Comment Re:about your sig; mod me (-1 offtopic) (Score 1) 252
I know 0 meth users, and all 0 of them are rapists. That's 100%! You can't argue with statistics like that, man!
L'Hôpital fail.
Comment Re:Forward thinkers (Score 1) 506
Well, if he is not, then ./ is not working properly...
Submission + - Google kills Wave (blogspot.com)
mordejai writes: Google stated in it's official blog that they will not continue developing wave as a standalone product. It's sad because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses.
Poor Vision? There's an App For That 146
necro81 writes "Researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a smartphone app that allows users to measure how poor their vision is (myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism) and receive a corrective prescription. The user peers through a $2 optical adapter at the screen of a smartphone. The app displays lighted bars, and prompts the user to adjust the display until the bars line up. Repeating this with bars in different locations and orientations allows the vision distortion to be determined to within about 0.4 diopters using a Nexus One. The iPhone 4, with its higher-resolution display, should be able to improve that to 0.28 diopters. This could have broad application in the developing world, where experienced opticians and diagnostic equipment are hard to come by."
Comment Re:Shannon (Score 1) 1186
Speaking of entropy, I would go for (pardon my LaTeX),
$S = k_B ln \Omega$.
Boltzmann for the win.
Comment Re:Maxwell Equations (Score 1) 249
It does not help the original confusion to illustrate the point with a confusing analogy.
Comment Re:Maxwell Equations (Score 2, Funny) 249
or being below 0 degrees Farenheit is having negative thermal energy
And you just failed physics by confusing temperature and thermal energy. Congratulations!
Submission + - RIAA's elementary school copyright curriculum (arstechnica.com) 2
selven writes: In a blatant attempt devoid of any subtlety the RIAA is fighting for the hearts and minds of our chilldren with its Music Rules, a collection of education materials on how to respect copyright. It includes vocabulary such as "counterfeit recordings, DMCA notice, "Grokster" ruling, legal downloading, online piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing, pirate recordings, songlifting, and US copyright law." with no mention whatsoever of fair use. Compounding the bias, it includes insights such as that taking music without paying for it is "songlifting", and that making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal. On the bright side, it includes math which shows that the total damages from copyright infringement by children in the US amount to a measly $7.8 million.
Comment Re:Shut up "New Atheists"? (Score 1) 899
The issue is, the experiment you suggest attempts to answer a valid question about the physical world. Independent of the likelihood of any reproducible results (which I think we agree it will be negligible), the question is valid within the realms of Science, because the effect this hypothetical scientist is trying to reproduce is measurable (water being splitted). Assuming there is no reproducible results, I see two explanations: (a), prayer has absolutely no effect on the behavior of water, or (b), there is some supernatural cause explaining the negative result (for example, God does not like being tested, has stage panic, or simply dislikes scientific rigor). Answer (b) "explains" some speculation by means of another speculation, in a regression which leads nowhere (not only within physics, also within logic). Therefore (b) has no place in a consistent explanation of the world, unless at some point it implies some falsifiable proposition (I believe this is similar to the case with String Theory). My argument is that, by Occam's razor one should stick with (a), and definitely not claim that there is a supernatural realm, the elements inside which sometimes interact with the physical world and sometimes don't, in an untestable way.
Comment Re:Shut up "New Atheists"? (Score 1) 899
Science does not say that there is no God. It doesn't give a damn.
Actually, I think proper, honest Science should care a lot. A Universe where causality and the laws of Physics can be suspended by praying, or by miracles, is quite different from a Universe where the laws are immutable. Only a God which does not intervene at all in the processes of the Universe would be separate from Science, otherwise, it has to enter one's assumptions at some point if we are really honest about our application of the scientific method, and not simply choosing to "enable scientific mode" for some things.
Submission + - Sam Ramji, Microsoft's Open Source Guru Moving On (typepad.com)
barking_at_airplanes writes: "Some called him crazy 3-1/2 years ago when he joined Microsoft to run the Open Source Software Lab but he endured and made real differences to how Microsoft treats Open Source and how open source people now view Microsoft. Sam Ramji is now heading back to Silicon Valley to join a Cloud Computing startup. Sam comments in his announcement:
46 months later, I am amazed at the changes that have occurred for the company, for the team I belonged to, and the sentiments of the industry.
It's a statement that 46 months ago few Slashdotters would have thought could come true! With Sam leaving, can Microsoft's positive momentum into Open Source continue successfully?"
46 months later, I am amazed at the changes that have occurred for the company, for the team I belonged to, and the sentiments of the industry.
It's a statement that 46 months ago few Slashdotters would have thought could come true! With Sam leaving, can Microsoft's positive momentum into Open Source continue successfully?"
Comment Re:Not really useful (Score 1) 256
Surely it is! Either you get it, or you don't.
C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends? 389
Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."
Leaving the GPL Behind 543
olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
Comment Re:Inconsistency? (Score 1) 554
Great! I'm going to use that as a footnote in my thesis!
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