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Comment That makes sense (Score 2, Insightful) 518

by sargosis (#27304441) Attached to: German Police Union Chief Wants Violent Game Ban After Shooting
...leave it to a German to take one person and blame a mass of people for that one person's faults. counter-strike and Far cry 2 aren't animate objects. they can't load a clip for you. they can't cock the hammer and pull the trigger. Run a search for violence statistics on google and you'll see that since the creation of violent video games, world-wide violent crimes have gone down, not up.

Comment An expert in the field, finally! (Score 1) 244

by aaron_ds (#26919093) Attached to: Web-based IDEs Edge Closer To the Mainstream
I coded up a web-based IDE two years ago for my senior project at California State University Fresno and presented it to a group of entrepreneurs at the Central Valley Business Incubator. It was a student project, but it incorporated SVN on the backend and did some slick syntax highlighting in real time on the frontend. A user could login anywhere, code for a bit, commit changes and logoff.

They smiled and nodded, but it was evident that they had no idea what an IDE was let alone how a web-based IDE would enhance the development process.

It has been technically possible for years, but now with Mozilla's Tamarin, and Google's V8, more complex functionality can be added (webtellisense?).
Robotics

Submission + - New Robots Hunt Pirates by Sea, Traffic by Land (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: Two interesting first-looks over at PopularMechanics.com's "Robot Week": a lengthy preview of this weekend's DARPA Urban Challenge, which unlike in past years will put self-driving vehicles through a world of parked cars, three-point turns and oncoming traffic; and a peek into the growing world of high-tech piracy on the open seas, which the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard are looking to cut off by investing in a new fleet of superfast, gun-mounted unmanned surface vessels (USVs). From the article: "The Interceptor is available now. But the USV market is just getting started: Two months ago, British defense firm Qinetiq debuted its own robotic vessel, the jetski-size Sentry. Among its potential duties is intruder investigation, which could include scouting out unidentified boats, along the lines of the raft that detonated alongside the USS Cole in Yemen, as well as offering a first look at a possible pirate-controlled vessel."
Biotech

Submission + - Brains hard wired for math

Submitted by
mcgrew (sm62704)
mcgrew (sm62704) writes: "New Scientist is reporting that "non-human primates really can understand the meaning of numerals."

The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values — regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.

For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values.
The report itself is online at PLoS Biology, Semantic Associations between Signs and Numerical Categories in the Prefrontal Cortex."
User Journal

Journal Journal: 336612^7031232+1 is prime 1

Journal by tqft

For those who care about such things
336612^7031232+1 is prime
[2,116,617 digits]
http://seventeenorbust.com/
http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=12670

10th biggest known prime

and I just missed it

IBM Creates Ring Oscillator on a Single Nanotube 159

Posted by CowboyNeal from the mini-milestones dept.
deeptrace writes "IBM has combined CMOS circuitry and a single carbon nanotube to implement a 5 stage ring oscillator. Even though the oscillator runs at just 52 MHz, they expect that it could reach the GHz range with improvements. The frequency of the current oscillator was higher than previous circuits using multiple nanotubes. IBM describes the achievement in the paper "Integrated Logic Circuit Assembled on a Single Carbon Nanotube" to be published this week in the journal Science."

Bill Could Restrict Freedom of the Press 747

Posted by Zonk from the who-needs-news? dept.
WerewolfOfVulcan writes "The Washington Post is carrying an article about a disturbing Senate bill that could make it illegal to publicly disclose even the existence of US domestic spying programs (i.e. NSA wiretaps)." An aide to the bill's author assures us it's not aimed at reporters, but the language is ambiguous at best. From the article: "Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified. 'The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact,' said Martin, a civil liberties advocate."

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