Comment AZ - lucky you (Score 1) 821
I went to the polls at about the same time, and had to spend one hour waiting in line...
Washington State To Allow Voter Registration Over Facebook 178
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that the state of Washington will soon have an application available on its Facebook page that will let residents register to vote. Washington and other states already allow online registration, but this is the first time it will be allowed over Facebook. The state's co-director of elections, Shane Hamlin, said, 'In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered.' Facebook won't have access to the State's database, and Hamlin says Facebook won't collect any of the personal information with which it interacts."
Comment Re:Vocab Nazi strikes again! (Score 2) 250
Please turn in your Vocab Nazi card at the nearest Nazi Card Collection Center.
Lanai is located east of the International Date Line, at 20.833333 N, -156.933333 W. The name "typhoon" is reserved for a tropical cyclone in the Northwest Pacific Ocean (i.e. west of the International Date Line). See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/A1.html for more details.
Comment Re:one word (Score 1) 238
5) Re-fuel with fuel conveniently pre-manufactured by previous robotic missions (this is the only part not obvious to me how it would be done for whatever that's worth).
You just make it there, using the Sabatier reaction or something similar.
Comment Re:obligatory... (Score 1) 382
That sound you hear is a 256-kbps WHOOOSH...
Comment Re:Great, now the terrorists are controlling natur (Score 2) 278
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we have systems designed to monitor weather, flooding, seismic activity, volcanism and so on? If they're finding out about natural disasters from social networks, that's beyond pathetic.
True, but sensors can't tell you what impact a tornado is causing; for that, you need "ground truth" information. The National Weather Service still has a network of weather spotters to complement the information given by the sensors, and took storm reports over Twitter a couple of years ago to further augment that info (not sure if they are still doing that, though).
Air Guns Shake Up Earthquake Monitoring 38
sciencehabit writes "Petroleum geologists have long used air guns in their search for oil and gas deposits. Sudden blasts from the devices generate seismic waves that they use to map underground rock formations. Could the same technique be used to study earthquakes? A team of Chinese scientists thinks so. The researchers have designed an air gun that could be useful in monitoring changes in stress buildup along fault zones."
Comment Re:IPv6 Info, disable Javascript to read Wikipedia (Score 1) 463
I used NoScript to block the JS too, but only a few can use these workarounds. Some opt to use mirrors like thefreedictionary. For the masses though, they cannot use wikipedia for 24 hours, and they cannot work around it. It is a major disruption of operations, as far as they are concerned.
Instead of disabling Javascript, you can access the English Wikipedia via the mobile site. Head to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 and enjoy your reading...
Comment More of the same (Score 4, Interesting) 117
And Mars continues to give Russia a big, fat middle finger. No Russian/Soviet probe has successfully completed a mission to the Red Planet...
Comment Re:C/C++ a disaster? No! (uh, YES!) (Score 1) 79
You know, Skapare, even Kernighan and Ritchie admit that C has serious security problems. I've talked to them both about it. As for C++, it is a complete dog of a language that would be best stricken from the planet.
You may snicker, but I am a scheme programmer at heart.
gem
Comment Re:evolution of the security industry? (Score 1) 79
WSC is a good book. So is the SDL book by Lipner and Howard.
Probably the best book on security for builders to read is "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson,
I happen to think that "Software Security" is good too. Then again, I wrote it.
gem
Comment Re:Let's not ask someone who has lots of credentia (Score 1) 79
Here, try this one on for size:
Software Security
gem
Comment EE (Score 4, Insightful) 296
If you want to learn controls, it seems Electrical Engineering would be a better fit than Computer Science. While Mechanical Engineers have to learn a fair degree of controls theory, the EE guys live and breathe controls, so it would make you more proficient in that area, at least on paper.
Comment Re:This is a real problem (Score 1) 253
Have you considered using Fortran? Matlab is much closer to Fortran than C (arrays start at 1 instead of 0, to pick a rather annoying bug), has plenty of libraries available (just like C) and the newer versions of the language standard are not the spaghetti-laden soup they used to be.
Comment Re:Late-Breaking News from the Council: Onwards! (Score 2) 86
Heh, I was wondering what K'Breel was going to say about this. You seriously should put all of these in an eBook or something similar... if nothing else to ensure that all the gelsacs that have been sacrificed during the Blue Planet's invasion are memorialized properly.
