What If They Turned Off the Internet? 511

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 24, 2009 @09:47PM from the very-funny-now-where-is-slashdot dept.

theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."

Comment Re:Sounds good to me (Score 1) 757

by iguy on Sunday October 18, 2009 @10:09AM (#29783957) Attached to: The US's Reverse Brain Drain

Getting a PhD in the US does not mean you'll get a job. I'll work hard and get a Masters or PhD and 95% of the jobs are the same jobs someone can get with a BS. So I incur 40-60k more in debt and get paid exactly the same. The other gotcha with this is say I do get a PhD. At most companies they'll just put you into Management. You won't be doing more academic research or applied theory, instead you'll be a project manager/people manager which is not what your studies were around and you get detached from the sciences.

Being a US Citizen I am very ashamed of the mentality of our country. We only believe in entitlements and not working for what we get anymore. That's why foreigner's are taking our jobs, taking our degrees and leaving. When they go back home they get respect. I get laughed at for getting a Master's degree.

Hard Choice to make for most.

Comment Re:Who Cares? (Score -1, Flamebait) 374

by iguy on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @12:05AM (#26443811) Attached to: Solving Obama's BlackBerry Dilemma

To be fairer, he's the first President in 24 years with a working brain cell.

Map of Web Content By Perspective 79

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 11, 2008 @03:23PM from the imperfect-but-neat dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Cruxlux has a perspective-based search engine up. It provides a map of results laid out by viewpoint. For example, querying 'Obama' shows a map with liberal blog posts, articles, and video clumped together, conservative stuff nearby, and nonpolitical sources farther away. It works for nonpolitical queries too (sports, etc.). It also lets you limit results to certain types of views — you can focus on hot 'Obama' content from a liberal angle, for instance."

Comment So how's this newsworthy? (Score 2) 306

by iguy on Monday October 01, 2007 @08:12AM (#20808625) Attached to: Halo 3 Causing Network Issues

Is there an article behind this? Did this sysadmin do ANYTHING to prove or find what the real issue was?

Sounds like the point is "It says Halo3 causing problems" so it must be newsworthy. If there was an article behind this explaining why this was an issue and had details such as Network graphs showing overloaded routers on the LAN or switches being overloaded or dropping UDP packets or something.. then we'd have something here.

Instead all this says is NOTHING of value.

Submission + - Ubuntu Feisty Fawn gets closer

Submitted by daria42 on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @08:46PM

daria42 writes: Ubuntu developers are finalising preparations for the release of the next version — dubbed Feisty Fawn — of the popular Linux distribution in mid-April. Overnight, Ubuntu developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Ubuntu's main software repository had been frozen — with no changes allowed to the code — as developers got ready to issue a fifth major test version ("Herd 5") of the next version of Ubuntu.

Ramanujian's Deathbed Problem Cracked 205

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @12:03AM from the mock-theta-soup dept.

Jake's Mom sends word of the serendipitous solution to a decades-old mathematical mystery. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin have unraveled a major number theory puzzle left at the death of one of the twentieth century's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan. From the press release: "Mathematicians have finally laid to rest the legendary mystery surrounding an elusive group of numerical expressions known as the 'mock theta functions.' Number theorists have struggled to understand the functions ever since... Ramanujan first alluded to them in a letter written [to G. H. Hardy] on his deathbed, in 1920. Now, using mathematical techniques that emerged well after Ramanujan's death, two number theorists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have pieced together an explanatory framework that for the first time illustrates what mock theta functions are, and exactly how to derive them."