Comment Israel-related animal conspiracy theories (Score 5, Informative) 109
There's an entire Wikipedia article about this phenomenon.
Comment BSG (Score 0) 297
Study Says Fracking is Safe In Theory But Often Not In Practice
Medical expert Doc. Cottle agrees.
Comment Re:Something is wrong there. (Score 1) 333
One bulb per household.
I don't think many households have 300 light fixtures in which they could replace bulbs.
Comment Still corrupts places.sqlite (Score 1) 189
RC1 still managed to corrupt places.sqlite (the History/Bookmarks database) when I tried to upgrade from Firefox 3.6, just like one of the last 4.0 betas. I had to install a portable edition of FF 3.6, open a backup of my profile with it, and set up Sync in both installations before I could use my existing browser history in the new installation.
Oh, and it now takes about 2 seconds to switch between tabs on a 3-year-old PC.
Solving an Earth-Sized Jigsaw Puzzle 39
aarondubrow writes "Three years ago, researchers from Caltech and The University of Texas at Austin came together to create a computational tool that could model the Earth and answer the most pressing questions in geophysics: What controls the speed of plates? How do microplates interact? How much energy do the plates generate and how does it dissipate? Using a new geodynamics software package they developed, the researchers have modeled plate motion with greater accuracy than ever before. The project is also a finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize — high performance computing's Oscar — at this year's SC10 conference."
NY Governor Wants To Expand DNA Database 169
crimeandpunishment writes "If Governor David Paterson has his way, New York would take DNA samples from even the lowest level of criminal, doubling the state's DNA database. He says it would help to both solve crimes and clear people who were wrongly convicted. New York would become the first state in the country to do this. Currently DNA isn't collected in most misdemeanors. The plan is getting lots of support among law enforcement, but the New York Civil Liberties Union says there are questions about privacy."
Comment Why would you ever use a debit card? (Score 1) 511
This is something I've never understood. Why on earth would you ever use a debit card when a credit card can be used instead? As long as you keep your account balance at zero, you have nothing to lose by using a credit card. And you gain a few legal protections against fraud; your own money generally isn't exposed.
Do debit cards have any advantages at all?
US District Judge Rules Gene Patents Invalid 263
shriphani writes "A US judge has ruled that Myriad Genetics' breast cancer gene patent is invalid. Hopefully this will go a long way in ensuring that patents on genes do not stand in the way of research. From the article: 'Patents on genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer are invalid, ruled a New York federal court today. The precedent-setting ruling marks the first time a court has found patents on genes unlawful and calls into question the validity of patents now held on approximately 2,000 human genes.'"
Comment Re:Why would it be a shame? (Score 1) 368
To be honest, the New York Times' tech and science reporting (and that of most major news organizations) is largely incompetent. They're able to cover the business side well, but the technological aspects are usually described vaguely and inaccurately. For the Slashdot crowd, this means that the NY Times is not a highly relevant source for "news for nerds." (It is, of course, a great news source for many other subjects.)
Comment Re:Google is the Foundation (Score 2, Informative) 330
Umm, this should be moderated "funny," not "informative." You guys missed the joke.
Comment Progressive refinement, not progressive JPEGs (Score 1) 91
The video narration is inaccurate. What you see there is not a progressive JPEG loading (they might be using progressive compression for the JPEG, but it doesn't matter).
What you're seeing is progressive refinement, which is a raytracing rendering technique that starts to show an image immediately and continuously adds detail (rather than rendering the image in full detail immediately). The light and dark splotches you initially see are a typical artifact of low-detail radiosity rendering.
More information here.
What you're seeing is progressive refinement, which is a raytracing rendering technique that starts to show an image immediately and continuously adds detail (rather than rendering the image in full detail immediately). The light and dark splotches you initially see are a typical artifact of low-detail radiosity rendering.
More information here.
Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language 831
Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in:
"For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures. There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept. ... One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements. ... Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design. The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently. ... The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."
Comment Re:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score 1) 290
It wasn't the listing of the shared host that was the problem. It was the fact that the university's filters resolve URLs in message texts to IP addresses, and block messages based on that criterion alone, rather than merely influencing a spam score. If you get a bounced message like this, you can't even report it to an administrator on the university mail network without removing all the URLs.
Block lists are useful, but, as several people in this article's discussion pointed out, they're not accurate or granular enough to be used for deterministic blocking. And this particular usage, resolving link URLs to block messages, is illogical for many more reasons.
Comment Re:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score 1) 290
filter *URL's pointing to a PBL'd IP that are embedded in a message*!!!
My university does that, too. I run a student organization site that has a university subdomain, but is hosted on a shared host. The host inexplicably got listed in the CBL several times, and that screwed up email for the organization staff, and mailing lists for hundreds of students for days at a time.
I didn't realize anyone else used this brilliant filtering scheme.
Hulu May Begin Charging For Video Content 313
An anonymous reader writes "According to Jonathan Miller, News Corp's CDO, Hulu may soon begin charging subscription fees for some of their online content. News Corp is the parent company of Fox, which owns a huge portion of Hulu. When Miller of Newscorp was asked if Hulu would begin charging for online content during an Interview with Daily Finance, he said that 'the answer could be yes.' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
