phossie - Slashdot User

Comment: comparison doesn't matter (Score 1) 691

by phossie on Wednesday June 23 2010, @01:03AM (#32661996) Attached to: Louisiana Federal Judge Blocks Drilling Moratorium

How many other industries have consequences of the same magnitude when they fuck up?

Ethics aside: If you can't absorb the risk, you shouldn't make the wager... unless you have no qualms about being forced to walk away from the game.

Being an oil company is a choice. Being an oil company that does deepwater drilling is a choice. Being an oil company that does deepwater drilling poorly is a choice.

Since when does being bad at your risky job entitle you to privileges unavailable to people who aren't as stupid as you are?

(Oh yeah, sorry, that's a long list right now. I guess we know how this will turn out.)

Beaver Dam Visible From Space 286

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 05 2010, @05:41PM
from the dam-big-job dept.

ygslash writes "The Hoover Dam no longer holds the title of the world's widest dam. Satellite photos of northern Alberta, Canada, show that several families of beavers have apparently joined forces to build a dam 850 meters wide, more than twice as wide as the Hoover Dam."

Geomagnetic Storm In Progress 110

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 05 2010, @02:13PM
from the sky-is-falling dept.

shogun writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports a strong geomagnetic storm is in progress. The shuttle, ISS and GPS systems may be affected." They think this storm was caused by a weak solar flare on April 3rd. As you may expect, this has caused some unusually impressive northern lights since it started. What you may not expect is a photograph from Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station showing the aurora from orbit. He apparently tweets a lot of pictures from space. He and his crewmates have taken over 100,000 pictures since coming aboard the ISS.

DR Congo Ring May Be Giant Impact Crater 96

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 12 2010, @03:48PM
from the leaving-a-mark dept.

Phrogman writes "The BBC is reporting that deforestation has 'revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say. The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade.' If you search Google Maps for 'Omeonga Democratic Republic of the Congo,' you will be right in the middle of the suspected crater."

The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 11 2010, @02:14PM
from the burning-potential-of-fire dept.

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."

California Lake's Arsenic Hints At a Shadow Biosphere 155

Posted by timothy on Friday March 05 2010, @11:00PM
from the some-more-tea-dear? dept.

MichaelSmith writes "Scientists think that there might be arsenic-based life in Mono Lake, California. If it's shown to exist, such life could have evolved independently from our own, or it could have forked from ours at a very early stage."

Comment: link to the actual paper (Score 2, Interesting) 108

by phossie on Wednesday February 17 2010, @10:59PM (#31180132) Attached to: PageRank-Type Algorithm From the 1940s Discovered

The summaries were intriguing but lame. Here's the real thing (preprint):

http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858

Author's page is here:

http://users.dimi.uniud.it/~massimo.franceschet/

Interesting stuff.

Comment: Re:Cartoon porn is still porn (Score 2, Insightful) 673

by Capsaicin on Thursday January 28 2010, @02:12AM (#30930394) Attached to: Man in Court Over Simpsons Porn

How the hell was he let off the hook the first time?

Maybe because it was a first offence?

And how serious was the nature of the "child exploitation material" the first time, given this is also classifed as such?

OTOH wanting to throw the book (or something even heavier) at him for looking like that I can understand!

Comment: Re:IPv6 will make this obsolete (Score 1) 265

by quantumphaze on Thursday January 28 2010, @01:56AM (#30930308) Attached to: Tracking Browsers Without Cookies Or IP Addresses?

tacks their 64-bit MAC on the end

MAC Addresses are 48 bits.
12:34:56:78:9a:bc = 8 bytes = 48 bits

Comment: Re:No stylus eh? (Score 1) 1713

by mikael_j on Thursday January 28 2010, @01:36AM (#30930214) Attached to: Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open

I want a stylus so I can draw, paint and sketch, and for that the Pogo stylus and those homemade ones just aren't good enough, it needs to have an active digitizer.

/Mikael