through the medium of Unreal Tournament and hopes are high that researchers at Imperial College in London have built a bot that is sufficiently human like that it will, in effect, pass the Turing Test and win a $7000 prize at the IEEE's Conference of Computational Intelligence and Games in Grenada, Spain.
Interestingly, the breakthrough, if proven, comes not from ever greater computational processing of the environment, but in discriminating between less and more important stimuli. In Alan Turing's centenary year one of the points he was ridiculed for in his lifetime — that machines could match human behaviour and 'thought' may be on the point of decisive vindication."
Wikipedia

Submission + - When a primary source isn't good enough- Wikipedia (newyorker.com) 4

Submitted by unixluv
unixluv writes: Evidently, Wikipedia doesn't believe an author on his own motivations when trying to correct an article on his own book, claiming they need "secondary sources". I'm not sure where you would go to get a secondary source when you are the only author of a work.
Medicine

Submission + - Spontaneous human combustion explained (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Human spontaneous combustion is real and scientifically explainable and not super-natural. More than that it is not a product of alcoholism, the most commonly accepted scientific theory to date, but of ketosis, which results from many different conditions, including diabetes. These are the conclusions of Brian J. Ford, a well known, in the UK, independent researcher into microbiology and are based on his attempts to burn pig flesh marinated in both alcohol and acetone (produced by ketosis sufferers).
Open Source

Submission + - MySQL slowly turning closed source? (mariadb.org)

Submitted by
mpol
mpol writes: "Sergei from MariaDB speculated on some changes within MySQL 5.5.27. It seems new testcases aren't included with MySQL anymore, which leaves developers depending on it in the cold.
"Does this mean that test cases are no longer open source? Oracle did not reply to my question. But indeed, there is evidence that this guess is true. For example, this commit mail shows that new test cases, indeed, go in this “internal” directory, which is not included in the MySQL source distribution."
On a similar note, updates for the version history on Launchpad are not being updated anymore.
What is Oracle's plan here? And is alienating the developer community just not seen as a problem at Oracle?"
Math

Submission + - Don't use a Kindle for Math or CompSci books (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Many Kindle users who read technical books will be used to having to handle what looks like second-class edits of the book: the ease of use of the device (just) making up for the problems caused by missing and misplaced paragraphs and non-Roman letters and symbols. But my experience in the last 24 hours has meant I will be avoiding using the device for technical reading — especially after a leading technical publisher told me the issue was not their editing, but the Kindle itself.

Submission + - Indian Prime Minister formally announces Mars mission (thehindu.com) 1

Submitted by neo12
neo12 writes: Making the first formal announcement on the country’s Mars mission, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said India will send a mission to the Red Planet that will mark a huge step in the area of science and technology.
Australia

Submission + - Australia cigarette plain packaging law upheld by court (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ccguy
ccguy writes: Australia's highest court has upheld a new government law -which had been challenged by tobacco companies- on mandatory packaging for cigarettes that removes brand colours and logos from packaging. The law requires cigarettes to be sold in olive green packets, with graphic images warning of the consequences of smoking.
Math

Submission + - Breakthrough in drawing complex Venn diagrams (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too.

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