Comment If you make the news, you own the news (Score 1) 597
I say.
Submission + - Amazon Kindle Book Sales Surpass Print In UK (techweekeurope.co.uk)
twoheadedboy writes: "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks. The same happened in the US not so long ago, largely thanks to the popularity of novels like EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey, which started out as an e-book before being released in paperback."
Comment Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test (Score 1) 559
You might want to rethink that: hypospadias is very common.
Comment Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score 1) 559
Well, AIS is 1
Comment Mod AC up (Score 1) 252
S/He needs the visibility !
Comment What about OTEC ? (Score 1) 252
What about Hawaii's "old" NELHA 220 kW Ocean Thermal Energy conversion plant off the Kona coast ?
OTEC solutions are apparently still alive in Hawaii, as a project and funding for building another more powerful OTEC plant off Maui's coast was awarded in 2010 to Lockheed Martin, and NELHA is aiming to build a second plant by 2014.
Submission + - Federal Appeals Court Orders TSA to Explain Delay in Body Scan Public Hearing (wired.com) 1
rhsanborn writes: One year ago the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ordered the TSA to hold public comment on the use body scanners in EPIC vs. DHS. The order has been ignored prompting a WhiteHouse.gov petition asking for the Obama Administration's response. One year later, Wired reports, the court has ordered the TSA to explain why it hasn't responded to it's original order. The TSA has until August 30th to respond.
Submission + - Algorithmic Trading Glitch Costs Firm $440 Million (nytimes.com) 3
alstor writes: "Yesterday an update to Knight Capital Group's algorithmic trading software caused massive volume buys and sells, resulting in large price swings on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). As a result, the NYSE canceled some of the trades, but today the loss to Knight has been calculated at $440 million. Ignoring adjustments for inflation, this makes the cost of this glitch almost as much as the $475 million charge Intel took for the Pentium FDIV Bug, which might warrant adding this bug to the list of worst bugs. In light of this loss and the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash, perhaps investors will demand changes from firms using algorithmic trading, since the SEC is apparently too antiquated to do anything about it (PDF WARNING)."
Submission + - Traffic Jam in Space Threatens Satellites (scientificcomputing.com)
bigvibes writes: In April 2012, the European Space Authority lost contact with its Earth observation satellite Envisat, rendering it inoperative. Envisat will orbit Earth for approximately another 150 years before burning up upon re-entry into the atmosphere. If the enormous eight-ton ghost satellite were to collide with another object and break apart, the resulting debris cloud would escalate the already serious threat to operating satellites.
A new report by Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS), titled Space Risks: A new generation of challenges, explores the considerable risks millions of orbiting fragments pose for satellites and space missions and stresses that the need to actively remove debris is now urgent. The report also highlights the insurance industry’s pivotal role in enabling the space industry.
A new report by Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS), titled Space Risks: A new generation of challenges, explores the considerable risks millions of orbiting fragments pose for satellites and space missions and stresses that the need to actively remove debris is now urgent. The report also highlights the insurance industry’s pivotal role in enabling the space industry.
Submission + - Is it time for an OpenGL revolution? (extremetech.com)
MrSeb writes: "In a scary twist that reinforces Valve’s distaste for Windows 8, it turns out that the Source engine — the 3D engine that powers Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 — runs faster on Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL (315 fps) than Windows 7 and DirectX/Direct3D (270.6 fps); almost a 20% speed-up. These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine’s performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months. Valve attributes the speed-up to the “underlying efficiency of the [Linux] kernel and OpenGL.” But here’s the best bit: Using these new OpenGL optimizations to the Source engine, the OpenGL version of L4D2 on Windows is now faster than the DirectX version (303.4 fps vs. 270.6 fps). If OpenGL is faster, and it has a comparable feature set, and hardware support is excellent... why is Direct3D still the de facto API? With Windows losing its gaming crown and smartphones (OpenGL ES!) gaining in popularity, is it time for an OpenGL revolution?"
Comment Re:How hard can it be? (Score 5, Insightful) 559
Oh yes, how hard can it be...
Check one:
[ XX ] Woman
[ XY ] Man
What if I'm XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) ? What if I'm just X (Turner Syndrome) ? What if I'm XX but SR-Y positive due to gene translocation ? What if I'm XY but Completely Androgen Insensitive (CAIS) ?
What if some of my cells are XY, but the others are X, or XX, or XXY (mosaicism and chimerism, sometimes combiend with the syndromes above, see the famous case of Lydia Fairchild for a primer) ? Do we decide sex on the cells' majority+1 ? Or should part of my body compete in the Mens' races, and the other part in Womens' ?
Comment Re:Overcomplicating things? (Score 1) 559
No, the most common reason would be congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which does NOT eliminate the effect of testosterone (quite the opposite).
Comment Re:Awesome! (Score 1) 409
Every single book came down to: "See? SEE?! This is why you fucking scientists shouldn't do anything remotely exprimental!
I fail to see how this even remotely applies to "Turbulence", "Sphere", "Disclosure" or "Congo".
Comment Re:The gist of it (Score 4, Informative) 474
No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.
Comment The gist of it (Score 3, Informative) 474
The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.
