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cdrdude writes: "We've all learned that it isn't possible to divide by zero, an age-old problem in mathematics. However, one Dr Anderson thinks he has found the solution,. The BBC writes: "Schoolchildren from Caversham have become the first to learn a brand new theory that dividing by zero is possible using a new number — 'nullity'. But the suggestion has left many mathematicians cold". In short, Dr Anderson has proposed that 0/0 = a new number called nullity. "Nullity is a fixed number with value 0/0, It is not undefined, it is not indeterminate". Could this really be possible? It seems impossible, but I don't have the math background to definitively prove or disprove it."
mikael writes: The Times is reporting that a teacher faces up to 40 years in jail for exposing children to online pornography.. The images appeared while she was out of
the classroom. Also, the comments in the article suggest that UNIX and Linux users are responsible for 99% of the malware and viruses that plague windows systems.
Posted
by
kdawson
from the dare-you-to-cross-this-line dept.
mgh02114 writes "The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previouslyreported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet." The Peoples Daily of China reported on Feb. 17 that two Raptors had landed on Okinawa.
shocking writes: "The recent work on moving FreeBSD to a new framework dealing with SMP issues (SMPng) has been finished, so developers have been benchmarking & profiling the code to find performance bottlenecks. After correcting a few, they found that a multithreaded MySQL benchmark performed extremely well under high load, maintaining throughput in situations where Linux throughput collapsed. The write-up is at http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html"
nght2000 writes: The Stanford Racing Team displayed their entry for the DARPA Urban Challenge this past weekend. The story was reported in the Palo Alto Daily News. The DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated military supply missions in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions. The vehicle, a 2006 diesel powered Passat named Junior, was donated by Volkswagen of America. Volkswagen's Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California is once again joining the Stanford Team by providing vehicle support, modification and testing. This year the team is being sponsored by no less than Google, Intel, Red Bull and others. Stanford won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with their Volkswagen Touareg robot named Stanley. The Urban Challenge is scheduled to be held at an undisclosed location on November 3, 2007.
Anonymous Cell Phone User writes: Earlier today, I called a friend on my cell phone and was connected to "Tom", a stranger. I knew I didn't have the wrong number because my friend's number was saved in my phone. I tried the same number again and got my friend this time. My friend told me he had just gotten a call from somebody wanting to speak to Tom, but his caller ID had said that the call was from me. This has happened to me a few times, both when I tried calling somebody on a landline from my cell phone and also when somebody tried to call me on my cell phone from a landline (it might also have happened between two cell phones once, but I'm not sure about that). The information in the caller ID seems to always match the intended call, but the voices get switched. I have had this happen with a Cingular/ATT contract in the USA and with a Vodaphone pay-as-you-go card in Germany (different phones). I am wondering if this error is due to a limitation of the GSM protocol or how it's implemented. I'm hoping that there's some cell phone / telecommunications expert here that can shed some light on the issue. Can anybody here explain how/why these errors happen?
A federal judge rejects a bid by Wired News and other media outlets to unseal whistle-blower papers in a lawsuit over surveillance of Americans. In 27B Stroke 6.
Mr. Lockwood, 42, said in an interview that he was trying to help disabled hunters when he... linked a rifle to a digital camera and high-speed Web connection."
Londovir writes: Recently our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction.
The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of reference for schools.
My question is: should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine validity of information? What's your opinion?
daria42 writes: Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world."
An anonymous reader writes with a NYTimes piece on the early moves by European governments to implement an EU data retention directive. The governments of Germany and the Netherlands are initially proposing much more stringent programs than the EU directive requires. For example, the German proposal "would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal." The Times notes that, early days as it is, nevertheless some people involved in the issue are "concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals' privacy rights."
yuna49 writes: Thieves recently stole a laptop belonging to the estranged wife of a computer programmer in Minnesota. Luckily the husband had installed SETI@Home on the machine. He saw the computer appear on the SETI site three times in a week and gave the IP address to the authorities. This lead to the recovery of the laptop and a reconciliation between the estranged couple.
This was a story I tried to submit but was rejected by Slashdot's editorial staff. Not grousing, saving my composition here for posterity, as I do with other of my rejected stories.