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Comment Whatever worked in the past (Score 1) 364

by i_am_socket (#40872723) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom?

Is probably good now.

When I was in college I had a PDA (Visor Edge) that I took all my handwritten notes on. It allowed for backup to my desktop after class, lightened the load of carrying a dozen notebooks, and I could add spreadsheets and other data along with it. For any overhead slides I brought a digital camera. Why copy manually what can be copied digitally? The other students thought I was cheating, the professors thought it was ingenious.

These days I would probably find it hard to replicate the old Graffiti input since typing on my phone isn't quite the same (bluetooth keyboard?) but it worked for me and I would try to keep that paradigm as closely as I can.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment At last! (Score 1) 378

by i_am_socket (#28718785) Attached to: Typography On the Web Gets Different
I welcome the addition and support for this. As a "front end" developer I get all kinds of requests for non-standard fonts to be used. They pay the bills so we do it; all as images. Changing a site from one color to another requires reworking dozens to hundreds of images. If all I have to do is embed their dumb fonts, I can go back to complaining about their color choices instead of mountains of work it'll cause me ;)
Transportation

Submission + - General Motors: Driverless cars ready by 2018

Submitted by
Gregor Stipicic
Gregor Stipicic writes: " Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. "This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018. "
The Internet

Submission + - Four Root DNS Servers Go IPv6 On February 4th

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "On February 4th, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers. With this transition, it will finally be possible for two internet hosts to communicate without using IPv4 at all. Certain obsolete software may face compatibility problems due to the change, but those issues are addressed in an ICANN report [PDF]."
Editorial

Submission + - Poll: Favorite irrational number

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: Poll: What is your favorite irrational number:

e
pi
2^0.5
3^0.5
sin(my birthday)
None. I am completely rational
Cowboyneal's favorite song
Security

Submission + - Sears Web "Community" is a Spyware Install (ca.com)

Submitted by
Panaqqa
Panaqqa writes: "After several weeks of security alerts from CA and denials by Sears, spyware security researcher Ben Edelman has joined the chorus accusing Sears of surreptitiously installing Comscore tracking software on the PCs of people who join the Sears "community". Kmart (owned by Sears) is apparently involved also. After installation, the software sends details of all online activities — including secure sites such as banking — directly to Comscore, despite the Sears website's assertion that it does not share collected data with anyone. Various technology blogs are likening this breach of online privacy to the recent Facebook Beacon fiasco."
Government

Submission + - Federal Research Funds for 2008 are Disappointing

Submitted by SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: Wired Science has asked their readers to complain about the biggest problems with federal research funding. Some of the comments are quite revealing: Lead scientists must rush to buy supplies before their grants expire, they sometimes get stuck when equipment breaks and they did not anticipate replacement parts in their budget, and there are only token incentives for alternative energy research. Worst of all, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could exceed $1.2 trillion, are particularly appalling when compared to the measly $6.43 billion requested by the National Science Foundation and $28.6 billion requested by the National Institutes of Health for supporting science in 2008.
Linux Business

Submission + - Time for IBM to set Lotus Notes Free (lotus.com)

Submitted by
hydra
hydra writes: "Ok, upon seeing the call for IBM to set OS/2 free, we thought we'd jump on the bandwagon and ask IBM to go Open Source with Lotus Notes/Domino. Ever since they acquired Lotus Inc and Notes they have marginalised its potential, choosing rather to chop the brand about so it fits in with the exclusive, yet uncool blue and white stripes. Notes was once a ferocious monster waiting to be unleashed, but without Ray Ozzie & co for direction it became a shadow of its real potential — "A real Microsoft Killer", was hung out to dry. So we say, unleash the monster IBM and let the open source community feed its hunger and make this Linux Demon "A real Microsoft Killler" again..."

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