Comment Added after submission: synopsis (Score 1) 1
Here is a somewhat more "official" synopsis from the publisher http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.110801
Submission + - Checking the positional invariance of Planck's Consant using GPS (aps.org) 1
gzipped_tar writes: Whether the fundamental constants really stay the same is always a question worth asking. In particular, the constancy of Planck's Constant is something that cannot be simply ignored owing to its universal importance in linking the quantum and classical pictures of our world. Using publicly available GPS data and terrestrial clocks, researchers form the California State University were able to verify that the value of h indeed stays the same across different positions in the vicinity of our Earth. Their result says the local position invariance of h is satisfied within a limit of 0.007. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters (paywalled), and a free-to-read preprint is available on arXiv. tl;dr version for slashdotters: by the well-known formula E = h * f, a hypothetical variation on h induces changes in f, the transition frequency that keeps the time in atomic clocks, both on earth and aboard the satellites. When taking account of other time variations such as general relativistic time dilation, and assuming the invariance of E (atomic transition energy) on physical grounds, we can figure out an upper bound on the variation of h reflected in the measured variation in f.
Submission + - Judea Pearl, a big brain behind artificial intelligence, wins Turing Award (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Judea Pearl, a longtime UCLA professor whose work on artificial intelligence laid the foundation for such inventions as the iPhone’s Siri speech recognition technology and Google’s driverless cars, has been named the 2011 ACM Turing Award winner. The annual Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizes Pearl for his advances in probabilistic and causal reasoning. His work has enabled creation of thinking machines that can cope with uncertainty, making decisions even when answers aren’t black or white.
Comment Wrong way of thinking (Score 5, Insightful) 247
As part of the society, you should think about how not to become a target of hacking activism. Especially when it's impossible to crush every one of the "hackers".
Better yet, convert them into your loyal customers, and even better, direct their anger to your competitors.
Comment Re:How is this is this different to shell history? (Score 1) 184
Shell history doesn't contains only input, not output.
Someone may have splashed some GPG private keys to the terminal, and the output ends up in the filesystem blocks.
Comment Re:tmpfs (Score 1) 184
On a memory-limited system, one may not want
Comment Re:Umm (Score 4, Insightful) 184
The problem is your terminal history may include data from other hosts, decrypted. Therefore it's not just "your" worries.
Comment Speech jamming vs POV gun (Score 1) 370
Whenever I heard of Japanese speech-jamming machines I go grab my point-of-view gun.
Comment Good name (Score 1) 74
Good luck explaining to the corporate suites what a "pwn" is.
Comment What a shame (Score 1) 247
We still see this kind of XXXX coming up every leap year.
Comment eMacs not good enough? (Score 2) 248
eMacs not good enough? But I never know vi costs so much!
Comment Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score 1) 119
I think LyX is mostly focused on the WYSIWIG aspect. Your problems (automatic completion of bibtex key, automatically managed "make" process, and debugging in context) are better solved in something that work like an IDE. Perhaps you can look for one that suites your needs.
Comment Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score 1) 119
Oh come on, get an IDE*. Typo in BibTeX key? It will jump to the offending line and highlight the error. Multiple passes? It manages the compilation process for you.
* Perhaps should be called IAE -- intergrated authoring environment. Personally I use vim-latex but please don't burn me for not using Emacs.
Comment Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score 1) 119
For many purposes, simple text file is indeed superior due to, well you guess, textuality. Put it this way: you can't grep an ODF file, but you can grep in a text file with insane efficiency (most of the time).
Comment Re:Searching by voice? (Score 2) 490
Maybe they got a patent on searching *by* the keys instead of searching for the keys. People these days are crazy.
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Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.
