Comment Regardless of what you call it... (Score 1) 205
The entire concept vastly more plausible and sensible than the 'All-Robot Warfare' idea that was going around several years ago.
Comment Necessary. (Score 1) 609
Even if you don't end up doing any actual high-level math, the ability to work with complex problems in a mathematical fashion is essential.
News Experiment To Rely Only On Facebook, Twitter 70
snydeq writes "With a setup ripped right out of a reality show — or, perhaps more fittingly, The Shining — a French-language public broadcasters association will put five journalists in a French farmhouse for five days, giving them no access to newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet, save Facebook and Twitter, to see how much world news they can report. The reporters will report this news on a communal blog. 'Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,' said France Inter editor Helene Jouan. 'This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter.'"
What Clown On a Unicycle? 284
R3d M3rcury writes "The New York Times has an article about walking and using a cellphone. 'The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous, particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.' But the interesting part was an experiment run by Western Washington University this past fall. There was a student who knew how to ride a unicycle and a professor who had a clown suit. They dressed a student up as a clown and had him ride his unicycle around a popular campus square. Then they asked people, 'Did you see the Unicycling Clown?' 71% of the people walking in pairs said that they had. 51% of the people walking alone said that they had. But only 25% of the people talking on a cellphone said that they saw the unicycling clown. On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at Western Washington University..."
Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Submission + - The World's Most Southerly ATM: An Interview (needcoffee.com) 1
Widgett writes: After hearing about the ATMs in Antarctica, I got curious. So I pinged Wells Fargo and wound up with an interview with one of their VPs. The end result is the story about how one services machines at the end of the world, plus--and most importantly--what are the service fees like?
Droid Touchscreen Less Accurate Than iPhone's 198
gyrogeerloose writes "A test published by MOTO labs comparing the accuracy and sensitivity of smartphone touchscreens among various makers gave the iPhone top marks ahead of HTC's Droid Eris, the Google-branded Nexus One and the Motorola Droid. The test was conducted within a drawing program using a finger to trace straight diagonal lines across the screens and then comparing the results. While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser."
Comment Threatening the emotional health of children? (Score 1) 204
I see where they're coming from, but doesn't it seem like the very children they're trying to protect from this stuff will now have no choice but to make it themselves if they desire to see it? Or are they just going to crack down on that by banning webcams, cell phones, cameras, camcorders, paper, writing impliments, and anything else that might be theoretically used to scar our childrens' minds?
Submission + - Lava Tube Found Maybe Ideal Spot for Lunar Base (cnn.com)
Camel Pilot writes: A Lava Tube has been found on the moon that could serve as an ideal structure to host a lunar base or colony. The tube is estimated by a paper in the American Geophysical Union as being over 200 feet wide and close to 300 feet deep. Such a tube provides protection from the severe lunar temperature swings, solar radiation and other hazards of space. What are we waiting for?
Submission + - SPAM: NASA Mars rover Spirit has survivability option?
coondoggie writes: As NASA celebrates its Mars rover Spirit’s sixth anniversary exploring the red planet it is hunting for a way to keep the machine, which is mired in a sand trap, alive to see a seventh year. On its Web site, the space agency this week noted there may indeed be such an option. That option would be spinning the wheels on the north side of Spirit, letting it dig in deeper in the Martian sand but at the same time improving the tilt of the rover’s solar panels toward the Sun.
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[spam URL stripped]
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Comment Re:couple more options and the obligatory (Score 1) 3
Yeah. Perhaps a "None" and a "More than 12". Also, would that be counting this poll or not?
Comment Not Anymore (Score 1) 1
It looks like it's a countdown to the New Year now.
Comment Re:Newgrounds... (Score 2, Interesting) 36
I was just thinking that. Being something of a regular Newgrounds user, I kinda felt my heart sink when I saw that. It doesn't look like it's quite the same, but it still bothers me that this is happening. All I can hope is that it's different enough to leave Newgrounds some space, or, failing that, its expanded fanbase will keep it alive. If it doesn't, Google is officially one small step closer to total domination of the internet.
Google Might Get Into Hosted Gaming Via YouTube 36
bizwriter writes "A recent patent application from Google describes a way to provide 'the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creation of interactive games.' Get into the description and you find it's about building games on top of video submissions, making it sound that Google plans to extend its YouTube site into an associated gaming site."
Submission + - The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves
theodp writes: If Amazon is Santa, says Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in 'workcampers' from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. 'Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,' explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. 'There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious.' Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. 'They'd get there exhausted.' The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned: 'When we told people [we] were going to do this, someone said 'Whenever I click the order button on Amazon, I always imagine a chorus of happy, singing Oompa-Loompas riding around on Segways and shipping my stuff.' Well...no. It's not exactly like that.'
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