Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Idle

Submission + - Pakistan Uses Google Earth For Military Targeting 1

Submitted by NeoBeans
NeoBeans writes: According to this article in the New York Times about the recent "improvements" in military strikes by the Pakistani military included dropping Google Earth as part of their target planning.

...the air force has shifted from using Google Earth to more sophisticated images from spy planes and other surveillance aircraft, and has increased its use of laser-guided bombs.

And no, you can't really find Osama Bin Laden using Google Maps either.

Links

Submission + - Jellyfish Swimming is mixing the oceans (wired.com)

Submitted by eviltangerine
eviltangerine writes: A new article out of Nature suggests that marine creatures, such as the jellyfish, may contribute as much to ocean mixing as wind and tides. Wired is also covering it and includes a video of the jellyfish in action.

These "could have a profound influence on climate models, which do not now account for this so-called biogenic mixing. If swimming generates tide-scale forces, then 'it has an impact on global climate. This is a rather novel twist to the whole climate story,' said William Dewar, a Florida State University oceanographer. 'How one would extend existing models to include a biosphere mixing input is not clear, largely because no-one has spent much time thinking about it.'" Link to the Nature article here (pricey registration required)

No word yet on when the jellyfish blender is to debut.
First Person Shooters (Games)

ArenaLive, an Open Source MMOFPS 95

Posted by Soulskill from the free-as-in-frag dept.
ZeXx86 writes "ArenaLive is a new open source game based on the well-known OpenArena. Its aim is to become an open-source alternative to id Software's QuakeLive. The main idea is to make a game available in your web browser. So far, the game is playable and provides player stats, straight-forward settings for your account in a web browser and, of course, loads of fun with your friends. At the moment, it is available only for 32/64bit Mozilla Firefox on GNU/Linux, however, support for other platforms and browsers is coming soon. The game is licensed under GNU/GPL2. It's still in an early development stage, so players and developers both are welcome to join."
Social Networks

Submission + - OkCupid plots personal questions geographically (okcupid.com) 2

Submitted by
Mark
Mark writes: "The dating site OkCupid posted some interesting graphs which draw from their 300,000 response data set of personal, user-contributed questions. This is the first post in their new blog, and has graphs showing: Croatia and Nevada lead in acceptance of rape fantasy, as opposed to New and old England; frequency of bathing in the US has a strong north-south bias (northerners report showering less frequently); and, plotted by lattitude/longitude instead of state or country, we find that "only people in cities believe flag burning should be legal". (OkCupid also points out that their data set compares quite favorably with the 2008 Gallup election poll, at 100x that survey's 3,050 response.)"
Censorship

Submission + - Hackers Work To Get Information Out of Iran (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a story by the AP which mentions NedaNet, a loose organization of hackers that are providing more secure channels of communication for Iranian citizens, with the goal of "supporting the democratic revolution in Iran". (from their website ) The idea is to get information about what is really happening on the streets of Iran, including the most recent protests, to the global community though the usual channels (like Twitter, Email, etc), by providing Iranian citizens with tools to evade their government's internet censorship software.
Education

Submission + - Important Lessons for the Next Gen of Geeks?

Submitted by
MrAndrews
MrAndrews writes: "My kids have had a fairly geeky upbringing so far, learning the evils of DRM at a young age, configuring new drives of anime for XBMC, and Creative Commons licensing their crayon drawings. But I feel like there's more education I could be doing, so I'm planning to create a series of short digi-fables that will prime them for life. I've already done DRM, patents, censorship and bullying, but there are probably lots of other topics out there that need covering, like net neutrality. Or SQL injection. Or... stuff. I've heard rumours that Slashdot is a fairly geeky place, so I put it to you: what are the most important lessons you can teach a geek-in-training?"

Comment Re:Flipbots are weak (Score 1) 58

by Auraiken (#28404023) Attached to: 400 Battle Bots Fight, Toss Enemies At RoboGames Competition

Completely agree with this in every way except a few issues. These competitions usually have weight restrictions and creating such a bot to combat the flipper genre is mighty hard to do without adding more weight or taking the place of more armor. Also, the complexity of the mechanism and the difficulty of pulling it all off during the competition makes me think that there should be some allowances given to bots that aren't of the flipper variety.

I would think that the competition should give advanced notice that they would be giving more leeway to experimental robots so that the competition actually has some differences over the years and not be dominated by single types.
Robotics

400 Battle Bots Fight, Toss Enemies At RoboGames Competition 58

Posted by Soulskill from the why-are-we-training-them-to-fight dept.
Andre writes "The 6th annual RoboGames were held in San Francisco last weekend. They welcomed a horde of 400 non-sentient, metallic warriors to do violent battle — against each other, of course. This army of remote-controlled and autonomous combat robots, along with walking humanoids, soccer 'bots, sumo 'bots and even androids that do kung-fu, was put to the test. Among the big winners was Canadian-made 'Ziggy' — one of the combatants in the 340-pound, super-heavyweight division (the biggest division) — who took home a gold medal for the fourth year in a row. The bionic brute proved its might against its final opponent, the 'Juggernaut,' by tossing it around like an empty pop can (and promptly making a mockery of its name) using a pneumatic flipper. Ziggy's newly-improved weapon results in unwanted (but totally cool) free-flying lessons for its opponents. At full power, the flipper can launch an opponent to the arena ceiling."
The Internet

Submission + - .org now signed for DNSSEC (pir.org)

Submitted by
lothos
lothos writes: "As of today, 06/02/2009, the Public Interest Registry (www.pir.org) has signed the tld .org for DNSSEC. .ORG, The Public Interest Registry is dedicated to the security and stability of the internet. In our effort to bolster Internet security, we are implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) within the .ORG Top Level Domain. DNSSEC is designed to protect Internet servers from domain name system attacks, such as DNS cache poisoning by malicious users. It is a set of DNS extensions which provide 3 basic functions:

        * Data Origin Authentication — assures that data is received from the authorized DNS server; can protect from impersonation attacks
        * Data Integrity — assures that data received matches data on the origin DNS server, and is not modified during transit; protects from man-in-the-middle type pollution attacks.
        * Authenticated Denial of Existence — assures that a "Non-existent" response is valid."

Comment Or you know, was the plan all along (Score 5, Insightful) 352

by Auraiken (#28146603) Attached to: Microsoft Kills 3-App Limit For Windows 7 Starter Edition
This seems more like they were marketing it as going to be limited and people were turned off by that but it kept the product in the public eye. Waited for a bit. Now they're marketing it as without the limit as to improve the perception of the product, leading to more people wanting it.

Slashdot Top Deals

Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Close