Comment Re:For those not familiar with IRC... (Score 2, Insightful) 157
It's not spam. It's relevant and funny.
Comment /. is going downhill. (Score 2) 147
How is this story relevant to tech? Who cares about a bunch of cars left behind at an abandoned junk yard?
Comment Everything is disputed (Score 3, Insightful) 208
There are nuts everywhere that dispute evolution, heliocentrism, The Big bang theory, you name it.
What a stupid classification. FB is just trying to have it both ways and not piss off the nut jobs.
Comment Re:Mass appeal (Score 1) 252
Annie Hall won best picture.
Interviews: Forrest Mims Answers Your Questions 161
A while ago you had the chance to ask amateur scientist, and author of the Getting Started in Electronics and the Engineer's Mini-Notebook series, Forrest Mims, a number of questions about science, engineering, and a lifetime of educating and experimenting. Below you'll find his detailed answers to those questions.
97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made 1105
An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"
Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89
First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."
4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well."
Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.
Comment Incoming Call Rejection Patent (Score 3, Interesting) 166
IncomingNumber
RejectCall
If (RejectCall)
RejectIncomingCall();
else
AnswerIncomingCall();
There I just wrote the code to reject incoming calls if the number is in the rejected numbers list. How is this patentable?
Comment The Nine Billion Names of God (Score 1) 278
By Arthur C. Clarke. It is not SF but it is great.
Comment Re:Best money laundering vehicle (Score 1) 134
Just take the drug money buy WoW gold with it then sell the gold to someone else and voila you're now in the gold farming business; which is legitimate.
Comment Re:Violates the law (Score 1) 684
Of course it's a Timothy post. What else is new. I previously had him ignored because of a another idiotic post. It might be time to put him back on the ignore list.
Comment Re:It is about time (Score 1) 1271
This is completely wrong. The belief that vaccines are bad and cause autism and other problems is distinctly a liberal issue. Yes, there are religious people who won't use medicine for religious reasons but they're a tiny minority among religious people. At least in the US. I'm not talking about crazy political conspiracy theories about the US using vaccines to kill people in foreign countries.
Comment Iron Monoxide? (Score 5, Informative) 153
FeO is Ferrous Oxide not Iron Monoxide.
