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Paleontologists Discover World's Horniest Dinosaur 109

Posted by samzenpus from the overcompensatesaurus dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Guardian reports that paleontologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient beast called Kosmoceratops richardsoni that stood 16 feet tall with a 6-foot skull equipped with 15 horns and lived 76 million years ago in the warm, wet swamps of what is now southern Utah. 'These animals are basically over-sized rhinos with a whole lot more horns on their heads. They had huge heads relative to their body size,' says Scott Sampson, a researcher at the Utah Museum of Natural History."
Wireless Networking

Providing Wireless In the World's Most Dangerous and Remote Places 40

Posted by samzenpus from the 5-bar-volcano dept.
grcumb writes "The Economist magazine is running a brief profile of Digicel, a 'minnow' in the wireless telecoms market that has distinguished itself by setting up shop in some of the most unlikely (and dangerous) markets in the world, including Haiti and Papua New Guinea, whose capital, Port Moresby, has one of the highest murder rates in the world."
Censorship

When the Senate Tried To Ban Dial Telephones 506

Posted by samzenpus from the history-repeating dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With the Senate now looking to have the government block access to websites it deems to be bad (which seems to be called 'censorship' in other countries), it's worth pointing out that the Senate doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to deciding what technologies to ban. Back in 1930, some Senators came close to banning the dial telephone, because they felt that it was wrong that they had to do the labor themselves, rather than an operator at the other end."

Comment Public presence (Score 0) 2

by put_it_down (#33158202) Attached to: Google CEO: No Online Anonymity In The Future
So we have a public persona. Tying that public persona to the habits of an anonymous user on a dark net or some other onion routed network, seems like a waste of resources. Perhaps google should be spending more of its time making software to hide the user from information gathering. How do there investors feel about google spying on people?
Google

Submission + - Google Bested by Demented Old Circus Monkey Reid

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Diehard King of Queens fans may remember the episode in which Doug starts calling everyone a 'Demented Old Circus Monkey' after getting caught using the phrase to describe his aging father-in-law Arthur. Not entirely unlike how Google publicly called employees 'Greyglers' after allegedly using phrases like 'old fuddy-duddy', 'obsolete', 'too old to matter', 'slow', 'fuzzy', 'sluggish', and 'lethargic' to describe its aging Director of Operations Brian Reid. On Thursday, Google was ordered to defend itself against Reid's age bias lawsuit (46-page Court opinion). Google had asked the California Supreme Court to reverse the Appellate Court's decision to allow Reid to have his day in court.
Math

Submission + - 5 Trillion Digits of Pi - New World Record (numberworld.org)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo claim to have calculated the number pi to 5 trillion places, on a single desktop and in record time.
The main computation took 90 days on Shigeru Kondo's desktop. Verification was done using two separate computers.
The program that was used for the main computation is y-cruncher v0.5.4.9138 Alpha.
Classic Games (Games)

'Old School' Arcade Still Popular In NYC 177

Posted by timothy from the keeping-it-authentic dept.
pickens writes "In 2005, there were 44 licensed video game arcades in New York, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs; today, 23 survive. With the expansion of interactive online gaming, video game action has largely shifted to the home. 'Arcades are an anachronism now,' says Danny Frank, a spokesman for the Amusement and Music Owners Association of New York. 'They exist only in shopping malls.' But Chinatown Fair has become a center for all the outcasts in the city to bond over their shared love for a good 20-punch combo and 'old school' games that more popular arcades don't stock anymore — the classic Street Fighter II from 1991 and King of Fighters 1996, for example, as well as Ms Pac-Man and Time Crisis. 'Now, you can play a million people from all around the world,' says one player. 'For me, it's not the same as playing face-to-face. The young'uns may not care, but I do.'"
Science

Submission + - Graphene promises to revolutionize DNA sequencing (upenn.edu)

Submitted by Ken Healy
Ken Healy writes: From the more-proof-that-graphene-is-the-next-best-thing-since-sliced-bread dept.

(Disclaimer: This isn't going to nuke your computer or eat your cat, but I am one of the scientists who carried out this research) Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that graphene could revolutionize DNA sequencing, reading our genetic codes so much faster and cheaper that, one day, every doctor could scan your DNA in minutes to figure out what's wrong. The researchers made a nanometer-sized hole in a graphene film and threaded DNA-molecules through it. They sense every DNA molecule as it passes through by monitoring the blockage of salt ions that are constantly flowing through the pore. Graphene is so much better than other materials for DNA sequencing because it is so thin and strong. The thinner the material, the more precisely DNA molecules can be probed. Graphene is the only material that anyone has been able to do this with that is as thin as each individual A, G, T or C in the DNA code.
Linux

Submission + - Lack of responsiveness on Linux desktop solved? (kernel.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A patch to apply to the 2.6.35 kernel source has been posted to the kernel bugzilla that appears to solve the long standing "Large I/O operations result in poor interactive performance and high iowait times" bug, also know as "Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness" in Ubuntu. You will hit this bug if you have a slow disk and not much RAM. How many times have you seen your desktop grind to a halt when you start copying files around partitions or usb disks? Certainly Con Kolivas has suffered with it, that is why he decided to create a new scheduler. There has been some coverage on the patches in Phoronix, but why don't you try it for yourself and post the results to the bug thread?
Kudos to Wu Fengguang and KOSAKI Motohiro for the patches.
Patents

Apple Mines App Store Submissions For Patent Ideas 307

Posted by timothy from the or-at-least-it's-fair-to-suspect dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Apple has started filing a bunch of patents on mobile applications. That might not be so interesting in and of itself, but if you look closely at the figures in one of the patents, you can see that it's a copy of the third-party Where To? application, which has been on the App Store since at least 2008. There's also a side-by-side comparison which should make it clear that the diagram was copied directly from their app. Even though it's true that the figures are just illustrations of a possible UI and not a part of the claimed invention, it's hard to see how they didn't get some of their ideas from Where To? It might also be the case that Apple isn't looking through the App Store submissions in order to patent other people's ideas, but it's difficult to explain some of these patents if they're not. And with the other patents listed, it's hard to see how old ideas where 'on the internet' has been replaced with the phrase 'on a mobile device' can promote the progress of science and useful arts. This seems like a good time to use Peer to Patent."

Submission + - Whole-House Fan Controller Project? 1

Submitted by michael_cain
michael_cain writes: We have a whole-house fan that is our principle source of summertime cooling (high dry climate, cools off quickly when the sun goes down). On-off and fan speed are controlled by connecting the "hot" lead to one of two terminals on the electric motor. The current manual controls are a simple spring-driven timer in series with a SPDT switch that controls high and low speeds — only the "hot" lead goes to the switches. My wife would like an electronic control that can be given a sequence of times and speeds — high for two hours, low for three hours, high for one hour, etc. Any suggestions for commercial or DIY approaches to the problem? And safety issues to look out for in the case of DIY? I'm experienced with microcontroller programming and can fabricate simple circuit boards, but have never done anything that was hooked directly into 120 VAC.
Security

Where To Start With DIY Home Security? 825

Posted by timothy from the first-we'll-steal-your-cameras dept.
secretrobotron writes "I'm a recent university graduate from a co-op system which has kept me on the move every other semester, so I've never really had a permanent place to live, and I've never had the opportunity (or the capital) to buy expensive things. Now that I'm working, those restrictions on my life are gone and I'm living in an apartment with things I don't want stolen. I would love to build a DIY home security system, but I don't even know where to start since Google searches reveal things like diysecurityforum.com, which help only to an extent for a curious newcomer. Has anybody out there successfully built a home security system on a budget? If so, where did you start?" Related query: When similar questions have come up before, many readers have recommended Linux-based Zoneminder (last updated more than a year ago); is that still the state of the art?
Idle

Submission + - Comic Con rejects Fred Phelps (comicsalliance.com) 2

Submitted by djconrad
djconrad writes: Anti-Gay preacher Fred Phelps decided to picket Comic Con today, because of their worship of super heroes. This is the participants' response. My favorite signs are "God needs a starship" and "Is this thing on?"

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