Comment Now he's in trouble (Score 2, Funny) 148
TI's lawyers will be after him for DMCA violation because he's bypassed their physical copyright protection mechanism.
Comment Re:How Does It Encapsulate the Source Code? (Score 5, Funny) 220
RTFA
But it's all the way in Australia!
Comment Re:Sense of entitlement much? (Score 3, Insightful) 289
Facebook has repeatedly changed their policies to publish various data that they had said was private or friends-only. But hey, no problem, they didn't charge money when they screwed people over so it's OK!
Uh, no, it's not OK.
Comment Now they'll have to ban the state animal (Score 1) 256
Grizzly bears kill people, too.
Comment Not "any" threats (Score 2, Funny) 54
The article says Pan-STARRS can "identify any potential threats to Earth", but it can only find asteroids and comets that are about to hit us. They don't claim to be able to spot other threats, such as:
- Dalek invasion fleet
- Berserker machines
- Chain reaction of supernovae
- Radiation front from the collapse of the galactic core
- Borg attack from the future
- Galaxy-wide iPhone recall
Stupid gadget blogs, over-hyping stuff as usual.
Comment How many explanations does this make? (Score 1) 542
How many different explanations have we heard for colony collapse disorder so far? Five? Six? Is there any particular reason I should believe this one more than the others?
USAF's Robotic X-37B Orbiter Launched For Test Flight 145
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket that blasted off Thursday from Florida on a mission shrouded in secrecy. ... The unmanned military Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1) — also known as the X-37B — lifted off at 7:52 pm EDT atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a mission that is expected to take months testing new spacecraft technologies. ... Key objectives of the space plane's first flight include demonstration and validation of guidance, navigation, and control systems – including a 'do-it-itself' autonomous re-entry and landing at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base with neighboring Edwards Air Force Base as a backup."
Graph-View of Collaborative Development At GitHub 14
VindictivePantz writes "In an interesting graphical view on collaborative development, FlowingData writes: 'GitHub is a large community where coders can collaborate on software development projects. People check code in and out, make edits, etc. Franck Cuny maps this community (with Gephi), based on information in thousands of user profiles.'"
Comment Not "Newly-Found" (Score 4, Insightful) 393
Microsoft was informed about this vulnerability on 12-Jun-2009, and they confirmed receipt of my report on 22-Jun-2009. Regrettably, no official patch is currently available. As an effective and easy to deploy workaround is available, I have concluded that it is in the best interest of users to go ahead with the publication of this document without an official patch.
from Tavis Ormandy's disclosure
So the bug was found six months ago, but Microsoft only decided it was serious enough to fix after it was publicized. Seems like another case of "responsible disclosure" being used to cover up a vulnerability, instead of fixing it (or publishing a workaround) before the bad guys find out about it.
Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Comment Where's the source? (Score 2, Insightful) 175
The CrunchPad was supposed to have open hardware & software, right?
It was almost finished and ready for release, right?
So where's the hardware design & source code? Or was all that "open" talk just BS meant to get support from the slashcrunch crowd?
Tracking the World's Great Unsolved Math Mysteries 221
coondoggie writes "Some math problems are as old as the wind, experts say, and many remain truly unsolved. But a new open source-based site from the American Institute of Mathematics looks to help track work done and solve long-standing and difficult math problems. The Institute, along with the National Science Foundation, has opened the AIM Problem Lists site to offer an organized and annotated collection of unsolved problems, and previously unsolved problems, in a specialized area of mathematics research. The problem list provides a snapshot of the current state of research in a particular research area, letting experts track new developments, and newcomers gain a perspective on the subject."
Comment Automatic internet backup (Score 4, Funny) 272
Everything your TV station broadcasts will automatically be backed up here.
Comment Worst tech publisher ever (Score 5, Funny) 271
Penguin Classics. They're forever bitching about plot, characters and crap like that. Plus, they won't publish anything about tech invented after 1920.
Comment Re:Why is Verbosity Bad? (Score 1) 491
There seems to be an assumption in the article that "verbose" means "difficult to write" or "hard to understand". This isn't always true, in my experience. APL, for example, can be used to write programs that are masterpieces of concision, but understanding them is like solving Sudoku puzzles. Which can be fun, but isn't a productive use of a programmer's brainpower.
