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Comment Probably due to Verizon / RIM (Score 2) 366

by Soskywalkr (#35358216) Attached to: Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37%
I'd bet that most of this increase is due the switch by Verizon to force Bing as the default search provider. Every so often, I forget to go to google.com first -- seeing the lack of usable results I'm instantly reminded and switch back to google, but I'm sure that still counts in Bing's favor.... perl @+?*.-&'_:$#/%!"
Idle

Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779

Posted by samzenpus from the where's-the-reset-button dept.
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.

Comment Check out Stack Overflow (Score 1) 283

by Soskywalkr (#33868118) Attached to: Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source
Head over to Stack Overflow -- a website for answering programming questions ( including C++ ). I found that I've learned a great deal by simply trying to answer the questions as posted and researching them if I don't know the answers. If you have time, you might also check out either stats.stackexchange.com or math.stackexchange.com, sites specific to statistical and mathematical questions respectively. Ps. If you haven't read "Joel on Software" you might also check it out.
Education

Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161

Posted by timothy from the deep-springs-college dept.
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
Biotech

Fluorescent Protein Research Lands Scientists Nobel Prize 79

Posted by timothy from the also-will-change-dinner-forever dept.
Iddo Genuth writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry award for 2008: jointly given to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien 'for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP' — a remarkable brightly glowing green fluorescent protein first observed in the beautiful jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, in 1962."
Image

Cisco Ships Mexican Folk Music On VPN Client CD 79

Posted by samzenpus from the whistle-while-you-work dept.
jemduff writes "So we receive our brand new firewall from CISCO and all goes well with the setup... until we try to upgrade our VPN client and we discovered that the installation CDs from CISCO contain 12 tracks of Mexican music!!? Not too bad if you're into that kind of music ... too bad if you need to get onto your corporate network. How much did those routers cost, again? 5,000,000 pesos?"
Mozilla

Firefox Add-On To Track Your Location Via Wi-Fi 181

Posted by timothy from the location-aware dept.
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new Add-on that allows Firefox to pinpoint your location based on Wi-Fi signals. The feature, called Geode, is a prototype for the location-tracking technology that will be built into the forthcoming Firefox 3.1. Geode is designed to work with websites that rely on knowing your location, such as mapping and geotagging services. The prospect of Firefox having the ability to track your location raises obvious privacy fears. Mozilla insists users will remain in complete control. 'With Geode, when a website requests your location a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site: your exact location, your neighbourhood, your city, or nothing at all,' the Mozilla Labs blog claims."
Programming

New Contestants On the Turing Test 630

Posted by CmdrTaco from the game-on dept.
vitamine73 writes "At 9 a.m. next Sunday, six computer programs — 'artificial conversational entities' — will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' — and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."
The Internet

Free Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone 111

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-whole-lotta-smart-stuff dept.
ocean_soul writes "Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500,000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists, it is the number-one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a 'normal' journal. A famous example is Grisha Perelman, who published his award-winning paper exclusively on arXiv."
Patents

Steve Jobs Patents "The Dock" 580

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what's-next dept.
theodp writes "If you're a PC, you may be unfamiliar with The Dock, the bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of a Mac and provides easy access to Apple applications. But don't count on it becoming a standard on the PC. On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Apple — and inventor Steve Jobs — a patent for their User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access, aka 'The Dock,' after a rather lengthy nine-year wait."
Communications

What Do You Want In iPhone 2.0? 436

Posted by Zonk from the you-know-its-coming dept.
Ian Lamont writes "The predictions about the iPhone being a bust have so far been way off the mark, but that doesn't mean the device is perfect. Besides the dependence on the AT&T Edge network and the lack of an iPhone SDK, there are a boatload of UI, software and hardware issues that should be addressed in the next-generation iPhone. Some complaints include GPS functionality, allowing iPhones to be used as hard drives, adding RSS support, and turning auto-correct into auto-complete. What would you want to see in the next generation of iPhone?"

Feed Engadget: Google planning undersea 'Unity' communications cable? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Networking

Earlier this year, we got wind of plans to construct a 12,428-mile fiber link between the west coast of America and Southeast Asia, and now it seems that Google may be "planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009." According to Communications Day, the so-called Unity cable "has been under development for several months," but Google would neither confirm nor deny the plans when questioned. Interestingly, the article points to a Google job listing for a "submarine cable negotiator," and when asked about it, the firm simply stated that "it should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity." For now, we'll file this one away in the ever-expanding rumor drawer, but hey, it's not like Google has shunned major purchases of fiber in the past.

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