Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:They are NOT Denying Global Warming (Score 1) 1100

They [the EPA] certainly aren't trying to _actually_ clean up the air, since worse offenders than the USA already exist

Um, the USA is the 2nd largest emitter of CO2 in the world, behind China. And China has a over billion more people, about four times more than the USA. In light of that, the EPA's attempts to legislate reduced CO2 emissions do not seem all that unreasonable to me.

Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Unusual physics engine game ported to Linux (blogspot.com)

christian.einfeldt writes: "Halloween has come early for Linux-loving gamers in the form of the scary Penumbra game trilogy, which has just recently been ported natively to GNU-Linux by the manufacturer, Frictional Games. The Penumbra games, named Overture, Black Plague, and Requiem, respectively, are first person survival horror and physics puzzle games which challenge the player to survive in a mine in Greenland which has been taken over by a monstrous infection/demon/cthulhu-esque thing. The graphics, sounds, and plot are all admirable in a scary sort of way. The protagonist is an ordinary human with no particular powers at all, who fumbles around in the dark mine fighting zombified dogs or fleeing from infected humans. But the game is remarkable for its physics engine — rather than just bump and acquire, the player must use the mouse to physically turn knobs and open doors; and the player can grab and throw pretty much anything in the environment. The physics engine drives objects to fly and fall exactly as one would expect. The porting of a game with such a deft physics engine natively to Linux might be one of the most noteworthy events for GNU-Linux gamers since the 'World of Goo' Linux port."

Comment Re:...or maybe (Score 1) 588

I call BS on a study that looks at test scores, (seemingly) for high school students, and says that the more women are in the 99% percentile so it's cultural.

So let me get this straight: you're saying that it's not significant that nations with greater gender equality have more women scoring above the 99th percentile in mathematics?

Methinks someone failed Logic 101.

Certainly, scoring in the 99th percentile is by no means an indication of math genius-ness. But that's missing the point entirely—what matters is that there are strong cultural factors that are pushing many capable women away from mathematics, leaving any mathematical ability unidentified, genius or not.

Comment Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score 2, Insightful) 281

So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??

While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.

That the standard is open does not mean that every browser implements the standard properly yet. If you intend to showcase an emerging standard, you want to actually showcase the emerging standard. As this is such a showcase, it's perfectly reasonable to restrict presentation to those browsers capable of displaying the page as intended.

As I quoted earlier FTFA:

We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.

Based on that, I expect that we'll see similar demos running on those and other HTML5-capable browsers in the near future.

Comment Re:Yeah, screw you too (Score 5, Informative) 281

If you actually read TFA, you might have noticed

Do other browsers support this HTML tag? Yes, but our code works best on Firefox 3.5 beta and is not yet optimized for other browsers. We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.

Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 1) 607

One that has been approved by the UN security council in accordance with chapter 7 of the UN charter. For example, the war in Afghanistan is a legal war. The 2003 Iraqi war was not.

Actually, neither of those two wars are legally wars under the US Constitution. Because, of course, they're not "wars" if Congress doesn't declare them to be wars... you know, the same way that no one dies if you don't declare them to be dead...

It's pretty messed up.

Comment Re:Tutorial on Using apt-p2p to Upgrade (Score 1) 482

From the apt-p2p website [emphasis added] http://www.camrdale.org/apt-p2p/ :

Similar to DebTorrent, Apt-P2P will act as a proxy between apt requests and a debian repository server, downloading any requested files from peers (if possible), but falling back to a direct HTTP download. Unlike DebTorrent, Apt-P2P will be simple, efficient, and fast.

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Working...