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Television

When Vote Counting Goes Bad 128

Posted by timothy
from the it-increments-the-database-or-else-it-gets-the-hose dept.
ZipK writes "Television singing competition The Voice disclosed on Wednesday 'inconsistencies' with the tallying of on-line and SMS-based voting. Although host Carson Daly claimed the show wanted to be 'completely upfront,' the explanation from their third-party vote counter, Telescope, was anything but transparent. In particular, Telescope claims that disregarding all on-line and SMS-based voting for the two nights in question left no impact on the final results, but they haven't provided any detail of the 'inconsistency' or their ability to predict a complete lack of impact. Sure, it's only The Voice; but tomorrow it could be American Idol, and by next month, America's Got Talent."

Comment: Blue crabs grow bigger shells, mud crabs eat less (Score 5, Informative) 203

by Walking The Walk (#43392003) Attached to: Increased Carbon Emissions Creating Giant Crabs
Not sure why the link goes to the second page of the article, but on the first page they explain that blue crabs grow their shells faster in water with more carbon. (They note that bigger shells doesn't translate to more meat.) On the second page, they talk about the fact that mud crabs seem confused in water polluted with carbon, and that some mud crabs only ate half as much as in water with less carbon. Relevant quotes from the article:

Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster

versus

Under conditions with lower levels of carbon, two mud crabs polished off 20 oysters in six hours. But in the aquariums with higher levels of carbon, the mud crabs seemed confused. They went over to the oysters, but they didn’t eat as many — sometimes fewer than half of what other crabs ate under normal conditions.

Education

Dell, Raymond Unveil 'One Smartwatch Per Child'; Icahn Erupts 34

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the brought-to-you-by-the-open-sauce-foundation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the suddenly crowded smartwatch sweepstakes along with Apple, Google, and Samsung. The twist is that Dell's product will target the low end of the market — the extreme low end, in the words of CEO Dell, because 'that's where most of the world's customers are'. Dell's smartwatch, projected to cost just 19.99 USD ($319.99 before Dell's mail-in rebate) will allow children in developing countries to communicate via voice and text, collaborate on school activities, and perform native-to-English voice and text translations with the help of Dell's new ARM supercomputer. Dell says premium models will also perform translations in the reverse direction, i.e. English-to-native. Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond, who joined Dell for the conference call, stated 'this is the beginning of what I call the Bazaar Wrist model of the mobile Internet. It'll be a battle of ideas against what I call the Office Tower Wrist model that Apple and Google will be selling.' Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who recently launched a rival bid for Dell, labeled the product an 'a pig in the poke' as well as a 'distraction and extreme waste of shareholder value', adding that his $7.44 Wal-Mart watch 'works just great for me and probably anyone else'."
ISS

Soyuz Breaks Speed Record To ISS 58

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the battling-space-dragons dept.
Zothecula writes "A manned Soyuz spacecraft set a record for traveling to the International Space Station (ISS), arriving six hours after launch instead of the usual two days. Soyuz 34 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, March 28 at 4:43 p.m. EDT (08:43 GMT) and docked with the ISS at 10: 28 PM EDT (03:28 GMT). It was able to catch up and match trajectories with the ISS in only four orbits using new techniques previously tested in ISS rendezvouses with Russian unmanned Progress cargo ships."
Businesses

National "Take Your Computer To Work" Day 40

Posted by samzenpus
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today marks the inaugural 'Take Your Computer to Work Day'. First conceived by security researchers Michael Gough and Ian Robertson (the Thoughtful Hackers), this day has exploded in popularity and has now become a world-wide phenomenon. Says Mr. Robertson of its introduction, 'We always hear stories of how much productivity people gain by using their own mobile phones and tablets at work – by some studies, as much as 110%. We thought, wow, that is so smart and has absolutely no downsides. The next logical extension of that is to offer all our workers to bring in any of their computers, so we did.' 'The results were absolutely astonishing', said Mr. Gough. 'We were seeing user productivity up at least 0.5 times with Commodore 64's alone. Our database searches got faster with home-built white-box servers, and our janitorial staff was able to clean the restrooms twice as fast thanks to their TRS-80's.'"
Hardware

Scientists Create World's First 3D-Printed 3D Printer 71

Posted by samzenpus
from the matryoshka-machines dept.
MikeChino writes "Researchers at Germany's Doppelbock University just opened the door to the future of rapid prototyping technology by developing the world's first 3D-printed 3D printer. Dubbed the Ecophage, the duplicitous device is capable of using readily available materials to create copies of itself – albeit at a slightly smaller scale. Best of all, it's outfitted with a built-in material re-processor that can convert virtually any carbon-based substance into filament for 3d-printing."
Books

Remote Island Adopts Dothraki Language 65

Posted by samzenpus
from the it-is-known dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The tiny island of Tristan da Cunha is officially the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world with few connections to the outside and access only by sea when the notoriously stormy south Atlantic co-operates which is not often. Entertainment options are limited and LARPing in Game of Thrones style has become massively popular, so much so that the islanders have declared Dothraki to be an official language, alongside English."
Encryption

A New Benefit For Logged-In Readers: Meet Slashdot's ROT13 Initiative 261

Posted by timothy
from the is-he-gonna-shift-or-is-he-gonna-kill-us? dept.
We appreciate all the support we've gotten over the years from Slashdot's logged-in users. They take part actively in discussions, and in exchange for their active interest in the site, we like to give a few perks over and above what our beloved anonymous readers get. But we never want to deprive anonymous readers of the actual features of the site — whether you're a logged-in account holder, anonymous, a subscriber, or have a username but are browsing anonymously at any given moment, Slashdot has always been freely available to read for anyone with a browser and an uncensored Internet connection. It's a balance we try to maintain, too, Sure, we'd like you to login, and we think it has some worthwhile benefits (like tracking comment responses, building karma, and using the Zoo system to keep track of your friends and foes), but we'll never force you to. Today, we're building on this approach, by introducing a feature that benefits every logged-in user, but still leaves the page free to read for all. We'll be phasing in over the next few days a button that logged-in users and subscribers can click to decrypt the text of each Slashdot posting with the trivial transform known as Rot13. Read more, below!
Android

We Didn't Need Google's Schmidt To Tell Us Android and Chrome Wouldn't Merge 107

Posted by samzenpus
from the keep-em-seperated dept.
First time accepted submitter Steve Patterson writes "Thankfully, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that 'Android and Chrome will remain separate.' Rumors that the products would be combined emerged last week when leadership of Android and Chrome were consolidated under Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai. Schmidt stated the obvious, but if you are a developer and you took the bait and thought the rumors might be true, you already read enough of Google Chrome or Google Android documentation before Schmidt's clarification and confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid."

Comment: Re:Newton (Score 2) 237

by Walking The Walk (#43229671) Attached to: Voyager 1 Officially Exits Our Solar System

Voyager has no need for power to continue its journey; running out of power will have no effect on its velocity.

You're forgetting drag. Just like flying through air, flying through parts of the solar system results in drag from dust. The dust density is expected to increase when the probe reaches the inner Oort cloud, unless Voyager 1's path has angled enough above the ecliptic that it manages to miss it (I thought 35 degrees was high enough, my colleague disagrees.) If dust density increases, the drag will provide a small but continuous slowing effect. Once past the inner Oort cloud dust density will likely decrease, though no one I've worked with has a great guess of the dust density in the outer Oort cloud. It will still be non-zero though, and Voyager can't avoid the outer Oort. Added to the small but still present force of gravity from the sun (which is what keeps the Oort objects from drifting away), you have continuous drag on the craft.

We can't calculate the effect of that drag without knowing the dust density, and our estimates of the size of the Oort clouds are still rough (on the order of +-100AU last paper I read), which is why that NASA paper estimated crossing the outer edge of the Oort cloud in a range from 14K to 28K years. 14K if the Oort cloud is small and fairly dust-free, twice that long if our worst-case estimates of the density and size are correct.

Comment: Re:Must be Wednesday (Score 2) 237

by Walking The Walk (#43226195) Attached to: Voyager 1 Officially Exits Our Solar System

the linked stories don't mention how big a change in radiation was experienced. Are we talking 10%, or a factor of 10?

Yes they did, from TFA:

"Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays trapped in the outer heliosphere, all but vanished, dropping to less than 1 percent of previous amounts."

and also

"galactic cosmic rays – cosmic radiation from outside of the solar system – spiked to levels not seen since Voyager's launch, with intensities as much as twice previous levels"

Role Playing (Games)

Villians & Vigilantes Creators Win Lawsuit, Rights To Game 30

Posted by timothy
from the remember-my-brother-playing-this dept.
rcade writes "Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the creators of the old-school super-hero roleplaying game Villains & Vigilantes, have won a copyright and trademark lawsuit over the game's publisher Scott Bizar of Fantasy Games Unlimited. Magistrate Judge Mark E. Aspey of the U.S. District Court of Arizona ruled that Jeff Dee and Jack Herman own the rights to the game based on the 1979 contract they reached with Bizar. The court also found that Bizar never had the right to sell derivative products or ebook PDF editions, which are a big deal to tabletop publishers these days. Too bad this judge didn't hear Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's case."

I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.

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