Comment Re:Wish my dentist had this... (Score 1) 64
Yeah, until you jerk your head involuntarily in reaction to something exciting on the TV.
Comment Re:Grammar Nazis (Score 1) 375
You failed to capitalize 'Slashdot'. The adjective 'previous' doesn't have a noun to modify. You should hyphenate 'spellcheck-running'. Usage of all-caps for emphasis is probably ungrammatical, but I might let that slide.
Man, the grammar Nazis are really sliding in quality these days.
Comment Re:then? (Score 1) 240
yeah, but nobody writes a wikipedia article about a specific pottery bowl. people write articles about ancient chinese pottery.
Comment Google does it too (Score 1) 95
Ugh, next thing you know Google is going to allow companies to pay to get their site linked when people search things!
Seriously. You can already grab a list of who someone follows using the public free API, and it looks like paid content is going to be clearly demarcated, just like with sponsored tweets.
Comment Re:Colliding black holes (Score 1) 201
Yeah they can. But that's a pretty anomalous event, and I think the article is talking about the standard methods of black hole formation.
Has Ron Paul Quit? 878
Lally Singh sends us to the inside-the-Beltway blog Wonkette for a quick take on a letter Ron Paul sent to his supporters. In this analysis, Dr. Paul has basically called it quits. "Late Friday night, Dr. Congressman Ron Paul posted a letter to his fans basically saying it's over, but he will continue talking about his message, and plus it would be completely embarrassing for him if he also lost his congressional seat."
W3C Gets Excessive DTD Traffic 334
eldavojohn writes "It's a common string you see at the start of an HTML document, a URI declaring the type of document, but that is often processed causing undue traffic to W3C's site. There's a somewhat humorous post today from W3.org that seems to be a cry for sanity and asking developers and people to stop building systems that automatically query this information. From their post, 'In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.' Stop the insanity!"
Best Presidential Candidate, Republicans 1481
A few days ago we posted a story for you to discuss the best presidential candidates for Super Tuesday, but I figured it would be an interesting idea to try that again, but split the discussion into 2 halves. This is the Republican half — please only discuss the Republican candidates in this story. Huckabee, McCain, and Romney only.
Best Super Tuesday Candidate for Technology? 549
Petey_Alchemist writes "With Super Tuesday coming up and the political field somewhat winnowed down, the process of picking the nominees for the next American President is well underway. At the same time, the Internet is bustling through a period of legal questions like Copyright infringement, net neutrality, wireless spectrum, content filtering, broadband deployment. All of these are just a few of the host of issues that the next President will be pressured to weigh in on during his or her tenure. Who do you think would be the best (or worst) candidate on Internet issues?"
Journal Journal: Ron Paul's Racist Past 1
It's been touched on before in various Slashdot discussions, but the mainstream media is starting to pay more attention to Ron Paul, darling of the Internet libertarian set, and the attention isn't very flattering. An article in The New Republic, "Angry White Man" lays out in detail how Paul's newsletters have over the years published a wide variety of paranoid and racist material.
Colorado Decertifies E-voting Machines 169
mamer-retrogamer writes "On December 17, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified election equipment used by 64 Colorado counties, including machines made by Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. A report issued by the Secretary of State's office details a myriad of problems such as lack of password protection on the systems, controls that could give voters unauthorized access, and the absence of any way to track or detect security violations. Manufacturers have 30 days to appeal the decertification."
Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product 842
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant 131
nm writes "The Mozilla Corporation's subsidiary in China has signed a deal with Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Baidu is already included as an option in Firefox's Chinese localization, but this deal formalizes the relationship between Mozilla and and the search company. Mozilla has established several other initiatives in China to help increase Firefox adoption, particularly in universities. The article notes that Firefox has seen limited uptake in China; the browser Maxthon is the second most popular after Internet Explorer. Maxthon is thought to have as much as 30 percent of the Chinese browser market."
AMD NDA Scandal 187
crazyeyes writes "Just two weeks ago, a Thai journalist walked out of the hush-hush AMD event in Singapore over a controversial NDA that required him to 'send any stories to the vendor before his newspaper can publish it.' AMD categorically denied it happened, but today, we not only have proof that it happened, we also have the sordid details of the entire affair. Here's a quote from the editorial: 'First off, the non-disclosure agreement covered everything confidential said or written over the next two years on the product, and had a duration of five years, during which anything published or used in marketing would have to receive written approval from AMD before it could be used. Worse, at the end of the five years, all copies of the information made would have to be returned to the chipmaker.'"
Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages 175
paleshadows writes "Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each Wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilizes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain 'reputation,' whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demonstration (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this
presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf)."
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