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Comment Is the model accurate? (Score 1) 655

by dgdriscoll (#40018639) Attached to: The Mathematics of Obesity
In the comments I don't see anyone else questioning whether this metabolism modeling formula is accurate. I can't seem to get to the original paper, the link in the Times story goes to an announcement of the conference. I'm not saying the formula isn't accurate. I'm just saying that sometime mathematical models give results that don't match the real world and I'd want to see some empirical evidence for this before I start drawing conclusions based on it.
Idle

Submission + - 400 Wolves Besiege Remote Russian Village 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: The Daily Mail reports that a 'super pack' of 400 wolves has been terrifying the remote town of Verkhoyansk (population 1,300) in Northern Russia leaving more than 30 horses dead in just four days as twenty four teams of hunters have been put together with a bounty of $335 for every wolf skin brought to officials. "To protect the town we are creating 24 teams of armed hunters, who will patrol the neighbourhood on snowmobiles and set wolf traps" says district official Stepan Rozhin. "'But we need more people. Once the daylight increases, the hunters will start shooting predators from helicopters." Dr Valerius Geist, a wildlife behaviour expert, says the harsh Siberian winter — where temperatures plummet to minus 49C — is the problem with the cold killing off the animal's usual prey. "Wolves are very careful to choose the most nutritious food source easiest obtained without danger — which in this case happens to be horses," opines Geist. "They will start tackling dangerous prey when they run out of non-dangerous prey."
Open Source

Fedora Infrastructure Compromised 115

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "The infrastructure of the Fedora Project was compromised over the weekend and an account belonging to a Fedora contributor was taken over by an attacker. However, Fedora officials said they don't believe that the attacker was able to push any changes to the Fedora package system or make any actual changes to the infrastructure. The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges. The attacker was able to compromise the account externally, and then had the ability to connect remotely to some Fedora systems. The attacker also changed the account's SSH key, Fedora officials said."
Businesses

The Fall of Traditional Entertainment Conglomerates 204

Posted by samzenpus from the let-me-know-how-that-goes-for-you dept.
Advocatus Diaboli writes "We no longer live in the era of 'plantation-type' movie studios or recording houses. However large private companies still have considerable power over content production, distribution and promotion. Technology has been slowly changing this state of affairs for almost 30-40 years, however certain new technological advances, enabling systems and cost considerations will change the entertainment industry as we know it within 5 years."
America Online

60% of AOL's Profits Come From Misinformed Customers 301

Posted by samzenpus from the check-your-math-again dept.
satuon writes "Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. According to Auletta: "The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. 'The dirty little secret,' a former AOL executive says, 'is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"
Google

Google Didn't Ship Relicensed Java Code After All 223

Posted by Soulskill from the deeper-looks dept.
RedK writes "In a follow up to yesterday's news about Google apparently relicensing confidential Oracle code found in Java under the ASL, it seems that the blogger who initially reported the issue was plain wrong, as the files he indicated were in breach of Oracle's copyright do not actually ship with Android. Google has also deleted many of these files, which were mostly used as unit tests."
Biotech

Biotech Company Making Fossil Fuels With a 'Library' of Bacteria 386

Posted by Soulskill from the micro-slaves dept.
Saysys sends an excerpt from a story at the Globe and Mail: "In September, a privately held and highly secretive US biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for 'a proprietary organism' – a genetically engineered cyanobacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (US) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, 'fossil fuels on demand.' ... Joule says it now has 'a library' of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has 'proven the process,' has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 US gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year."
Censorship

Comics Code Dead 316

Posted by Soulskill from the may-make-a-shocking-return-in-later-issue dept.
tverbeek writes "After more than half a century of stifling the comic book industry, the Comics Code Authority is effectively dead. Created in response to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, one of the early think-of-the-children censorship campaigns, and Congressional hearings, the Code laid out a checklist of requirements and restrictions for comics to be distributed to newsstand vendors, effectively ensuring that in North America, only simplistic stories for children would be told using the medium of sequential art. It gradually lost many of its teeth, and an increasing number of publishers gave up on newsstand distribution and ignored the Code, but at the turn of the century the US's largest comics publishers still participated. Marvel quit it in 2001, in favor of self-applied ratings styled after the MPAA's and ESRB's. Last year Bongo (publishers of the Simpsons comics) quietly dropped out. Now DC and Archie, the last publishers willingly subjecting their books to approval, have announced that they're discontinuing their use of the CCA, with DC following Marvel's example, and Archie (which recently introduced an openly gay supporting character, something flatly forbidden by the original Code) carrying on under their own standards. The Code's cousins — the MPAA and ESRB ratings, the RIAA parental advisory, and the mishmash of warnings on TV shows — still live on, but at least North American comic publishers are no longer subject to external censorship."
Transportation

Solar Car Speed Record Smashed 72

Posted by timothy from the hats-are-off-to-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes with word from Australia that "There's a new world record for the fastest solar-powered land vehicle: 88 km/h average speed over one kilometre in a lightweight car that uses about the same power as a toaster." As the article goes on to explain, this solar racer, built last year by students from the University of New South Wales, managed to nab that speed record earlier this month on an Australian navy base airstrip.
Image

DSL Installation Fail 371

Posted by samzenpus from the job-well-done dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an example of fine Qwest workmanship. In our business park, they just installed a DSL connection for our neighbors, for which we share an exterior utility space. They left: a DSL modem stuffed in a cardboard box, wrapped in a Wal-Mart bag, sitting outside in what will be below-zero (F) temps, on top of a bank of ten natural gas meters in some of the driest air of the year. They also left it plugged into an exposed exterior power outlet above a snowbank, with network cables running around the building, through snowbanks, coupled and protected by zip-lock baggies, and into our neighbors office. Not to mention the hack-job of patching the phone cable directly into the demarcation box. And if you're wondering — I was told upon calling them that this is not their problem, and I need to contact my primary phone service provider."
Networking

Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users 290

Posted by CmdrTaco from the trial-by-fire dept.
alphadogg writes "Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially. Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 — the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol — could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call 'IPv6 brokenness.'"
Power

Global Observer's First Hydrogen-Powered Flight 34

Posted by timothy from the oh-the-non-humanity dept.
cylonlover writes "Following on from a successful maiden flight under battery power in 2010, AeroVironment's high altitude, long endurance (HALE) Global Observer unmanned aircraft has now taken to the skies using hydrogen-fueled propulsion. The aircraft reached an altitude of 5,000 feet during the four hour flight on January 11 at Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB) in California. Both the endurance and the altitude of the system will be expanded in further test flights in order to achieve the planned operational altitude of 55,000 to 65,000 feet."

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