Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

Open Source Beehives Designed To Help Save Honeybee Colonies 172

Posted by samzenpus from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-bees dept.
Lemeowski writes "Honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate, with a third of U.S. honeybees vanishing last year. Since bees pollinate many fruits and vegetables, the disappearance of honeybees could cause the United States to lose $15 billion worth of crops, and even change the American diet. The honey bee disappearance is called Colony Collapse Disorder, a serious problem of bees abruptly leaving their hives. A new open source effort called the Open Source Beehives project hopes to help by creating "a mesh network of data-generating honey bee colonies for local, national, and international study of the causes and effects of Colony Collapse Disorder." Collaborators have created two beehive designs that can be downloaded for free and milled using a CNC machine, then filled with sensors to track bee colony health."
United States

Dial 00000000 To Blow Up the World 306

Posted by timothy from the your-public-servants dept.
Charliemopps writes "For 20 years the password for the U.S. nuclear arsenal was '00000000.' Kennedy instituted a security system on all nuclear warheads to prevent them from being armed by someone unauthorized. It was called PAL, and promised to secure the entire US arsenal around the world. Unfortunately for Kennedy (and I guess, the whole world) U.S. military leadership was more concerned about delaying a launch than securing Armageddon. They technically obeyed the order but then set the password to 8 Zeros, or '00000000'."
Math

Ask Slashdot: How Reproducible Is Arithmetic In the Cloud? 226

Posted by timothy from the irreproducible-results dept.
goodminton writes "I'm research the long-term consistency and reproducibility of math results in the cloud and have questions about floating point calculations. For example, say I create a virtual OS instance on a cloud provider (doesn't matter which one) and install Mathematica to run a precise calculation. Mathematica generates the result based on the combination of software version, operating system, hypervisor, firmware and hardware that are running at that time. In the cloud, hardware, firmware and hypervisors are invisible to the users but could still impact the implementation/operation of floating point math. Say I archive the virutal instance and in 5 or 10 years I fire it up on another cloud provider and run the same calculation. What's the likelihood that the results would be the same? What can be done to adjust for this? Currently, I know people who 'archive' hardware just for the purpose of ensuring reproducibility and I'm wondering how this tranlates to the world of cloud and virtualization across multiple hardware types."

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 294

by fritsd (#45466749) Attached to: How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source
If you're scared about the correct layout of your documents, why don't you try out some test documents first, or push your own documents through the officeshots.org round-trip test suite? And be sure to complain if something doesn't render your correct ODF document properly.

N.B. I have seen in the past that not all test engines are on-line all the time.

Comment Where are the other countries (Score 2) 152

by fritsd (#45462263) Attached to: How Perl and R Reveal the United States' Isolation In the TPP Negotiations
When I looked at the map, I saw the following countries were missing from the list (plus lots of Oceania countries): Russia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Fiji, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala.

Isn't it odd that at least Russia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and Panama are excluded? I'd imagine they do lots of trade across the Pacific Ocean (for Panama I meant transport rather than production).
Space

Chicxulub Impact Might Have Spread Life-Bearing Rocks Through the Solar System 161

Posted by samzenpus from the big-boom dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Some 65 million years ago, an asteroid the size of a small city hit the Yucatan Peninsula in what is now Mexico, devastating Earth and triggering the sequence of events that wiped out the dinosaurs. This impact ejected 70 billion kg of Earth rock into space. To carry life around the Solar System, astrobiologists say these rocks must have stayed cool, less than 100 degrees C, and must also be big, more than 3 metres in diameter to protect organisms from radiation in space. Now they have calculated that 20,000 kilograms of this Earth ejecta must have reached Europa, including at least one or two potentially life-bearing rocks. And they say similar amounts must have reached other water-rich moons such as Callisto and Titan. Their conclusion is that if we find life on the moons around Saturn and Jupiter, it could well date from the time of the dinosaurs (or indeed from other similar impacts)."

Comment Re:It will be ok. (Score 1) 132

by fritsd (#45456185) Attached to: Tremors Mean Antarctic Volcanism May Be Heating Up

CO2 absorbs only a very narrow and specific wavelength. THAT is understood.

Look at the peak at 700 reciproke centimeter in figure 2 on this webpage:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
It is the broadest peak in the spectrum!

Don't believe me, google images CO2 IR absorption spectrum (N.B. often the scale is right to left)
google it yourself ffs
One article I found that shows the very broad peak at around 675 cm-1 is a PDF from a US military document from 1976. Are you saying they're into the tree-hugger conspiracy now?
The Internet

Time For a Warrant Canary Metatag? 332

Posted by timothy from the unless-double-secret-probation-prohibits-canaries dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With the advent of national security letters and all the NSA issues of late perhaps the web needs to implement a warrant 'warrant canary' metatag. Something like this: <meta name="canary" content="2013-11-17" />. With this it would be possible to build into browsers or browser extensions a means of alerting users when a company has in fact received such a secret warrant. (Similar to the actions taken by Apple recently.) The advantage the metatag approach would have its that it would not require the user to search out a report by the company in question but would show the information upon loading of the page. Once the canary metatag was not found or when the date of the canary grows older than a given date a warning could be raised. Several others have proposed similar approaches including Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic and Cory Doctorow's Dead Man's Switch." What problems do you see with this approach?

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Close