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Submission + - Chang'e-3 lunar rover landing tomorrow at 13:40 UTC (planetary.org)

Submitted by savuporo
savuporo writes: The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon tomorrow, 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event life as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section.

Comment Re:What a bunch of idiots (Score 1) 462

by Jerry Smith (#45625187) Attached to: U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013

As a conservative, religious man, I find the religious anti-vaccination crowd a bunch of blind ninnies. I have a few at my church like that, and I want to smack them as they put my children who are too young to receive these vaccination at risk of catching a deadly disease.

Yet you still go that church? Might as well stop that, for your childrens' health.

Submission + - Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto (nytimes.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: Two Israeli computer scientists say they may have uncovered a puzzling financial link between Ross William Ulbricht, the recently arrested operator of the Internet black market known as the Silk Road, and the secretive inventor of bitcoin, the anonymous online currency, used to make Silk Road purchases.

Submission + - Why Do Users Uninstall Apps? (intel.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: In mobile app development, one of the more daunting problems facing developers is user engagement; how to get users keep my app installed? Intel has done a little bit of research to find the most common cases. Apps that don’t offer anything helpful or unique tend to be the ones that are uninstalled the most frequently. People cycle through apps incredibly quickly to find the best-fitting. Then a lot of apps have a naturally limited lifecycle; i.e., apps that are centered around a movie release or tracking a pregnancy. Aside that, there seems to be a few common factors that can contribute to uninstallation: lengthy forms, asking for ratings, collecting unnecessary data, user unfriendliness, unnecessary notifications and of course, bugs. Additionally, if people have paid even a small price for the app, they are more committed to keep it installed.

Comment Re:Is it a phone ? (Score 1) 310

No, it's not a phone. It's a pocket-sized computer that can also make phone calls. We call it a smartphone for historical reasons. Do you also complain that we say 'computer' as shorthand for 'electronic computer', when we all know that a computer is a person who prepares logarithm tables?

Yes, yes, so much yes. My smartphone is hardly used in the phone-kind of way (not much of a caller anyway, hardly touch those 'free' minutes) but as an internet-computer/pdf-viewer/musicplayer/calculator/watch SO much more. It doesn't do any of those functions really well, but just good enough and the fact that it's all in one single handheld device makes me happy.

When I ONLY want a good mobile phone I'll get my old trusty Siemens.

Submission + - Critics Reassess 'Starship Troopers' as a Misunderstood Masterpiece 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Calum Marsh writes in The Atlantic that when Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, American critics slammed it as a “crazed, lurid spectacle” featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys" and “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.” But now the reputation of the movie based on Robert Heinlein's Hugo award winning novel is beginning to improve as critics begin to recognize the film as a critique of the military-industrial complex, the jingoism of American foreign policy, and a culture that privileges reactionary violence over sensitivity and reason. "Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism," writes Marsh. "The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers." The movie has rightfully come to be appreciated by some as an unsung masterpiece. Coming in at number 20 on Slant Magazine’s list of the 100 best films of the 1990s last year, the site’s Phil Coldiron described it as “one of the greatest of all anti-imperialist films,” a parody of Hollywood form whose superficial “badness” is central to its critique. "That concept is stiob, which I'll crudely define as a form of parody requiring such a degree of over-identification with the subject being parodied that it becomes impossible to tell where the love for that subject ends and the parody begins," writes Coldiron. "If you’re prepared for the rigor and intensity of Verhoeven’s approach—you’ll get the joke Starship Troopers is telling," says Marsh. "And you’ll laugh."

Comment Re:NOT posted as AC. (Score 1) 603

by Jerry Smith (#45333817) Attached to: TSA Union Calls For Armed Guards At Every Checkpoint

would have turned into the OK Corral

Prove that. .. The most effective deterrent to actual violence is a credible threat of retaliatory violence. That is how humans actually work in the real world. Widespread gun ownership reduces violence.

Majority of shooters are willing to die, or even kill themselves. That's how shooters ACTUALLY work.

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