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Comment Re:c++ is 'write-only' code (Score 1) 752

by Bright Apollo (#30506418) Attached to: The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook

PHP does the same things as C++? Really? And C++ lacks standard libraries to process XML, connect to DBs..? Interesting assertions. Cite sources, because from what I understand, C++ has tons of libraries and templates, and does things that lots of languages including PHP cannot do... operating systems, real-time applications, and compilers spring to mind.
Medicine

Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves 167

Posted by kdawson from the time-to-shut-down dept.
SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whose diminishing over time we discussed a bit earlier). "The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm. Then they rubbed a cream onto the arm and told the volunteers that it contained a painkiller, but in fact it had no active ingredient. Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish. 'This type of mechanism has been envisioned for over 40 years for placebo analgesia,' says Donald Price, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the new study. 'This study provides the most direct test of this mechanism to date.'"
The Internet

Submission + - Piracy Demo Fails In Federal Court (itnews.com.au) 3

Submitted by bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: The court battle between the film industry and Australian internet service provider iiNet today saw the film industry attempt to demonstrate how piracy could occur by accessing the Pirate Bay website. iTnews reports that website blocking software installed within Sydney's Federal Court brought proceedings to a halt. Upon the film industry proposing the demonstration before the Court, Justice Cowdroy said he expected such a demonstration would work. The judge said he would have the Pirate Bay website unblocked. Wait untill they find out that certain ports will be blocked too!
Moon

2 Companies Win NASA's Moon-Landing Prize Money 110

Posted by timothy from the what-happened-to-$150k? dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA said it will this week award $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which was managed by the X Prize Foundation, will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace for successfully completing the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge."
Politics

Submission + - Blogger humilates town councillors into resigning. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Dr_Barnowl
Dr_Barnowl writes: In an occurence first postulated in sci-fi and lampooned by stick figures, it would see that a blogger has actually been responsible for the mass resignation of elected officials (a British town council), largely by calling them "jackasses" and Nazis.

What's next? The desposition of the president with "your mom" smacktalk?

Comment Re:Not sure (Score 4, Insightful) 253

by Bright Apollo (#29768779) Attached to: FCC Considers Opening Up US Broadband Access

mod +1 insightful and correct: infrastructure is defined as the basis for an economy and society. It is not in public interest to run more than one gas line, water supply line, or sewer line. It is impossible to run separate highways -- and outsourcing mgmt of same is proving as ridiculous as govt mgmt -- so why then do we allow the pretense of the last mile?

The problem is a historical outsourcing of this infrastructure component to a regulated monopoly (AT&T). NYC circa 1911 had hundreds of indie wires connecting buildings; granting a monopoly to AT&T with open-access covenants solved this and cleaned up the problem. Today, the problem is largely solved but the divorce of managing the infrastructure versus providing services on it did not take place. In other words, break up Verizon and SBC and every other last-mile provider, separating the physical transport from the value-added services.

Just think of it this way: Verizon or some other company contracts with a muni or county to provide last-mile service. Taxes pay for the connectivity, the wires, the fiber, what have you. Verizon provides -- and only provides -- a central office space with connections to the local infrastructure. Your services are provided by people leasing space in the CO and interconnecting. Last mile is provided by your town or county. Services are provided by whoever can lease a spot on the floor and cover operating costs.

I mean, we don't run Main Street any differently, do we?

-BA

Comment Re:If you play enough, you will ALWAYS lose. (Score 2, Informative) 597

by adamstew (#29768613) Attached to: Computer-Based System To Crack Down On Casino Card Counters

There exist continuously reshuffling card machines. They just pull cards out of it. When they are done with a hand, they put the used cards back in to the machine, and it will continuously shuffle the deck.

Card counters are thwarted completely and there is no time lost for reshuffling. Although, I don't think these machines are legal in vegas. I have seen them on cruise ships and other casinos.
Communications

FCC Considers Opening Up US Broadband Access 253

Posted by kdawson from the let-slip-the-dogs-of-the-market dept.
An anonymous reader writes On October 14, the FCC issued a call for public comments on a study (PDF) done by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society about whether the US should require the telephone and cable companies to open their networks to competitors so that independent ISPs could begin offering broadband, much in the way it was done back in the days of dialup access. The study found that open-access in virtually every other country 'is playing a central role in current planning exercises throughout the highest performing countries,' noting: 'While Congress adopted various open access provisions in the almost unanimously-approved Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC decided to abandon this mode of regulation for broadband in a series of decisions in 2001 and 2002. Open access has been largely treated as a closed issue in US policy debates ever since. We find that in countries where an engaged regulator enforced open access obligations, competitors that entered using these open access facilities provided an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics.'"
Google

Submission + - Google to upgrade Swiss Street View (swissinfo.ch)

Submitted by cheros
cheros writes: Google Switzerland says it will upgrade its software to improve the blurring of faces and car registration plates on its Street View service, but doesn't want to lower its cameras (interesting — that was the same thing it was asked to do in Japan).
Google

Submission + - What problems does Google Wave solve? (danieltenner.com)

Submitted by KDan
KDan writes: There are countless pundits and other tech gurus describing Google Wave as a disappointment, lately. Most of that seems to come from the fact that nobody seems to get what Wave is for. So they compare it to social media.

Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.

I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”.

Submission + - First black hole for light created on Earth (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An electromagnetic "black hole" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time.

The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.

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