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Android

Submission + - STRaND-1 Satellite Preparing to Activate Onboard Nexus One (thepowerbase.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: In as little as a few days, the British-made Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1) satellite will begin transitioning its key systems over to a completely stock Android Nexus One smartphone that's been bolted to the bottom of it. The mission is designed to test the endurance of off-the-shelf consumer hardware, and to validate Android as a viable platform for controlling low-cost spacecraft.

STRaND-1 managed to beat NASA's own "PhoneSat" mission to the punch, which will see a Nexus One and Nexus S launched into space aboard the April test flight of the Orbital Sciences Antares commercial launch vehicle, the prime competitor to SpaceX's Falcon 9.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984

CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."
Science

Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269

cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.

Comment Re:Great! (Score 1) 275

In there you will learn that "Attention Deficit Disorder" is an unfortunate misnomer, and that part of the disorder is very strong focus on things that are sufficiently stimulating. They mention that a better name would be something like "Attention Inconsistency Disorder".
That is precisely why this solution won't help most children sufficiently. The games are already over stimulating and therefore they have no trouble concentrating. A couple of years ago I worked with some guys based out of NC, http://www.playattention.com/, that were doing the same EEG bio-feedback but not using off the shelf video games. Instead we made some very simple 2D games similiar to pong (but with color). They didn't use a controller to play the game, instead the feedback from the EEG device made the game progress positively or negatively. They did have to interact with the game once every 2-5 seconds with the spacebar, to make sure they were focusing on the game and not something else, but mostly the game was driven by their focus. The games were slow, but that was the point. When a kid is sitting in math or english class, there aren't lots of flashes and loud sounds and they don't get to control "where they go" as you might in a video game. They have to sit in their chairs and pay attention to something that may be totally boring. This is where ADD (or as the parent states AID) really hurts these kids (and adults). Using flashy video games just perpetuates the problem that they are at least partially responsible for creating.

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