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Math

+ - Discrimination of numbers->

Submitted by BlackShirt
BlackShirt writes "In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.That's an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren't numbers evenly distributed in such lists?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: phone=a computer with skype installed (Score 1) 161

by BlackShirt (#31430532) Attached to: 6 Smartphone Keyboards Compared

Where I could by a decent phone with wifi connection and qwerty keyboard? I could buy some fancy phones (iphone, xperia, blackberry,nokia e72) but no dirt cheap models. I tried ipod touch but it feels cold and too heavy on the hand.

Samsung GT-B3410 sounds most reasonable option. Lacks wifi.
http://www.pda-247.com/wordpress/2009/12/a-smartphone-for-under-80-meet-the-samsung-gt-b3410/

It's funny. Laugh.

+ - What Did We Watch Before YouTube?

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Copybrighter has an amusing post on what "What the Social Web Looked Like in the 1990s" with a tongue-in-cheek look at early precursors to blogs, podcasts, Facebook. Skype, eBay, iPhone, P2P file sharing, and Craigslist. Our favorite is the forerunner to YouTube — "America's Funniest Home Videos," a 90's television smash-hit, based on a Japanese show, that kicked off user-generated video content in America with home videos of babies with nail guns, dogs on fire, and grandmas falling down, that at its peak of popularity reported receiving close to 2,000 video submissions a day. You're invited to contribute other examples of predecessors of today's social web."
The Internet

+ - WikiSlashNews

Submitted by BlackShirt
BlackShirt writes "Could you imagine if instead of commenting slashdot users could rewrite an wiki article for the story subject.

Pro
There is tremendous knowledege that users have on various subjects
It could work on the same way as wiki news.

Con
It takes time and effort to attain certain certain editorial level (sci stories)
What would be the motivation for the readers?

What do you think?"
PC Games (Games)

+ - Top Ten Free Games of 2007->

Submitted by
Midnight Synergy
Midnight Synergy writes "With the season of big commercial game releases upon us, it is a great time to remember the many free, fun, inventive, and creative games that have been produced over the year.

To this end, Midnight Synergy has compiled a Top Ten Best Free Game Releases of 2007 . The list includes, among others, a surrealist adventure game, an island survival game, an educational puzzle game, and even an experimental sumo wrestling simulation. These games are virtually guaranteed to provide you with hours of fun on these cold winter nights (and are completely free).

To view the list and play the games, visit
http://www.midnightsynergy.com/topten2007

Notes:
1. The list was compiled based on coverage on major game websites and discussion boards, but as with any "Best Of" list, it contains a healthy dose of personal bias. This "Top Ten" concentrates on independent releases and does not include previously available commercial titles that have been re-released as freeware for promotional purposes.

2. We would be very interested in hearing feedback on this list. Which games do you think did not deserve the cut? Which ones did we miss?"
Link to Original Source
X

+ - Trying to disprove Humans have free will->

Submitted by
fantafob
fantafob writes "In an attempt to prove Humans don't have free will I have unwillingly written this: Disproving free will is very difficult, and possibly impossible to conclusively prove. I think the major problem lies in the possibility that if it were proved, that would also open up the almost certainty that a God exists. And Humans like supernatural scenarios to be unproven — we found the Lock Ness Monster, it was a big Trout — Boring, lets keep it undiscovered. Lets try a simple experiment: Go and kill yourself! No? Is that because you don't want to die, or you don't actually have the free will to carry it through? The perception that you could kill yourself if you really wanted to is always in your mind, but at the critical moment could it actually be done? And if you did actually do it, maybe, and controversially, you were meant to do it. The movement you just made with your hand, you didn't actually do that knowingly, your subconscious mind did it. A subconscious that you have no control over. So our conscious mind is experiencing reality and a false perception of control over it, while our subconscious mind is actually doing what we have no control over. The mindless, drunken idiot in the pub is deliberately a mindless, drunken idiot because his place in the world is to be that. Part of your place was to read this. The wider implications are very controversial because it implies that criminals have no choice in what they have done. However, I am not implying that we are 100% controlled, we may have a little free will which is kept within a certain parameter, and kept from reaching outside the boundary by outside forces that we wouldn't even notice. How many of you believe in fate? Fate implies control. True randomness does not exist, only perceptions of random in a controlled environment. Unwillingly written by Fantafob"
Link to Original Source
The Media

+ - Paid Newspaper Readership Continue to Decline

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes "Paid circulation at major newspapers in the United States continued to decline this year with readership at 609 papers that filed on Sunday falling 3.5% to 46,771,486. Some major newspapers are doing much worse. For example, Sunday circulation at the New York Times and the LA Times fell 7.6% and 5.1% respectively this past year. so with their business model under extreme pressure, publishers have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers and increasing their internet presence because ad revenue has been increasing. Online advertising now accounts for an average 5.5% of newspapers' total ad revenue and online profits margins have been skyrocketing worldwide with revenue projected to hit 10% of newspapers' total ad revenue by 2008-2009. Last week the NY Times provided an especially good example of how newspapers are tailoring their stories for the internet and figuring out innovative new ways to draw readers to their online offerings when they published a story by writer Tom Bissell on his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and supplemented it with an Interactive Kilimanjaro Climb (flash) documenting Bissell's climb with 3D maps and video."
Java

An Open-Source Java Port To iPhone? 148

Posted by kdawson
from the one-can-hope dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a fruit much sought-after in the Java community: a Java port to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not released a version of Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early 2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone."
The Internet

+ - Massive p2p raids in Hungary, 100 servers down->

Submitted by
xxuaoxx
xxuaoxx writes "A sad news came from Hungary, a country which seemed to be a very secure place in terms of peer to peer networks and filesharing. Hungarian police raided and confiscated over 100 servers, including scene top sites, private bittorrent trackers and warez forums. Affected sites include the biggest and most popular hungarian tracker bitHumen (30 000 registered users), release site nCore (which is already up though), trackers Bitlove, Independent, Moobs, Revolution and many other private FTP sites which had a connection with the scene.

full story can be read here[rlslog.net]"
Link to Original Source

Don't abandon hope. Your Captain Midnight decoder ring arrives tomorrow.

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