Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Science

+ - The End of Science Friday?->

Submitted by
ihuntrocks
ihuntrocks writes "The Huffington Post carried an article earlier this month describing what could be the end of the long running (20 years) NPR program "Science Friday". Science Friday is facing a funding crisis as the National Science Foundation has decided to cease funding the program. From the article: "We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it's not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding."

Donations and sponsorship for the program, as for all public broadcasting, is always being sought from listeners."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (Score 1) 646

by ihuntrocks (#33718806) Attached to: Obama Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority
Wow...you're entire argument is made up of a single contiguous logical fallacy (argumentum ad Nazium). Impressive. Entirely ignorant, but still impressive. That's okay, ignorance is fixable. Perhaps try checking up on murder rates for countries who currently have strict gun control, such as Japan and Australia.
Robotics

+ - Frog-powered robotic sensor->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "What do you get if you cross a genetically-modified frog cells with an electronic nose? A robot that can smell moth pheromones, reports New Scientist. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a robot which shakes its head when a sample of moth perfume is injected in to its nostrils."
Link to Original Source

+ - 3D Sex and Zen->

Submitted by agatharuiz
agatharuiz writes "Last week there was a story about the porn industry's wary turn towards 3D, but now the first movie is officially in the works:

"The idea has originated in Hong Kong, where producers are hoping to revive the porn industry. It’s been essentially ripped apart by the world of amateur internet exposure, and director Christopher Sun seems to think that this is the best way to hit back. The film’s a $3million dollar epic and it’s about some young guy in some vague historical era who meets some people, or something. The plotline is probably not going to be the most important part.

"Somehow when you're doing a 3-D movie you always want to make an impressive image because the viewers ... are going to buy tickets with double or even triple the ticket price to get into a world they've never seen before," says Sun. “It’s not just erotica, they want some ‘wow factor’!” Of course, because why else would anyone watch porn, except for the wow factor?""
Link to Original Source
GUI

+ - Windows 95 Turns 15

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's "social desktop", I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparese (pre Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials."

+ - Autonomous flight in GPS denied environment->

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes "During AUVSI 2010 Adaptive Flight demonstrated autonomous flight in a GPS-denied environment with their Hornet Micro UAV at AUVSI. This state of the art,
and market first capability allows the micro-UAV to transition from outdoor navigation to indoor navigation at the touch of a button, opening up a broad range of applications for these vehicles."
Link to Original Source
The Courts

+ - Blogger beware: Postings can lead to lawsuits-> 1

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes "The Internet has allowed tens of millions of Americans to be published writers. But it also has led to a surge in lawsuits from those who say they were hurt, defamed or threatened by what they read, according to groups that track media lawsuits.

"It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet," said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York.

Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously.

Hal Turner, a right-wing blogger from New Jersey, faces up to 10 years in prison for posting a comment that three Chicago judges "deserve to be killed", in western Pennsylvania, a judge recently ruled a community website must identify the Internet address of individuals who posted comments calling a township official a "jerk" who put money from the taxpayers in "his pocket."

The Supreme Court has said that the 1st Amendment's protection for the freedom of speech includes the right to publish "anonymous" pamphlets. But recently, judges have been saying that online speakers do not always have a right to remain anonymous.

"The first thing people need to realize, they can be held accountable for what they say online," Baron said. "Before you speak ill of anyone online, you should think hard before pressing the 'send' button."

LA Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/23/nation/la-na-blogger-suits-20100823"
Link to Original Source
HP

+ - HP Laptop Nightmare 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Hi Chaps,

My HP laptop has decided to make my life a living hell thanks to shoddy manufacturing and some questionable NVIDIA cards. As such I'm looking for suggestions as to ways to circumvent the internal graphics card — are there external cards out there? Is there some smart way to cool the treacherous innards? I've tried replacing the drivers, updating the BIOS, and have messed around with cooling pads but it always ends in a graphical glitch, hard lock, and non-responsive screen. On a tangent — the only thing that gets the screen working again is to wrap the entire computer in a towel, let it overheat, then boot it up again immediatly (the Xbox solution essentially)...whats the logic behind that? Does a connection reattach when heated?"
Space

+ - Galactic Supervolcano Erupts From Black Hole->

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes "Volcanic eruptions can wreak as much havoc in space as on Earth, a new image of galaxy M87 reveals. The black hole at the galaxy’s center is spewing gas and energetic particles in what researchers call a “galactic supervolcano,” and suppressing the formation of hundreds of millions of new stars.
The new photo shows clouds of gas that glow in X-ray light (blue) surrounding the galaxy from observations taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and jets of radio emission (red) from observations from the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico."
Link to Original Source
AMD

+ - AMD exposes Bobcat and Bulldozer cores for Fusion->

Submitted by arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes "With Fusion's grand entrance rapidly approaching, AMD has finally decided to stop being all secretive and start dishing out the details. The company is detailing two new CPU cores called Bobcat and Bulldozer at Hot Chips today, showing a new approach to CPU architecture. For a start, Bulldozer sees AMD taking on Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. Rather than attempting to execute two threads on a single core, a Bulldozer core instead features two integer units with a shared floating point unit. Given that most compute tasks use integer calculations, it could effectively process two threads much more efficiently than an Intel core with Hyper-Threading. Meanwhile, AMD ie eyeing up the netbook market with its Bobcat core, which it says can run while consuming just a single Watt. Like VIA's Nano processor, Bobcat can also process instructions out-of-order, giving it a potential advantage over Intel's "in-order" Atom chips."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Libraries (Score 1) 137

by ihuntrocks (#32922884) Attached to: Why 'Gaming' Chips Are Moving Into the Server Room
I know I posted this like a little bit above, but this sounds like something you might be looking for. Any card with the PowerXCell setup. http://www.fixstars.com/en/products/gigaaccel180/features.html If you check under the specs section, you'll see tha BLAS, LAPACK, FFT, and several other numeric libraries are supported. Also, the GCC can target Cell. All around, not a bad set up for physics modeling.

This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not. -- A. E. Housman

Close