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Comment Long live GURPS! (Score 1) 111

by TechkNighT_1337 (#50015025) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Steve Jackson About Designing Games
What about relaxing a bit the license for GURPS products? I don't know, but from my experience is the better to have the best share of a farm than be the only owner of a single (dead) cow. Imagine you creating a place for people putting their endless GURPS material in your GURPS Portal and doing it all digital so cost are minimal? Everybody would win. Thanks for your system. Tech Tenente from Brazil

Submission + - Scientists in China predict pentagonal graphene

Submitted by TechkNighT_1337
TechkNighT_1337 writes: Chinese scientists made calculations and predict that a new 2D allotrope of carbon based in a pentagonal form resembling an common pavement in the streets of cairo can be synthesized, they call this new form penta-graphene from the announcement in the Chemistry World they say: "The team found that not only should a pentagon-containing version of graphene be fairly stable, it should also be stronger than conventional graphene and be able to withstand higher temperatures, up to 730C. It would also be a natural semiconductor, unlike conventional graphene, which is a highly efficient conductor and has to be chemically modified to turn it into a semiconductor."

Comment Two cents, two alternatives. (Score 2) 294

by TechkNighT_1337 (#48105173) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: An Accurate Broadband Speed Test?
I know it's not a good reliable test, but you can always try do download an .ISO file from some Linux distro from various sources or some big program from sourceforge. The second alternative, you can try to use the meter from the Brazilian agency for internet at: http://simet.nic.br/medidor/ (try googling: simet nic br) it's not in any form affiliated with any US ISP and i think we have sufficient bandwitdth for the test.

Submission + - Carbyne: A Form of Carbon Even Stronger Than Graphene 1

Submitted by Dialecticus
Dialecticus writes: Sebastian Anthony at ExtremeTech has written an article about research into the physical properties of carbyne, an elusive form of carbon. A new mathematical analysis by Mingjie Liu and others at Rice University suggests that carbyne may achieve double the strength of graphene, stealing its crown and becoming the strongest material known to man.
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-to-blame dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
Youtube

YouTube Alters Copyright Algorithms, Will 'Manually' Review Some Claims 71

Posted by timothy from the get-your-hands-off-my-manuals dept.
thomst writes "David Kravets of Wired's Threat Level blog reports that Google's Thabet Alfishawi has announced YouTube will alter its algorithms 'that identify potentially invalid claims. We stop these claims from automatically affecting user videos and place them in a queue to be manually reviewed.' YouTube's Content ID algorithms have notably misfired in recent months, resulting in video streams as disparate as Curiosity's Mars landing and Michelle Obama's Democratic Convention speech being taken offline on specious copyright infringement grounds. Kravets states, 'Under the new rules announced Wednesday, however, if the uploader challenges the match, the alleged rights holder must abandon the claim or file an official takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' (A false takedown claim under the DMCA can result in non-trivial legal liability.)" Update: 10/05 11:24 GMT by S : Google has clarified its earlier comments. The user videos will be placed in a queue for manual review not by Google, but by the content owners.
United States

Submission + - Reverse Robocall Turns Tables On Politicians (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "One of the great banes of election season is that any politician can shell out a few pennies per voter and phone-spam thousands of people who'd rather not hear a recorded pitch. But turnabout's fair play, and now a service called reverse robocall will deliver your recorded message to elected officials as often as you'd like for a nominal fee. If you got someone who you'd like to call repeatedly, check them out."
Science

Submission + - Graphene spun into metre-long fibres (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Nano-sized flakes of graphene oxide can be spun into graphene fibres several metres long, researchers in China have shown. The strong, flexible fibres, which can be tied in knots or woven into conductive mats, could be the key to deploying graphene in real-world devices such as flexible batteries.
Space

Submission + - Bizarre expanding light halo seen by Hawaii webcam (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A webcam mounted at the CFHT observatory in Hawaii caught a strange, expanding halo of light on the night of June 22. Announced on the Starship Asterisk forum, readers quickly honed in on the likely culprit: the terminal charge from the third stage of a Minuteman III missile. Very similar to the Norway Spiral of 2009, and scientific sleuthing at its best!"

Submission + - Is there a formula for a hit song? (google.com) 1

Submitted by moveoverrover
moveoverrover writes: What happens when two Rutgers Grad students analyze 50 years of Billboard Top 10 hits with MIT offshoot Echo Nest's API and turn the data into visualizations for an assignment? Great looking visualizations for one, and a fascinating look at 50 years of Pop music at the data level. Posing the question,"Is there a formula for a hit song?" The students write,

  "What if we knew, for example, that 80% of the Billboard Hot 100 number one singles from 1960-2010 are sung in a major key with an average of 135 beats per minute, that they all follow a I-III-IV chord progression in 4/4 time signature, and that they all follow a "verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus" sequence structure?

  Using data extracted by Echo Nest on tempo, duration, time signature, musical key, as well as subjective criteria like "energy" and "danceability," the pair generated a number of visualizations with Google Motion Charts (warning: slow) and "(some) Tableau Results" for everyone to see and investigate. Curious about tempo and song duration trends in Pop music over 50 years? Correlation between record label and song tempo? They have it. Do you have your own burning question or visual relationship to investigate?? Download the core data, the Tableau reader and look at it any way you want.

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