Arcanazar - Slashdot User

Comment Re:References? (Score 2) 274

by Arcanazar on Monday October 07, 2013 @03:56PM (#45062893) Attached to: Could IBM's Watson Put Google In Jeopardy?

As a Canadian, the Celcius scale has a number of useful quantities:

- Where I live, the temperature ranges from approximately -40 C to 40 C (Winter to Summer). Essentially, temperatures further from 0 are more extreme.
- Room temperature is about 20 C (although some may prefer up to about 25 C). This is a nice round number to remember.
- If I'm driving and the temperature is near 0 C then road condition is typically poor (slush or water on top of ice).

During my day-to-day activities, many of the temperature numbers that I use are convenient. YMMV.

Submission + - Supreme Court of Canada Rules That Text Messages Are Private (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @12:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that text messages are private communication [Official Ruling] and therefore police are required to get a warrant to gain access to the text messages of private citizens. The CBC reports:
[Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman] Abella said the only practical difference between text messaging and traditional voice communications is the transmission process. "This distinction should not take text messages outside the protection to which private communications are entitled," she wrote.

Comment Re:Reinstall Ubuntu. (Score 1) 573

by Arcanazar on Monday March 25, 2013 @10:10AM (#43270347) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: New To Linux; Which Distro?

As an Arch user myself and someone who wasn't paying attention to the systemd debate, why don't you like it?

Most of the arguments that I've read against it is that it adds unneeded complexity to the system, but it is obvious that it mostly just creates links to various scripts which are run asynchronously when the machine starts. My impression is that this is basically all that init did anyways. If you have a good source of information on systemd vs. init, I would happily read it.

Submission + - Unusual New Species of Dinosaur Identified (nytimes.com)

Submitted by cervesaebraciator on Friday October 05, 2012 @03:33PM

cervesaebraciator writes: A new species of heterodontosaur, called Pegomastax, has been identified. Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist, published a description of this species in a recent issue of ZooKeys. Although this diminutive (60 cm or less) species was herbivorous, it also possessed a set of sharp, stabbing canines in its parrot-shaped beak. Dr. Sereno holds that these canines where likely "for nipping and defending themselves, not for eating meat.” Perhaps the most imaginatively intriguing aspect of all, the body of the Pegomastix might have been covered in porcupine-like quills, making for perhaps the least attractive dinosaur of all time. You can almost hear Dieter Stark screaming 'Helvetes jävlar!'

Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 20, 2009 @05:40PM from the going-in-circles dept.

feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."

Grad Student Project Uses Wikis To Stash Data, Miffs Admins 268

Posted by timothy on Monday April 13, 2009 @12:06AM from the going-on-the-beg-forgiveness-principle dept.

Anonymous writes "Two graduate students at the Ivy League's Brown University built a P2P system to use abandoned wiki sites to store data. The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites to send data between users as an alternative to BitTorrent. There was immediate backlash as site operators quickly complained to the University. The project appears to be shutdown, but many of the pages still remain on the web. The project homepage was also taken down and the students posted an apology this afternoon." The same submitter links to two different forum discussions on the project.

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