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Comment Re:Nice (Score 1) 491

by Cirvam (#30578324) Attached to: China Debuts the World's Fastest Train

Actually one of the provisions of the federal government taking over passenger rail (aka Amtrak) was that they got priority over freight. This is slowly being enforced more and more so it wouldn't be a factor. One thing I wonder is why the government doesn't just take some of the right of way that they granted the railroads way back when. The Pennsylvania Railroad used to have 4 tracks going clear across the state from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Since then they have ripped out 2 of them, why not have the government replace them with rail that's rated for high speed operation?

I think a large part of the problem is the regulations associated with running trains faster. I mean if I was a shareholder in the railroads and they could perform upgrades to get stuff across the country in 1 week instead of 2 and thereby beat the trucking industry it seems like it would be a worthwhile investment.
Medicine

Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Starting To Die Off 260

Posted by Soulskill from the intestinal-fortitude dept.
Dr_Ken writes with a quote from Scientific American: "The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing? With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. 'This is the next frontier and has real significance for human health, public health and medicine,' says Betsy Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. 'They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have,' Foxman says."
Operating Systems

Submission + - NetBSD.org Asking US $60,000 For NetBSD 6.0 (netbsd.org)

Submitted by
Trollaxor
Trollaxor writes: "Hot on the heels of their NetBSD 5.0 release, the NetBSD organization is gearing up for NetBSD 6.0, due in just under a year ("The sixth major release for the six month of 2010!"). To make that happen, NetBSD is asking its industry partners, users, and anyone with spare change to contribute US $60,000. Matt Thomas, of NetBSD's core group, says the money will allow for "network performance improvements and embedded and realtime optimization," meaning NetBSD can finally move onto specialized hardware, something it has struggled with in the past. So far, they have $40. Do Slashdot readers find $60,000 an appropriate amount to sponsor the BSD family's middle child, or does the price outweigh the upgrade?"
Programming

Submission + - Speeding up code with GCC's prefetch extension (mit.edu)

Submitted by
birge
birge writes: "In memory-constrained loops where memory must be accessed out-of-order, a relatively little-used extension to GCC can be used to speed up code by as much as several times. Extremely simple to use, the __builtin_prefetch instruction tells the cache mechanism to load a memory location into local chip cache, allowing the programmer to have memory loaded for the next computation in parallel with the current computation."
The Media

Submission + - Traditional News Media Leads Blogs by 2.5 Hours (peacecorpsonline.com) 1

Submitted by
Peace Corps Online
Peace Corps Online writes: "The NY Times reports that researchers at Cornell studying the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking some 90 million articles and blog posts which appeared from August through October 2008 on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. have discovered that for the most part, traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. The researchers studied frequently repeated short phrases, the equivalent of "genetic signatures" for ideas. The biggest text-snippet surge found in the study — "lipstick on a pig" originated in Barack Obama's colorful put-down of the claim by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that they were the genuine voices for change in the campaign. The researcher's paper, "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle," (PDF) shows that although most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media. For example, when Mr. Obama said that the question of when life begins after conception was "above my pay grade," the remark was first reported extensively in blogs and though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo. "This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world," said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft. "The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.""
Networking

Submission + - your neighbor springs for your bandwith 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: a family friend has asked me to install a high speed, low-latency network so he can install video conferencing in his home office. he lives on a private road with about 10 houses on it, and wants to offer his neighbours acceess to the same. the houses are each on 2 acres, on some hilly land, so in total are pretty far apart. what would you suggest for him, and what would you suggest he offer his neighbours ?
United States

Submission + - Steve Fossett Killed By Downdraft (NTSB) (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "The NTSB has now released the text of its examination into the crash of Steve Fossett's aircraft on Sept 3rd, 2007. It concludes that downdrafts were the likely cause of the crash, dragging the plane into the mountain with such force that, even at full power, it would have been impossible to escape the collision. Pilots experienced in the area report that those winds can rip the wings off aircraft and Mark Twain remarked that they could roll up a tin house "like sheet music". One must wonder why such a skilled aviator was taking a gamble with such hostile conditions, given that he was looking for a flat stretch of land to race cars on, but that is one mystery we shall probably never know the answer to."

China Bans Gold Farming 293

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot dept.
InformationWeek is reporting that the Chinese government has declared a ban on the sale of virtual goods for real currency. This move is poised to shut down a several billion yuan a year business that has been growing by leaps and bounds every year. "The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China. [...] Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure."
Transportation

Obama Proposes High-Speed Rail System For the US 1385

Posted by timothy from the self-mucking-biodiesel-ponies dept.
fantomas writes "The BBC reports that 'US President Barack Obama has announced his "vision for high-speed rail" in the country, which would create jobs, ease congestion and save energy.' Can rail work in the land where the car is king? Would you travel on the new high speed lines?"
Microsoft

Obama's "ZuneGate" 608

Posted by kdawson from the et-tu-barack dept.
theodp writes "Barack Obama supporters were left shaking their heads after a report surfaced that the president-elect was using a Zune at the gym instead of an iPod. So why would Mac-user Obama be Zune-ing out? Could be one of those special-edition preloaded Zunes that Microsoft bestowed on Democratic National Convention attendees, suggests TechFlash, nixing the idea that the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World would waste time loading Parallels or Boot Camp in OS X just to use a Zune."
Biotech

The Unforgettable Amnesiac 120

Posted by kdawson from the every-20-seconds-a-new-day dept.
jamie found an account in the NYTimes of the life and death of one of the most important figures in modern neuroscience, Henry Gustav Molaison — a man who could not form memories. Molaison became an amnesiac after a brain operation in 1953. Known worldwide as H.M., Molaison was studied intensively for 55 years. Dr. Brenda Milner, a psychologist from Montreal, was the first researcher to visit Molaison. In 1962 she authored a landmark study demonstrating that a part of Molaison's memory was fully intact. "The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. ... Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pick up a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it. Soon 'everyone wanted an amnesic to study,' Dr. Milner said..."
NASA

Depressed Astronauts Might Get Computerized Solace 138

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-email-them-porn dept.
alphadogg writes "Clinical tests on a four-year, $1.74 million project for NASA, called the Virtual Space Station, are expected to begin in the Boston area by next month. The effort is designed to address the onset of depression in astronauts while they are in outer space. In the project, sponsored by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a recorded video therapist guides astronauts through a widely used depression therapy called 'problem-solving treatment.'" Here's a related story from a few weeks ago. Those astronauts got it rough.

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