All_Star25 - Slashdot User

Submission + - God particle search gets more frantic

Submitted by holy_calamity on Tuesday June 05, 2007 @01:00PM

holy_calamity writes: The Large Hadron Collider [slashdot.org] is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008 not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an "accumulation of minor setbacks", and comes on top of a "design fault" that saw magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab accelerator break down. Just yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumours among physicists that Fermilab has already found the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find.

Submission + - Integrity of Science: White House Misuse of Data (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by

Science data nerds

on Monday June 04, 2007 @02:16PM

Science data nerds writes: "The White House is consistently and persistently claiming that the US is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This turns out to be false — their claim is purely based on carefully selecting the only subset of data that shows this. When all the data are used, Europe emissions have declined substantially; the US emissions have grown substantially. This story, and the linked analysis, debunk the White House claims."

Submission + - McCain on Net Neutrality, Copyright, Iraq

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @11:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: Sen. John McCain kicked off the All Things Digital conference Tuesday night with some interesting comments about net neutrality among other things. His take: there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible. The market should be allowed to solve the Net-neutrality issue: "When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment."

Submission + - MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search

Submitted by

gbulmash

on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @11:27PM

gbulmash writes: "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."

NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer 117

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 14, 2007 @06:45PM from the fun-toys dept.

Bull_UK writes "As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to finish what Chris Maxwell started. Some of the new things which differentiate the new World Wind from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research."

Comment Re:Too many pirates riding the snake... (Score 2, Informative) 228

by All_Star25 on Tuesday September 19, 2006 @03:06PM (#16139794) Attached to: Python 2.5 Released

I have been tutoring a 7th or 8th-grader in Python for several months now using the book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. It's released for free under the GFDL, and I printed up two copies of it via PrintFu, and it seems to be a pretty good text. However, it's primarily geared towards those with no prior programming experience. Regardless, I learned the language along with him as I tutored, and learned some general programming things from the book. I have no idea to what extent you are familiar with programming, but I was able to look at various things and think things like, "Oh, those are the equivalent of Perl hashes". I found that Python and Perl have a good deal in common when compared to a language like C (caveat: I am most familiar with C and Perl). But, it is indeed free, so it could serve as a simple introduction to Python before you spend money on something like the O'Reilly text.

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