Submission + - Sharpen the Python Saw or Die Trying (ivanidris.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Improve your Python skills before the end of the Mayan calendar.
Comment Obligatory ref (Score 0) 226
Scientific Literacy vs. Concern Over Climate Change 545
New submitter gmfeier writes "An interesting study reported in Nature Climate Change indicates that concern over climate change did not correlate with scientific literacy nearly as much as with cultural polarization. Quoting: 'For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions. Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.'"
Comment reliably? (Score 4, Interesting) 226
I wonder.... will it be fooled if images are converted to/from lossy formats a few times.....
Comment Not soon (Score 1) 417
Management may think they're going to make the switch, but when it comes to actually doing it, it'll prove to cost more in terms of effort than they'll save on licensing. There's a hell of a lot more to VMWare than just the virtualization of servers, and it doesn't take a propeller-head to effectively use the tools. Can the same be said of the alternatives?
Comment Statistics (Score 0) 290
Warning: 4 out of 5 statements of "fact" from Microsoft are completely made up.
Comment Delayed? (Score 2) 222
Well is anyone _really_ surprised at this? If I were publishing this, I'd announce a delay even if it was on-schedule, just for the added publicity.
Comment Re:elephant in the room -- MOD PARENT UP! (Score 3, Interesting) 336
Mod parent up, please. Why is this glaringly obvious solution NEVER discussed?
Comment Vacuously true (Score 1) 410
That can be said of nearly every invention since fire: no users, no problems.
Comment Re:Oh For Chrissakes (Score 1) 466
I find it amusing that some people think that a nation's defense research organisation, which helps build ICBMs, supersonic aircraft, tactical software and so on, needs advice from someone who reading slashdot on how to write an operating system.
Eh? It's their history in such areas that convinced me they could screw up Water Soup with a recipe from Alton Brown.
Comment Collapsed?!?!? (Score 1) 294
If all we find are collapsed ones, what makes them think the uncollapsed ones are safe?
Submission + - Interesting data from the YouTube outage (techworld.com)
superapecommando writes: YouTube continues to fascinate people, even when nobody is able to watch it.
A revealing data nugget has turned up from the Internet department of Arbor Networks on the effect (or lack of it) of yesterday’s well-publicised YouTube ‘outage’.
The interruption was relatively brief — perhaps an hour and a half — which turns out to correspond to a measurable drop in Google Internet traffic seen by the company across a random sample of 50 small and mid-size ISPs spread across the world.
A revealing data nugget has turned up from the Internet department of Arbor Networks on the effect (or lack of it) of yesterday’s well-publicised YouTube ‘outage’.
The interruption was relatively brief — perhaps an hour and a half — which turns out to correspond to a measurable drop in Google Internet traffic seen by the company across a random sample of 50 small and mid-size ISPs spread across the world.
Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984
CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."
Neptune May Have Eaten a Planet and Stolen Its Moon 145
jitendraharlalka noted a piece about the origins of Neptune. There is a theory now that it once ate a super-earth in the outer solar system, and kept its moon as some sort of macabre trophy to make sure that Mars and Venus didn't get any big ideas.
Does This Headline Know You're Reading It? 140
An anonymous reader writes "Not yet, but it could. German artificial intelligence researchers are combining JavaScript with eye-tracking hardware to create 'text 2.0,' which 'infers user intentions.' Unimportant words also fade out while you're skimming the text, and a bookmark automatically appears if you glance away. It can pronounce the words you're reading, and reading certain words can trigger the appearance of footnotes or even translations, biographies, definitions, and sound effects or animations, almost like the truly interactive books in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. 'With the help of an eye tracker, Text 2.0 follows your progress and presents effects just in time,' the researchers explain in a video. Meanwhile, DFKI has already created a free 'Processing Easy Eye Tracker plugin' (or PEEP) to manipulate windows with what they call 'gaze-controlled tab expose,' while there's speculation similar technology may be adopted by Apple. Apple has already purchased Tobii's eye-tracking hardware, and 'Whether these are for internal research only or for a future product, Apple is characteristically not saying.'"
