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Comment Re:Non-Notable (Score 1) 138

by pyrosim (#31627716) Attached to: Journalism Students Assigned To Write On Wikipedia
Did you even read the page you linked? Wikipedia's notability policy is simply "A thing is notable if and only if you can provide citations that make us think you're not just making shit up." The requirements of the journalism assignment were explicitly that the articles should be well researched, so if a student produces an article that doesn't satisfy that policy, they should fail the class.

Comment Life is hard (Score 1) 144

by pyrosim (#30272112) Attached to: Augmented Reality and Privacy
Sure, somebody might keep track of you on the internet for six months and steal your TV. Somebody could also drive by your house every so often and do the same thing. Is it worth it to censor your entire life to cower from burglers? Life is hard, take some risks and have some fun. Social networking is fun. You can buy a new TV, you can't buy back having wasted your life hiding.
NASA

Europa Selected As Target of Next Flagship Mission 168

Posted by samzenpus from the my-favorite-moon dept.
volcanopele writes "NASA and the European Space Agency announced today that they have selected the Europa/Jupiter System Mission as the next large mission to the outer solar system. For the last year, the Europa mission has been in competition with a proposal to send a mission to Saturn's moon Titan, as reported on Slashdot earlier. The Europa Mission includes two orbiters: one developed by NASA to orbit the icy moon Europa and another developed by ESA to orbit the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede. Both orbiters would spend up to 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter before settling into orbit around their respective targets, studying Jupiter's satellites, rings, and of course the planet itself. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020 and arrive at Jupiter in 2025 and 2026."
Businesses

Circuit City Closes Its Doors For Good 587

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the gonna-have-a-heart-attack-and-die-from-not-surprise dept.
bsharma is amongst the hordes of people wanting us to share the news that long beleaguered retailer Circuit City has finally decided to close for good, asking for court approval to close the remaining 567 US stores. "Whalin said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City. 'This company made massive mistakes,' he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement. What's more, given the credit market freeze, Whalin added that no manufacturer wants to sell to any retailer who doesn't have money to pay for the merchandise. At the same time, Whalin said there's still a very slim chance that one or more firms that have expressed an interest in buying Circuit City could still buy it out of bankruptcy over the next few days."
Government

Content Filtering Pulled From Free Broadband Proposal 111

Posted by samzenpus from the blocked-no-more dept.
huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said. The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."
Space

Space Litter To Hit Earth Tomorrow 443

Posted by kdawson from the leave-only-memories-take-only-footprints dept.
A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. "NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Medicine

Internet Use Can Be Good For the Brain 114

Posted by samzenpus from the wasting-time-not-your-brain dept.
ddelmonte writes "This Washington Post article examines a test conducted at UCLA. The test had two groups, young people who used the Internet, and older people who had never been online. Both groups were asked to do Internet searches and book reading tasks while their brain activity was monitored. 'We found that in reading the book task, the visual cortex — the part of the brain that controls reading and language — was activated,' Small said. 'In doing the Internet search task, there was much greater activity, but only in the Internet-savvy group.' He said it appears that people who are familiar with the Internet can engage in a much deeper level of brain activity. 'There is something about Internet searching where we can gauge it to a level that we find challenging,' Small said. In the aging brain, atrophy and reduced cell activity can take a toll on cognitive function. Activities that keep the brain engaged can preserve brain health and thinking ability. Small thinks learning to do Internet searches may be one of those activities."
It's funny. Laugh.

XKCD Improving the Internet ... Yet Again 204

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-oh-monroe dept.
netbuzz writes "Comic creator Randall Monroe suggested in a recent xkcd strip that YouTube comments would be better — or, more precisely, less idiotic — if only those posting them were forced to hear their words read aloud first. Well, YouTube has gone and made this "audio preview" a reality, albeit an optional one. And, it's not the first time that xkcd has contributed to the betterment of the Internet, as those who are familiar with last year's "Internet census" and its use of a Hilbert curve may remember."
Patents

Canon Files For DSLR Iris Registration Patent 273

Posted by kdawson from the biological-metadata dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer's copyright protection to the next level. You set up the camera to capture an image of your eye through the viewfinder. Once captured, this biological reference is embedded as metadata into every photo you take. Canon claims this will help with copyright infringement of photos online."
Education

A Child's View of the OLPC 268

Posted by kdawson from the all-this-and-games-too dept.
Finallyjoined!!! sends us a BBC account of a dad who traveled to Nigeria and brought back an XO laptop for his 9-year-old, Rufus. Here is Rufus's review, a child's view of OLPC. "Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored. Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination... With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time."
Biotech

Open Source, Genetically Engineered Machines From a Kit? 157

Posted by Zonk from the quite-a-kit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Students in an MIT competition are helping to build a dev-kit for cells. Together with synthetic biologists, they're building a Registry of Standard Biological Parts called BioBricks. They aim to do for cells what open source software has done for computers. 'The competition is a showcase for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Knight and his colleagues Randy Rettberg and Drew Endy, who created the contest in 2004, want to make biological systems easy to build by applying the tools of computer science and engineering: using standard parts and modular design to simplify complex systems. The goal is to create "genetic Legos" that could produce any chemical, from ethanol to pharmaceuticals.'"

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[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. -- Joseph Campbell

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