jakedagreat - Slashdot User

Comment Re:This is one of occasions wher... (Score 1) 845

by jakedagreat on Friday January 01, 2010 @09:19PM (#30618108) Attached to: Ireland's Blasphemy Law Goes Into Effect

I am an agnostic myself but I fail to see how you could teach the history of Europe while ignoring religion.

What? It's fine to teach the *history* of religion and how it has most definitely affected mankind, but you were advocating the teaching of religion in school. That is completely different. I don't want my kids indoctrinated with fairy tales, thank you very much. Standard schooling already covers the basics of religion and the myriad effects of it in life.

Wikileaks Targets the Local News Frontier 57

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @07:45PM from the think-locally-disrupt-globally dept.

eldavojohn writes "Wikileaks has been pretty successful on a global scale — from ACTA documents to East Anglian e-mails, it is the definitive place to find suppressed documents. But some are saying that now Wikileaks should begin focusing on a local level. From the article: 'The organization has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation's News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news. WikiLeaks proposes using the grant to encourage local newspapers to include a link to WikiLeaks' secure, anonymous servers so that readers can submit documents on local issues or scandals. The newspapers would have first crack at the material, and after a period of time — perhaps two weeks, [German Wikileaks spokesman Daniel] Schmitt said — the documents would be made public on the main WikiLeaks page.' Anyone reading this who works for a community news source and would like to host sensitive documents with no risk: here is your solution."

Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled 499

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday May 31, 2009 @09:28AM from the i-blame-the-schools dept.

An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting: "Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."

Woman Admits Sending $400K To Nigerian Scammer 857

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 13, 2008 @03:44PM from the headdesk dept.

svnt writes "Janella Spears wiped out her husband's retirement account, remortgaged their paid-for house, and took out a lien against the family car in an attempt to cash in on the deal. A undercover officer involved with the investigation called it the worst example of the scam he's ever seen. Thoughtfully, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim."

McCain Picks Gov. Palin As Running Mate 1813

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday August 29, 2008 @03:49PM from the the-one-upping-continues dept.

Many readers have written to tell us about McCain's choice of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his VP choice. "Palin, 44, a self-described 'hockey mom,' is a conservative first-term governor of Alaska with strong anti-abortion views, a record of reform and fiscal conservatism and an outsider's perspective on Washington. [...] If elected, Palin would be the first woman US vice president, adding another historic element to a presidential race that has been filled with firsts. Obama, 47, is the first black nominee of a major US political party. The choice of a vice president rarely has a major impact on the presidential race. Palin will meet Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a debate in October."

Bird's-Eye View May Include Magnetic Fields 86

Posted by Zonk on Friday September 28, 2007 @11:03PM from the need-that-addon-for-tom-tom dept.

BoredStiff writes "Heard on NPR and reported in ScienceDaily: a study finding that migratory birds may be able to 'see' magnetic fields. The report comes from a current study by a research group from Oldenburg, Germany. They found that migratory birds use their visual system to perceive the reference compass direction of the geomagnetic field: 'Sensory systems process their particular stimuli along specific brain circuits. Thus, the identification of what sensory system is active during magnetic compass orientation, provides a way to recognize the sensory quality utilized during that specific behavior.'"

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