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Comment Re:States Rights (Score 1) 665

by gpronger (#46228781) Attached to: South Carolina Education Committee Removes Evolution From Standards
It seems that there is fairly strong sentiment on the issue, and if so, there should not be a State legislature voting this crap in.

It is very hard to relocate, and pick up a family, but if the State I were in, the true majority of the people believed this, I would think it time for a permanent field trip.

I think though, that those that feel strongly on the issue are getting to the polls in stronger numbers and tipping the balance in favor of these laws.

The religious right is very good at picking up bits and peices of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and using it to motivate their followers to vote. The center and left pretty much suck at that.

Comment Voting (Score 1) 665

by gpronger (#46228745) Attached to: South Carolina Education Committee Removes Evolution From Standards
It seems that there is fairly strong sentiment on the issue, and if so, there should not be a State legislature voting this crap in.

It is very hard to relocate, and pick up a family, but if the State I were in, the true majority of the people believed this, I would think it time for a permanent field trip.

I think though, that those that feel strongly on the issue are getting to the polls in stronger numbers and tipping the balance in favor of these laws.

Comment States Rights (Score 4, Insightful) 665

by gpronger (#46220297) Attached to: South Carolina Education Committee Removes Evolution From Standards
So, if a State chooses to not teach their children what is accepted in the scientific community, should this be their prerogative? At the same time, a decade later, when their students do not fair well at college, or professionally, they should be comfortable with that aspect to their decisions.

Submission + - L.A. Building's Lights Interfere With Cellular Network, Says FCC (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Fluorescent lights at Ernst & Young Plaza, a 41-story tower near the heart of downtown, emit frequencies that interfere with the Verizon Wireless 700MHz network, the FCC said in a citation issued on Friday against building owner Brookfield Office Properties. Brookfield could be fined up to $16,000 a day if it keeps using the interfering lights, up to a total of $112,500. The alleged violation could also lead to 'criminal sanctions, including imprisonment,' the citation says.

Submission + - How Apple's iBeacon technology is turning location sensing inside out (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Apple's iBeacon location sensing technology, based on the Bluetooth radio in your iPhone, promises to personalize the world around you. For users, this increasingly popular technology changes the question of "Where am I?" into the announcement "Here I am!" An iBeacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy radio that broadcasts a signal in a given area, say the doorway to a clothing or grocery store. Your iPhone – if it has Bluetooth 4.0, and the radio is turned on, and iOS notifications and location services are active – can detect that signal and query the beacon. The beacon uses radio signal strength to figure out the phone’s location and can share that with iOS. Your phone shows an invitation from the beacon to enable something like “in-store notifications,” which involves sharing your Bluetooth-determined location. Now organizations from the NFL to major league baseball are embracing it.

Submission + - Too cheap to meter: new lies about artificial markets (forbes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Nuclear power plants are becoming uneconomical and closing. They can't compete in deregulated wholesale markets. In the Midwest, low natural gas prices are keeping wholesale prices low and aging nuclear plants can't catch up with deferred maintenance and still make a profit. In the Northeast, a history of dishonesty on the part of Entergy, an owner of used nuclear power plants, has made it difficult for them to get long term contracts and has turned eyes towards hydro power from Quebec. Markets should punish incompetence and dishonesty. But Forbes is claiming that these deregulated markets are artificial, and we need to look to the Southeast for real markets: markets where regulators choose forms of generation and guarantee profits for large utilities while working to keep competition out through lobbying against renewable energy standards. Those markets don't seem to lack artificiality. According to detailed analysis, dumping nuclear power makes achieving climate goals less costly as well. Forbes, living in backwards world, claims that keeping uneconomical nuclear plants helps rather than hurts these goals. Nuclear power started life with lies about low costs, claiming it would be too cheap to meter. Many people lost their investments in the 1970's and 80's as this was revealed as a lie. They just can't seem to help themselves. They are too compulsive to come clean. Lots of other deceptions in this piece, See how many you find.

Submission + - Comparing Cloud-Based Image Services for Developers (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As Web applications grow in number and capability, storing large amounts of images can quickly become a problem. If you’re a Web developer and need to store your client images, do you just keep them on the same server hosting your Website? What if you have several gigabytes worth of images that need to be processed in some way? Today, many developers are looking for an easy but cost-effective solution whereby images can be stored in the cloud and even processed automatically, thus taking a huge load off one’s own servers, freeing up resources to focus on building applications. With that in mind, developer and editor Jeff Cogswell looks at a couple different cloud-based services for image storage and processing. At first glance, these services seem similar—but they’re actually very different. He examines Cloudinary and Blitline, and encourages developers to take a look at ImageResizer, an open-source package that does a lot of what proprietary services do (you just need to install the software on your own servers). "If you’re not a programmer but a web designer or blogger, Blitline won’t be of much use for you,"he writes. "If you are a developer, both Cloudinary and Blitline work well." What do you think?

Submission + - Can Commercial Storage Services Handle the NSA's Metadata? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In a review of NSA surveillance last month, President Obama called for a new approach on telephony metadata that will 'establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.' Obama said that a third party holding all the data in a single, consolidated database would be essentially doing what is a government function, and may not increase public confidence that its privacy is being protected. Now, an RFI (request for information) has been posted to get information on U.S. industry's commercially available capabilities, so that the government can investigate alternative approaches.

Submission + - Google and Samsung Sign Patent License Agreement (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The deal cover’s patents currently owned by both companies, as well as any failed in coming 10 years, as company said in a recent release. But financial terms were not disclosed in the release. Both the companies are frequently involved in patent infringement lawsuits from long time, but not against each other.

Comment And I may be deaf or working next to a jet runway (Score 1) 371

by gpronger (#46144443) Attached to: How loud is your primary computer?
So, there are a number of caveats here: 1) Am I deaf, typically no except if spouse or kids are talking at me. 2) What level is my background noise - see above. 3) How loud is the game I'm playing, and my speaker setting _ I enjoy a loud game. Since I enjoy it, everyone else must to, hence I am being extremely unselfish not to put on my head phones and set the volume to max.

Submission + - Early Universe Friendlier to Life Than Previously Thought (nature.com) 2

Submitted by gpronger
gpronger writes: Cosmologists have considered the early universe inhospitable due to lack of water. Quoting the article; "Abraham Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has realized that in the early Universe, the energy required to keep water liquid could have come from the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, rather than from host stars."

And

"He suggests that there would have been a habitable epoch of 2 million or 3 million years during which all rocky planets would have been able to maintain liquid water, regardless of their distance from a star. “The whole Universe was once an incubator for life,” he says."

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