iq in binary - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Do they run vista? (Score 1) 785

by iq in binary on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @04:00PM (#25902533) Attached to: Ethical Killing Machines

Now check out the rape rate, domestic violence rate, and property crimes rate on a per capita basis. The US's rates for all the above are lower. Yeah sure we've got alot of drug dealers shooting eachother, but our women are safer and property generally stays in good condition.

Submission + - Fight Global Warming from your Desktop

Submitted by

LocalCooling

on Thursday January 04, 2007 @04:57AM

LocalCooling writes: "Global warming and its impact on the environment is a hot topic in the news at the moment. As a software company, we are aware of the fact that the energy required to run the computers belonging to 660 million users worldwide, runs into millions of kilowatts each day. It is estimated that more than 30 billion kilowatts of energy are wasted each year because many people forget to shut down their computer when leaving the office. The CO2 emissions from all those computers are huge, especially as the emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car! Here's something that every computer user worldwide can do from their desktop, right now, to reduce the output of CO2 from their computer and it's totally free. http://www.localcooling.com/ is a brand new project from the labs at Uniblue Systems. The new downloadable application will automatically optimize the power settings on a PC, by using a more efficient and effective power save mode. An easy-to-use interface allows users to change their default power settings, meaning savings on electricity bills for the users, and therefore a reduction in the amount of Greenhouse Gas that results from powering a computer. The LocalCooling.com website updates the results in real time for power savings, and translates this into meaningful environmental terms, such as how many trees and barrels of oil have been saved since the LocalCooling.com Community started. As word spreads and more people download the application, the website will display the rapid increases in the savings made globally. Members can set up Individual, Team and Company Accounts showing the savings for one, two or a whole office network of PCs. There is a fun aspect to LocalCooling.com, as users can compete with each other in the "Top 100" League Tables of the biggest savers worldwide. Uniblue's goal is to introduce 100 million PC users to the LocalCooling.com Community. With that many members, the community could prevent over 30 billion kW of gas emissions each year — amounting to a saving of around $3 billion on energy costs alone. For more information about the impact computers have on the environment, see www.localcooling.com LocalCooling.com is a non-commercial website and is not a selling platform. It is malware free, carries no advertising, political content or bias in any way. It has been developed specifically to help in the fight against global warming; to demonstrate that individuals can take action and make a real difference to an issue of global importance. By joining the LocalCooling.com Community, PC users can work together to bring about a positive, noticeable change to the future of our planet."

Submission + - Groovy 1.0 has been officially released.

Submitted by

twofish

on Thursday January 04, 2007 @04:53AM

twofish writes: "Groovy, a dynamic scripting language for the JVM, has reached 1.0 release status. Groovy originally came to prominence in 2004 when it was approved by the JCP under JSR241. Uses of Groovy include the Grails andRife web application frameworks, Spring 2.0 scripting integration and XWiki.

From the press release:
"Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform.
It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers.""

Submission + - The Paypal Wars

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Thursday January 04, 2007 @03:52AM

prostoalex writes: "If you made an online payment any time within the past decade, you have probably used a Paypal account to send the money. If you're an Internet "power user", you probably remember the time, when Paypal was free, promising to make the money off the float on the accounts, the times when free credit card payments were limited to a certain amount per month, and then a time when all the credit card services for sellers started included commissions.

If at any time you dealt with Paypal, you're probably left wondering:

How did eBay with all its market power failed at promoting its own BillPoint venture and killing Paypal meanwhile?

How did Yahoo! with its tons of users and user-friendly interfaces fail to promote Yahoo! PayDirect and kill Paypal meanwhile?

How did Citibank with its decades of banking and payment experiences and reaches into millions of households fail to establish c2it as primary online payment platform and meanwhile kill Paypal?

Are the stories on Paypal wall of shame true or have any merit to them?

Is Google's Checkout a viable alternative to Paypal, or without person-to-person payment its bound to remain a niche product?

The book, written by Paypal's interim VP of Marketing (the interim part got in there after eBay acquisition), provides quite a few answers, providing insight into tumultuous history of an Internet startup that was fighting off startup competition, online giant competition, international fraudsters and Planet Earth in general.

The author describes his recruitment process and starting with a pretty small team down on University Avenue in Palo Alto, the same place that previously served as a launching pad to Logitech and Google. Apart from the engineers, few people hired for early Paypal were hired based in their previous experiences, and Eric Jackson starts off with a marketing career at online payment company without any previous knowledge of marketing field.

At the early stage Paypal was pretty much defining itself as a business. The original model of sending electronic money from PDA to PDA didn't seem to be materializing too soon, as penetration of those early days Palm Pilots left much to be desired. E-mail penetration, however, was beating all the records, and soon Paypal found itself competing with X.com, dotBank and companies with similar business models.

The author spends a great deal of pages portraying Paypal's Big Idea — ruling the world's personal markets, therefore enabling commonplace citizens to get better control of their money. Quite frequently in places like Argentina, Indonesia or Russia the government chooses to devalue the currency, and the ones who are hit the hardest are the poorest and middle-class citizens. With no real estate investments, most of their life savings frequently resides in savings accounts or large wads of cash stored under the mattress, and hence rampant inflation tends to enrich the political elite, while ruining the financial stability of helpless citizens.

Paypal's merger with X.com is described at good level of detail, but unfortunately Jackson did not have access to the board room during the merger, and hence unable to render all the juicy details that usually accompany startup mergers. Jackson, however, was part of the group involved in ousting Elon Musk from the CEO's position, and the tensions are described in great detail. The quickly evaporating competition also deserves only a passing reference in Jackson's book. While insignificant in the hindsight, it's still interesting to find out why Yahoo! and HSBC could not turn PayDirect into a successful venture, or why Citibank closed c2it.

Graduated from the early stages, Paypal has only two formidable opponents to fight — BillPoint, a joint venture between eBay and Wells Fargo, and international criminals, who are pretty excited at the opportunities presented to them by Paypal, where stolen credit card numbers can mysteriously be converted into cash and sent to a "pal". The war with BillPoint is described in great detail, sometimes feature-by-feature, as it was the pinpoint of Jackson's career, with the author being responsible for customer communication and for producing those nifty comparison tables butting BillPoint and other competitors feature by feature.

The relationship with eBay surrounds pretty much any chapter of this book. Early on Paypal became the vehicle for the nascent industry of online auctions, and while eBay focused on its core competency (providing Internet users with a platform to buy and sell products), Paypal focused on its (moving money between registered users). Turns out, online payments was the first area of expansion for eBay, and throughout its corporate life Paypal tried to fight off competition from its major benefactor, while enjoying most of the traffic and signups from eBay auction. To be fair though, Paypal's success was driven not by eBay's ineptitude, but by loyal and active user base, who was the company's best defender, whenever eBay tried yet another trick to default its users into BillPoint's payments.

The technical side of fighting fraud gets a few paragraphs in the book, but besides some mysterious descriptions of Max Levchin's and team's workings, little light is shed on all the drama that went into fighting international fraud. Overall, the book does lack a great deal of technical detail, but if you know that it was written by a marketing employee, and not an engineer, it's expectable. Paypal Wars does, however, read like a detective story, primarily because the young company seemed to have an endless supply of crises and fights to overcome. With the book written like an action hero novel, the end (eBay's purchase of Paypal) is almost anticlimactic, as pretty much anyone worth writing about left the company soon after that point. The paperback edition has author's epilogue on Google's recent entry into online payments world (not person-to-person payments, but merchant payments only), where Jackson is fairly optimistic about Google's potential in the market, since Checkout can be a loss leader for Google, as long as merchants keep boosting its primary revenue line, Internet advertising."

Submission + - No Google Background Checks for Finnish Employers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04, 2007 @03:36AM

An anonymous reader writes: The top Finnish privacy official has ruled that under the current privacy protection laws, employers generally are not allowed to do internet background searches on job candidates without the consent of the candidate. When consent is given and in cases where consent is not necessary, the employers must reveal the findings of such searches to the candidate.

Electronic Paper Plant to be Built in Germany 105

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 04, 2007 @02:17AM from the my-aibo-ate-my-homework dept.

Aqua_boy17 writes "BBC News is reporting today that Cambridge based firm PlasticLogic is set to build the world's first manufacturing facility dedicated to producing plastic circuits. In particular the company is focused on developing flexible plastic circuits that cost much less than silicon and would soon enable electronic paper devices that could be used to store large amounts of text and other data. The company has secured $100 million in venture capital and is set to build its first facility in Dresden, Germany. Construction of the facility should be completed by 2008 according to the article. Industry experts expect market demand for this technology to approach $30 billion by the year 2015."

Submission + - Geminid explosions on moon visible by amateurs

Submitted by

saskboy

on Thursday January 04, 2007 @01:54AM

saskboy writes: "The ET scanning project SETI@Home was wildly popular, and the mock project Yeti@Home much less so, but soon there will be a chance for the enthusiastic amateur astronomer to combine those respective scanning techniques and spot explosions on the moon with simple telescope and camera equipment at home.
"On Dec. 14, 2006, we observed at least five Geminid meteors hitting the Moon," reports Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. Each impact caused an explosion ranging in power from 50 to 125 lbs of TNT and a flash of light as bright as a 7th-to-9th magnitude star. "The amazing thing is," says Cooke, "we've [caught explosions] using a pair of ordinary backyard telescopes, 14-inch, and off-the-shelf CCD cameras. Amateur astronomers could be recording these explosions, too."

NASA will "soon release data reduction software developed specifically for amateur and professional astronomers wishing to do this type of work. The software runs on an ordinary PC equipped with a digital video card. 'If you have caught a lunar meteor on tape, this program can find it.'""

Submission + - U.S. Bars Lab from Testing Electronic Voting

Submitted by

joshdick

on Thursday January 04, 2007 @01:45AM

joshdick writes: "A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests. The federal Election Assistance Commission made this decision last summer, but the problem was not disclosed then. In a shock to no one here on Slashdot, experts say the deficiencies of the laboratory suggest that crucial features like the vote-counting software and security against hacking may not have been thoroughly tested on many machines now in use."

Submission + - SCALE Announces Conference On Women in Open Source

Submitted by irabinovitch on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @11:30PM

irabinovitch writes: The Southern California Linux Expo announces plans to host a 'Women In Open Source' Mini-conference. The goals of the conference are to encourage women to use technology and open source and free software, and to explore the obstacles that women face in breaking into the technology industry. The audience will be those women who may have an interest in technology, but hesitate to get into it because they believe it's a male-only club. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Fifth Annual So Cal Linux Expo. The Women in Open Source mini-conference will be held February 9th, 2007 at the Westin LAX Hotel.

UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet 463

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @10:45PM from the how-can-you-have-any-pudding-if-you-smash-my-window dept.

Marlow the Irelander writes "The BBC is reporting that in response to a YouTube video of a schoolboy breaking his teacher's window (yes, this is a video), NASUWT, one of the teaching unions in the UK, is calling for legislation to control the internet. Could Britain, rather than the US, be the main front of the battle against censorship in 2007?" From the article: "Unfortunately, any yob or vandal can now have their 15 minutes of fame, aided and abetted by readily accessible technology and irresponsible internet sites which enable such behaviour to be glorified. [The general secretary of the union] said the union supported a zero tolerance approach in schools to pupils who used technology to abuse and undermine teachers, and called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites which gave them license."

Submission + - The Trouble with Physics

Submitted by

SpaceAdmiral

on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @10:36PM

SpaceAdmiral writes: "You've likely heard of Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics. It has created a lot of controversy because it argues that string theory gets far too much attention and money, despite a complete lack of evidence. It accuses string theorists of groupthink.

First some basic background in case you haven't read Smolin's other books: Although Smolin has dabbled in string theory from time to time, he's a proponent of the alternative loop quantum gravity. Although irrelevant to this book review, he has also suggested that it is possible that universes reproduce via black holes, making them prone to pressure similar to natural selection (universes that produce a lot of black holes are more successful spawners than those that don't). Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, quotes Nobel-winner Murray Gell-Mann as once saying, "Smolin? Is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong."

The Trouble with Physics is very unlike most pop-physics books not only in its criticism of string theory, but in its open adulation of Einstein and skepticism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Having said that, it does provide a very decent summary of 20th century physics (including string theory) for laypeople, not unlike more traditional pop-physics books (e.g. by Hawking and Greene).

The book's main criticisms of string theory are that it makes no testable predictions and that some things string theorists take for granted haven't been rigorously proven mathematically. Smolin is highly skeptical of many string theorists' reliance on the Anthropomorphic Principle.

The book becomes most interesting somewhere in the middle where he discuses truly controversial approaches to physics. This includes things like MOND, which, interestingly enough, Smolin is skeptical of.

In case you've forgotten your high-school physics, I'm going to use this paragraph to refresh your memory of special relativity to prepare you for the next couple paragraphs. The basic idea of special relativity is that the speed of light is constant. Pretend that I am shining a light at you while (A) standing still relative to you; (B) moving towards you at half the speed of light, and; (C) moving away from you at half the speed of light. In all three scenarios, I will accurately measure the light moving away from me at 3,000,000 km/s and you will accurately measure the light moving toward you at 3,000,000 km/s. To ensure this result, distances and times will have to be different for me than they are for you, except in case (A).

Now I'll quickly remind you of the Planck length: This is a theoretical limit on how small something can be. According to Smolin, all versions of quantum gravity seem to suggest the Planck length as a limit. But would observers moving relative to each other disagree about the Planck length?

I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II. The basic idea is that it may be possible to modify the theories of relativity such that observers agree not only on a constant speed of light, but also on a constant Planck length. It's not unreasonable to guess that a modification of this sort could solve some of the same problems MOND does (e.g. explain astronomical observations without resorting to dark matter and dark energy). Furthermore, since DSR in its current incarnation predicts that more energetic photons are slightly faster than less energetic photons (only the speed of the least energetic photons is constant in DSR), it could also explain away, for example, inflation in the Big Bang model. (Immediately after the Big Bang, everything was hotter and more energetic, so the average speed of light would have been faster than it is now if DSR is correct.) Although I'm not qualified to judge the actual mathematics of such a theory, I find it very appealing for reasons of consilience.

I was slightly disappointed with the final chapters of Smolin's book since, despite an obvious effort to the contrary, it struck me as awfully bitter and reeked of sour grapes. Leaving physics in favor of sociology, he lambasted the current tenure and peer review systems (particularly in the United States) as favoring Master Craftspeople (like those scientists who developed the standard model of particle physics) over Seers (like Einstein, Bohr, and de Broglie) who look at the deep questions of physics that border on the philosophical rather than the latest technical problem. A few interesting things do emerge in these chapters. One such thing is that Smolin seems to have a soft spot for Paul Feyerabend as a philosopher of science (despite describing himself as a proud Popperazzo in an endnote). Another is that Smolin thinks a scientist who is hated by half his senior colleagues and loved by the other half is likely better than a scientist who is liked by all his senior colleagues.

I strongly recommend this book."

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