aquasheep - Slashdot User

Work Progresses On 10,000 Year Clock 307

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @12:09PM from the artifexian-contrapulation dept.

KindMind writes "CNet has pictures of a planned 10,000 year clock to be built in eastern Nevada by the Long Now Foundation. From the article: 'Running under its own power, the clock is an experiment in art, science, and engineering. The six dials on the face of this machine will represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky over a 10,000-year period. Likely to span multiple generations and evolutions in culture, the thinking and design put into the monument makes it a moving sculpture as beautiful as it is complex.' This was reviewed on Slashdot in 2005. Really cool pictures, including one of a mechanical 'binary computer' that converts the pendulum into positions on the dial."

IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer 380

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @04:17PM from the don't-let-the-door-hit-you dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.

Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming 492

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 19, 2008 @05:02PM from the and-we-will-need-an-additional-10,000-coal-plants-to-power-this dept.

SUNSTOP writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Maryland scientist has proposed a public patent that he claims could combat global warming. The proposed plan would require massive amounts of water to be sprayed into the air in an effort to bolster the earth's existing air conditioning system. "First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation. Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University whose computer simulation of Ace's invention suggests it would significantly cool the planet. The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said."

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction 399

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 14, 2008 @01:37PM from the doing-the-numbers dept.

wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."

Comment Re:i look at it this way (Score 1) 553

by aquasheep on Monday June 18, 2007 @02:45PM (#19554581) Attached to: The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

what is bad about gold farming?

Couple of points, specific to WoW:

First of all, for a long time, gold farmers were generally blamed for making the game less fun for "typical" users. They took up player spots on servers, which caused a lot of servers to have queues. This forced a lot of people to have to wait to get into the game during primetime hours (6-11pm). A lot of gold farmers tended to bother other players to give them buffs/conjured food/open locked boxes, usually pretty rudely. And, players that wanted to legitimately farm for their own gold had a harder time, because gold farmers would typically plant themselves in common, high-profit spots and camp spawns.

Secondly, visiting and buying from a lot of gold-selling sites puts you at risk to have your account stolen or hacked, either via key loggers or poor security on the buyer's part. Your account is stripped and liquidated, and that gold sold to others, creating a cycle that gives a very bad reputation to both gold farmers and gold sellers alike.

Third, for a while, gold seller sites would spam people in the game advertising their services, both through tells and through the in-game mail.

Now, recently, these aren't the problems that they used to be. I haven't seen a queue on my server in months, ever since the expansion it's been easier than ever to make money (less incentive for anyone buy gold), and with the most recent patch, Blizzard instituted controls to limit the amount of spam. That doesn't take away from the fact that gold farmers have accrued very bad reputations, and people who buy from gold sellers are generally seen as contributing to shady business practices.

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