Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Internet

6 Homeless People Saved By the Internet 94

Posted by samzenpus from the power-of-farmville dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With Ted Williams's story (the homeless man with the golden voice, saved by the internet) blowing up online, and in the traditional media, we figured it was time to tell the stories of 5 other homeless people who've found success, be it financial or personal, through the wonderful use of this series of tubes we call The Internet."

Comment Re:Arthur C Clarke and Doctor Who (Score 2, Insightful) 1419

by kristinester (#24113341) Attached to: Sci-Fi Books For Pre-Teens?
Well, I'm not entirely certain as to what "pre-teen" is. 9-12? But when I was around that age I wasn't really reading books for my age group. Well, except for Sweet Valley High, but it was a guilty pleasure.

If they display an interest in something, let them read it. Regardless of whether it's too advanced for them. Yes, certain themes may be a bit mature (i.e. A Clockwork Orange, American Psycho), but so long as there is no graphic violence, torture, or rape there shouldn't be an issue. Books with political messages should be fine as well, if they catch the references, it can spark an interesting conversation. It's always good when kids think and ask questions.

As far as sci-fi goes specifically, I've always been more of a fantasy chick myself. Loved Dragonlance, it's total fluff but still fun. They even have children's versions of the first trilogy now, although I'm not sure how much easier to read they can make it. It's not exactly difficult reading material to begin with.

Oh! William Gibson. I read Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, and Neuromancer when I was about 12 and loved it, then explored his other novels. Good stuff. Orson Scott Card is great as well.

http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html Top 100 Sci-Fi books.

Hell, if they're ambitious throw a copy of Cryptonomicon at them and see what happens. If they don't like it, read it yourself, great book. And it's ridiculously long, perfect for road trips or long plane rides.

Doctor Who is great sci-fi. I haven't picked up any of the books yet, but now that I have a two years or so until the next series I may start reading the novels until I can get my fix. ;)

All else fails, toss them in the sci-fi section of the library and tell them to look around and read. I suppose it all depends on how much they enjoy reading. Some kids just aren't into it. I was very happy on summer vacations when my parents dumped me at the library.
Software

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

Feed Science Daily: Riding In Cars With Smokers: Secondhand Smoke Concentrations Problematic (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
It's Labor Day weekend and you have packed the family into the car for the two-hour drive to grandma's house. Because of the heat, you crank the AC and keep the windows closed. The problem is you are a smoker and after just two cigarettes you will have exposed your spouse and kids to particulates at a level well above government safety standards. That's the bottom-line finding of measurements recently published by engineering researchers at Stanford University.

Feed Techdirt: Court Rules That Anti-Spyware Companies Can Call Spyware Spyware (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
All too often, we've seen cases where security software firms were sued for calling some piece of software "spyware" or "adware." In fact, Microsoft even wanted to make sure that new anti-spyware legislation would make it clear that there's nothing wrong with calling spyware "spyware." However, in the latest ruling on one of these cases (in which Zango sued Kaspersky), the ruling makes it clear we already have such a law on the books. The judge dismissed the lawsuit, noting that security firms have every right to label software as they see fit, citing part of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

We often point to section 230, because it protects service providers from liability for the actions of the service providers' users. However, this is referring to a different part of section 230, which says that no service provider is liable for a good faith attempt to restrict access to something it deems objectionable. The court felt that the security company was a service provider, and that since it believed Zango was objectionable, then it has every right to try to restrict it. The court makes a second very important point. Zango complains that its software is not objectionable, and therefore the security providers cannot block it as objectionable. However, the court points out that the statute clearly says that it's for what the service provider finds objectionable. In other words, the content in question need not be "objectionable" at all -- it only matters what the service provider feels about it. This is a pretty strong endorsement for the idea that security companies absolutely can call software whatever they feel is appropriate.

Feed Linux.com: Use Linux over Windows with Xming (linux.com)

From feed by lcfeed
One of the nice things about the X Window System is its ability to display X apps running remotely on a local machine. One of the not-so-nice things about Microsoft Windows is the complete lack of native support for displaying X applications. If you find yourself working on Windows but wanting to use Linux apps at the same time, Xming can do the job. Xming is a port of X Window System to Microsoft Windows that's free and easy to use.
Education

Submission + - Internet no longer dangerous, school boards decide (blorge.com) 1

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Good news. The National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members, just released a report declaring fears of the internet are overblown. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, "the researchers found exactly one student who reported they'd actually met a stranger from the internet without their parents' permission. (They described this as "0.08 percent of all students.") The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was. Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum!"
Biotech

Submission + - Human diversity on the decline

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."
Space

Submission + - Largest-known planet befuddles scientists (msn.com)

Submitted by
langelgjm
langelgjm writes: "As mentioned today on the BBC World Report:

The largest planet ever discovered is also one of the strangest and theoretically should not even exist, scientists say. Dubbed TrES-4, the planet is about 1.7 times the size of Jupiter and belongs to a small subclass of "puffy" planets that have extremely low densities. The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal. "TrES-4 is way bigger than it's supposed to be," Mandushev told Space.com. "For its mass, it should be much smaller. It basically should be about the size of Jupiter and instead it's almost twice as big." "TrES-4 appears to be something of a theoretical problem," said study team member Edward Dunham, also of the Lowell Observatory. "Problems are good, though, since we learn new things by solving them."

Feed Techdirt: How Dare You Promote Our Promotional Materials! (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
cannen writes "This is a yahoo! news story about a trailer to a new movie called "Cloverfield". This is one of those secretive movies. The interesting part isn't so much about the movie, as the fact that they put the trailer before Transformers to generate "buzz". Shortly after, the trailers from the movie were put on YouTube. The last paragraph in the article says: "Several copies of the trailer, seemingly shot in theaters with a camcorder, were posted on YouTube by Thursday morning. But by Thursday afternoon, some of those links had been taken down, replaced by an advisory saying, 'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Paramount Pictures Corp.' Why is it that the studios wanna ruin their buzz?

Come on, cannen, it makes perfect sense -- when you let lawyers run your entertainment company. Perhaps we should just be thankful that Paramount hasn't tried to have the people who filmed the trailer arrested.
Programming

Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist? 942

Posted by Zonk from the this-is-why-i-wasn't-a-good-programmer dept.
Coryoth writes "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"
Software

Submission + - Which is the best data compressor in the world?

Submitted by
crazyeyes
crazyeyes writes: "We all use some kind of data compression software but do you know what is the best data compressor in the world? This amazing article has detailed test results that compare 11 of the most common data compressors with 8 different filetypes.

The author covers 7-zip, ARJ32, bzip2, gzip, SBC Archiver, Squeez, StuffIt, WinAce, WinRAR, WinRK, WinZip and tests using 8 filesets — Audio Files (WAV), Audio Files (MP3), Documents, E-Books, Movies (DivX), Movies (MPEG), Pictures (PSD) and Pictures (JPEG). He tests them at different settings and even includes the aggregated results.

This is easily the best article I've seen on data compression. If you want to know if the data compression software you use is good enough, read this article and compare its performance against the other compressors. You will be surprised with the results. Slashdotters will enjoy arguing over them!"

Slashdot Top Deals

"Flattery is all right -- if you don't inhale." -- Adlai Stevenson

Close