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Idle

Submission + - Music by natural selection (darwintunes.org)

maccallr writes: The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum "genome size" and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change.
Patents

Submission + - Microsoft Seeks Patent on Shaming Fat Gamers 1

theodp writes: A newly-disclosed Microsoft patent application — Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic — takes aim at fat people, proposing to generate fat avatars in gaming environments for individuals whose health records indicate they're overweight ("an undesirable body weight could be reflected in an overweight or underweight appearance for the avatar"), limiting their game play ("only requisite health levels are allowed to compete in a certain competition level"), and even banning them ("a dedicated gamer could exercise for a period of time until his health indicator gadget shows a sufficiently high health/health credit in order to allow reentering the avatar environment"). Linking one's gaming avatar to one's physique, explains Microsoft, will produce healthy and virtuous behaviors in individuals. Microsoft also proposes shaping gaming experiences by using 'psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc.'
Earth

Tsunami Hit New York City Region In 300 BC 147

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists say that sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate a huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson River. Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, says that size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. 'If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm,' says Goodbred. An Atlantic tsunami is rare but not inconceivable, says Neal Driscoll, a geologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is not associated with the research. The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake."

Comment Senior Project 2004 (Score 1) 323

For my senior project I requested a donation of PCs from a local business, and they granted it, and I grouped up with a underclassmen (He then used it as his senior project the next year, maintaining it). But we setup Fedora on 32 PCs and setup a server using a form of UNIX I forget. The lab worked perfectly, we were even able to use wine to emulate programs that the school required for testing purposes. It really isn't too hard to convert, you just have to make a convincing argument in a way that people who don't understand open source, will understand IE money.
Programming

Journal Journal: Programming Communitys?

I'm currently in the military and am going to get out in about a year, so I'm trying to dust off my programming skills and get some new ones, but I have trouble learning stuff solo (I need a challenge when I am, and also project ideas). So I was wondering if anyone knows of any Programming Communities one could go to get advices and light tutorship from. I use Source Forge quite a bit for playing around, but I don't want to jump into a project and end up just wasting space or causing more work

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