Comment Re:Its friday... (Score 2) 278
Let's not forget the monkey dance
Comment Re:Microsoft will pull back (Score 5, Insightful) 426
Yeah! It's downright criminal that M$ won't continue to support an OS that came out before the Iraq war, or SARS, or the first US case of Mad Cow, or Gray Davis getting recalled, or Greenspan retiring from the fed, or Hurricane Katrina, or The release of three more operating systems from Microsoft....
Let's be reasonable. XP is four versions old at this point. It's time to put it out to pasture.
Comment Re:NatGeo channel's really gone downhill (Score 1) 305
Nat Geo used to have a show called Is it Real? that actually did some of this, and it was really interesting. Unfortunately they don't make new episodes of Is it Real anymore, it was great. They would usually have some proponent of whatever they were talking about that week (ghosts, UFOs, etc.) for the first 15 minutes or so, then would have actual scientists come in and explain why it probably wasn't for the next 30 minutes. I miss that show.
Comment Re:Thanks for all the Fish Wrapper (Score 1) 1521
The Road goes ever on and on/Down from the door where it began/Now far ahead the Road has gone/And I must follow, if I can/Pursuing it with eager feet/Until it joins some larger way/Where many paths and errands meet/And whither then? I cannot say.
IBM Plays SimCity With Portland, Oregon 220
Hugh Pickens writes "Portland, Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new software called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities, containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities' emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. 'What's the connection, for example, between ... obesity rates and carbon emissions?' writes Greg Lindsay. 'To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.' One of the drivers of the 'Portland Plan' is the city's commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. After running the model, planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it's important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren't the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
Comment Re:Northwest? (Score 1) 123
I also like how Minneapolis/St Paul was left out when it's a bigger metro area than Oklahoma City and Nashville combined.
Comment Re:And so it begins (Score 0) 565
And my point is that according to INTERPOL it isn't more broad then that. I will admit to not being able to read Swedish, or being a lawyer, but this is the first case that I have heard of where Sweden's rape laws would not be what most /. readers would consider rape. This seemed suspicious to me so I went to the best source I could find, and from what I have found the criminal charge or rape in Sweden is exactly what a /. reader would think it is. Julian may or may not have raped that woman, and I am going to wait for the criminal investigation to finish before I attempt judgement, but it is a BS argument to claim that these rape charges are less serious for being in Sweden as opposed to the US.
Comment Re:And so it begins (Score 1) 565
According to Interpol it is pretty much what I would consider rape.
"Section 1 of the Swedish Penal Code
'A person who, by violence or threat involving or appearing to the threatened person as imminent danger, forces the latter to have sexual intercourse or to engage in a comparable sexual act, shall be sentenced for rape to imprisonment for at least two and at most six years. Rendering the person unconscious or otherwise placing the person in a similarly helpless state shall be regarded as equivalent to violence.'"
Unless people consider rape to be something other than non-consensual sex, in which case I admit to being wrong, and I am kind of curious to see what you consider rape to be.
30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet 407
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity 773
myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."
Comment Re:Making things complicated. (Score 1) 299
BB spot is a humor website. The entire list is ment to be a joke.
A Telescope as Big as the Earth 172
Roland Piquepaille writes "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.'"
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The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. -- Lew Mammel, Jr.
