Comment 1 word (Score 1) 505
oscilloscope
Comment Good pics? (Score 2, Insightful) 175
Good pics? Where? I didn't see a single pic of a server setup or wireless equipment :(
Submission + - Developing a Vandalism Detector for Wikipedia (webis.de)
marpot writes: The title really says it all. In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we conduct a public lab on vandalism detection. Goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work not unlike a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors is evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate.
Journal Journal: Spam from Web page "email this to a friend" forms
Over the past few days I've noticed spam coming from those "email this to a friend" forms you see everywhere. Didn't really think about it until today, when I received this:
Submission + - CERN Restarted, First beam of 2010. (physorg.com) 1
khrath writes: The LHC is on its way again. First beam of 2010 circulated in each direction by 04.10 CET (0310 GMT)," said CERN in a tweet on its website on Sunday.
The 3.9 billion euro (5.6 billion dollars) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down in December to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels. It was run for a few weeks after being successfully revived from a 14 month breakdown.
The 3.9 billion euro (5.6 billion dollars) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down in December to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels. It was run for a few weeks after being successfully revived from a 14 month breakdown.
Submission + - Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linke (cnn.com)
johncadengo writes: Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.
Submission + - US Gov't Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition 5
Hugh Pickens writes: "Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an interesting article in Slate about the US government's little known policy to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during prohibition in the 1920's by poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States. Known as the "chemist's war of Prohibition," the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people by the time Prohibition ended in 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the United States after high-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations helped push the amendment through in 1919. When the government saw that its “noble experiment” was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that methyl alcohol, readily available as industrial alcohol, didn't taste nasty enough and put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program but an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination.""
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Will the Serial Console ever Die? 2
simpz writes: Will the serial port as a console connection esp for devices switches, routers, SAN boxes etc ever be displaced? Okay in one sense it's an simple connection, but it is the only current port you need to know about wiring/baud rates/parity etc to use, has non-standard pinouts and is now becoming too slow to quickly upload massive firmware updates on dead devices. And it is rapidly being removed from new laptops where you really need it in data centers. Centronics, PS/2, Current loop have mostly passed on. Any sign of a USB console connection?
Submission + - Microbin: Recommendation algorithm wants to show you somethi
When it comes to recommendation systems, everybody's looking to increase accuracy: the Netflix Prize was awarded last July for an algorithm that improved the accuracy of the service's recommendation algorithm by 10 percent. However, computer scientists are finding a new metric to improve upon: recommendation diversity. In a paper that will be released by PNAS, a group of scientists are pushing the limits of recommendation systems, creating new algorithms that will make more tangential recommendations to users, which can help expand their interests, which will increase the longevity and utility of the recommendation system itself.
Accuracy has long been the most prized measurement in recommending content, like movies, links, or music. However, computer scientists note that this type of system can narrow the field of interest for each user the more it is used. Improved accuracy can result in a strong filtering based on a user's interests, until the system can only recommend a small subset of all the content it has to offer.
Link to Original Source
Submission + - HTML5 vs Flash (silicon.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Here's an article that provides a lowdown on whether HTML5 is going to smackdown Flash when it comes to mobile apps or whether the standard will be obsolete by the time that its specifications are finally ratified.
Submission + - NASA Project M to Send Every Scientist to the Moon (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing.
Submission + - Honda new concept electric personal vehicle
Gosan writes: Honda Motor will show off its new concept vehicle the Honda 3R-C Concept in the Geneva Motor Show. The 3R-C is an electric three-wheeled single seat scooter like vehicle. The driver is not exposed as a motorbike driver, the lower part of the body is enclosed and there is a movable wind shield to protect the driver from the elements.
The size of the vehicle looks to be similar to Toyota's concept car the i-swing, and these vehicles are designed for urban commute in mind.
As for the concept of a personal vehicle, the Segway (the 3R-C however is a lot larger and meant for commute on roads) has gained some acceptance in areas such as airport and shopping mall.
When will we be driving one of these greener vehicles to mall and do our grocery?
The size of the vehicle looks to be similar to Toyota's concept car the i-swing, and these vehicles are designed for urban commute in mind.
As for the concept of a personal vehicle, the Segway (the 3R-C however is a lot larger and meant for commute on roads) has gained some acceptance in areas such as airport and shopping mall.
When will we be driving one of these greener vehicles to mall and do our grocery?
Submission + - Microsoft, Panasonic ink IP deal (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft Corp. says it has agreed to an intellectual property licensing contract with Panasonic Corp., a deal that gives Panasonic access to technology that will help store more media content on consumer electronics. The deal covers the latest generation of Microsoft's file system technology, which is called Extended File Allocation Table. A file system is technology used inside computers and other electronics for organizing and storing data.
Submission + - Europe to block ACTA disconnection provisions (zdnet.co.uk)
superglaze writes: The European Commission is "not supporting and will not accept" any attempt to have Acta (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) force countries to disconnect people for downloading copyrighted material, a spokesman for the new EU trade commissioner has said.
All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hardline stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commssion spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article:
"[Acta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is 'commercial scale' [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in Acta."
All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hardline stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commssion spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article:
"[Acta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is 'commercial scale' [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in Acta."
