Comment: Re:pfftt... (Score 1) 544
I'd mod you up, but you're already at five. You deserve a 6 out of 5, my good man.
+ - Major advance towards a proof of the twin prime conjecture->
Submitted
by
ananyo
ananyo writes "Researchers hoping to get ‘2’ as the answer for a long-sought proof involving pairs of prime numbers are celebrating the fact that a mathematician has wrestled the value down from infinity to 70 million.
That goal is the proof to a conjecture concerning prime numbers. Primes abound among smaller numbers, but they become less and less frequent as one goes towards larger numbers. But exceptions exist: the ‘twin primes’, which are pairs of prime numbers that differ in value by 2. The twin prime conjecture says that there is an infinite number of such twin pairs. Some attribute the conjecture to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, which would make it one of the oldest open problems in mathematics.
The new result, from Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, finds that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart. He presented his research on 13 May to an audience of a few dozen at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although 70 million seems like a very large number, the existence of any finite bound, no matter how large, means that that the gaps between consecutive numbers don’t keep growing forever."
Link to Original Source
That goal is the proof to a conjecture concerning prime numbers. Primes abound among smaller numbers, but they become less and less frequent as one goes towards larger numbers. But exceptions exist: the ‘twin primes’, which are pairs of prime numbers that differ in value by 2. The twin prime conjecture says that there is an infinite number of such twin pairs. Some attribute the conjecture to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, which would make it one of the oldest open problems in mathematics.
The new result, from Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, finds that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart. He presented his research on 13 May to an audience of a few dozen at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although 70 million seems like a very large number, the existence of any finite bound, no matter how large, means that that the gaps between consecutive numbers don’t keep growing forever."
Link to Original Source
Comment: Now, (Score 1) 416
if they had called themselves the "Brony Patriot Thank You Fund", we'd have a different story.
Comment: Re:More FUD. It was much higher 450 million years (Score 4, Informative) 690
TFS:
[...]reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said.
There weren't any humans around 450 million years ago.
Furthermore, you copy-and-pasted directly but left out the rest of the paragraph
CO2 levels of more than 4000 parts per million (ppm) occurred during the Ordovician-Silurian (450 million years ago). There is also evidence of a glacial event occurring during this period. This has been used by some to attempt to disprove the link between temperature and CO2. Royer et al. (2006) considered the CO2 forced climate thresholds over the Phanerozoic eon (the last 545 million years). It was found that there is insufficient proxy data to determine that a high CO2 event coincided with the Ordovician-Silurian glacial event. The only proxy CO2 data near this glacial event could be up to five million years younger than the event. Further, the Earth was a very different place during this period including differences in solar luminosity, albedo, distribution of continents and vegetation, orbital parameters and other greenhouse gases.
You should try to think more, brah. It can actually save you from embarrasment.
+ - Flying car crashes->
Submitted
by
vawarayer
vawarayer writes "An experimental car has crashed near a school in British-Columbia, Canada. Only five car like this have been produced to this day.
"
Link to Original Source
The flying car is a combination of a plane engine, propeller and parasail attached to a dune buggy
Link to Original Source
+ - Mozilla Handing Out Free Firefox OS Developer Phones To Bolster App Marketplace->
Submitted
by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes "Is the world really ready to shift from native apps to HTML5 Web apps? Probably not, at least not in North America yet, but developing nations may see it differently. That's the hope with Firefox OS, a web-based operating system that's (in theory) a lot more open. Of course, one needs only look at Microsoft's battle to get Windows Phone into a place of competition to realize that gaining market share is no easy task, which is why Mozilla will soon be handing out Firefox OS developer phones in order to bolster that. The company's goal is to get app builders to build for Firefox OS, so Mozilla is sending out free Preview handsets for folks to tinker with."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment: Re:However that line is impossible to believe (Score 1) 713
The problem with libertarianism is that they don't have that example, or that we do and they ignore it (much of the 3rd world). We have the example of the extreme-left and the extreme-right (communism, facism) and how they failed. However, we don't have the example of "extreme freedom" or the state of nature that libertarians can't or won't explain away as being the true result of their idealism. Some liberts actually think Somalia is a good example of the power of unregulated markets and thus study their "currency" as an example of the power of no-government but are sure to explain away their social problems due to culture, etc.
Comment: Re:Imagine a day (Score 1) 54
I really hope so, bro. Given the short-sightedness of some on this planet, it seems like it will be a while until that "day" will actually come.
Comment: Re:Negative Attention (Score 2) 117
It is a reality that women are are poorly represented in IT. In fact, if you're one of those types who believe "reverse discrimination" is an issue, you should be upholding her as an example that women can and do succeed in computing and thus need no special attention.
I'm happy because she can be a role model for her peers, both male and female.
+ - Major Quantum Information Technology Breakthroughs
Submitted
by
quax
quax writes "Within the same week two major Quantum Information Technology milestones where announced: The Los Alamos National Labs unveiled that they've been operating a scalable quantum encrypted network for the last two years (link to original paper).
There have been commercial quantum encryption devices on the market for quite some time now, but these have been limited to point to point connections. Having a protocol that allows the seamless integration of quantum cryptography into the existing network stack raises this to an entirely different level.
Just days after this news came the announcement that the company D-Wave, that claims to ship the first quantum computing device, aced a test when their machine was put into direct comparison with conventional hardware. It wasn't even close. For the class of problems that the D-Wave machine is designed for, the next best algorithm on a regular CPU performed several thousand times worse."
There have been commercial quantum encryption devices on the market for quite some time now, but these have been limited to point to point connections. Having a protocol that allows the seamless integration of quantum cryptography into the existing network stack raises this to an entirely different level.
Just days after this news came the announcement that the company D-Wave, that claims to ship the first quantum computing device, aced a test when their machine was put into direct comparison with conventional hardware. It wasn't even close. For the class of problems that the D-Wave machine is designed for, the next best algorithm on a regular CPU performed several thousand times worse."
+ - MS developer about why MS kernel development falls behind->
Submitted
by
mha
mha writes "In a response that truly seems to be from a core Microsoft developer we are told about why MS Windows kernel development continues to fall further and further behind that of the Linux kernel."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment: Re:can't get past the hype and bad studies (Score 1) 132
Incorrect. The response to "The adverse health effects (like early beginnings of brain tumors) start showing up after two years." was "Cellphone radiation is non-ionizing.", suggesting that there are no adverse health effects if the radiation is non-ionizing. That claim is false, as shown by documented cases of adverse health effects caused by non-ionizing radiation.
Uh, no. Tumors == Cancer. Below red EM doesn't cause cancer from what we know. You're the one who implied cancer, and he responded to that claim.
Comment: Re:Why are you people against labeling? (Score 1) 132
Hell of a way to validate Godwin's Law... Let's argue against it with science and reduce to their level.
Comment: Uhm (Score 4, Insightful) 651
DISCLAIMER: I am a godless liberal in some respects, so I might be biased...but this is becoming like bitcoin, guys. A 3D printed gun is cool to me as a demonstration of the advanced state of the technology, but we don't need a story of even little happening with TEH 3D PRONTED GUNNS (GUBERMIENT, etc).
Slashdot has become awash with political crap. Let's return to a site for nerds, stuff that matters. Not stuff that rallies the libertarians and the collectivists, okay?
Comment: Re:bollocks (Score 1) 675
I trust in the good of individuals to do the right thing.
No you don't. Otherwise, you wouldn't buy a gun. You wouldn't put locks on your doors. You wouldn't connect to websites using SSL. You really don't trust others, you'd rather put restrictions on them (reduce their power in democratic process) while you'd be able to do whatever you want. You want them to trust you to do the right thing and not take advantage of them. You can't trust them; why can they trust you?
Libertarianism in politics is like solipism in philosophy. Why would anyone want you to be the point of existence when they could be?