Comment Re: No (Score 1) 337
You have lots of misconceptions.
Comment No (Score 1) 337
Swift, if anything, is the new VB.
Comment Re:Funny, that spin... (Score 1) 421
Why prefer demigods with no domain knowledge? You realize that your science is religion?
Comment Re:My first thought (Score 1) 27
Why not just dissolve the original blockage? I bet there is a two dollar solution to this.
Ask Slashdot: Living Without Social Media In 2015? 394
An anonymous reader writes On Slashdot, we frequently write derogatory comments regarding social networking sites. We bash Facebook and the privacy implications associated with having a great deal of your life put out there for corporations to monetize. Others advocate for deleting your Facebook profile. Six months ago, I did exactly that. However, as time went on, I have fully realized social media's tacit importance to function in today's world, especially if you are busy advancing your career and making the proper connections to do so. Employers expect a LinkedIn profile that they can check and people you are meeting expect a Facebook account. I have heard that not having an account on the almighty Facebook could label you as a suspicious person. I have had employers express hesitation in hiring me (they used the term "uncomfortable") and graduate school interviewers have asked prying questions regarding some things that would normally be on a person's social media page. Others have literally recoiled in horror at the idea of someone not being on Facebook. I have found it quite difficult to even maintain a proper social life without a social media account to keep up to date with any sort of social activities (even though most of them are admittedly quite mundane). Is living without social media possible in 2015? Does social media have so much momentum that the only course of action is simply to sign up for such services to maintain normality despite the vast privacy issues associated with such sites? Have we forgotten how to function without Facebook?
SpaceX's New Combustion Technologies 132
An anonymous reader shares this story that takes a look at some of the advances SpaceX is working on. "Getting a small group of human beings to Mars and back is no easy task, we learned at the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose hosted graphics chip and accelerator maker Nvidia. One of the problems with such a mission is that you need a very large and efficient rocket engine to get the amount of material into orbit for the mission, explained Adam Lichtl, who is director of research at SpaceX and who with a team of a few dozen programmers is try to crack the particularly difficult task of better simulating the combustion inside of a rocket engine. You need a large engine to shorten the trip to Mars, too....Not only do you need a lot of stuff to get to Mars and sustain a colony there, but you also need a way to generate fuel on Mars to come back to Earth. All of these factors affect the design of the rocket engine....As if these were not problems enough, there is another really big issue. The computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, software that is used to simulate the movement of fluids and gases and their ignition inside of all kinds of engines is particularly bad at assisting in rocket engine design. 'Methane is a fairly simple hydrocarbon that is perfectly good as a fuel,' Lichtl said. 'The challenge here is to design an engine that works efficiently with such a compound. But rocket engine CFD is hard. Really hard.'"
Broadband ISP Betrayal Forces Homeowner To Sell New House 222
New submitter knightsirius writes: A Washington homeowner is having to sell his new house after being refused internet service from Comcast and CenturyLink despite receiving confirmation from both that the location was able to receive broadband service. The whole process took months and involved false assurances and bureaucratic convolutions. The national broadband map database frequently cited by Comcast as proof of sufficient competition lists 10 options at his location, including a gigabit municipal fiber network, but he cannot subscribe to it due to Washington state direct sale restrictions.
Politics Is Poisoning NASA's Ability To Do Science 416
An anonymous reader writes: Phil Plait just published an article about how politics is interfering with NASA's ability to perform vital scientific experiments. As expected when we heard that Ted Cruz would be made head of the committee in charge of NASA's funding, the Texas senator is pushing hard for NASA to stop studying Earth itself. Plait writes, "Over the years, NASA has had to beg and scrape to get the relatively small amount of money it gets—less than half a percent of the national budget—and still manages to do great things with it. Cruz is worried NASA's focus needs to be more on space exploration. Fine. Then give them enough money to do everything in their charter: Explore space, send humans there, and study our planet. Whether you think climate change is real or not—and it is— telling NASA they should turn a blind eye to the environment of our own planet is insanity." He concludes, "[T]he politics of funding a government agency is tying NASA in knots and critically endangering its ability to explore."
Google Wants To Rank Websites Based On Facts Not Links 375
wabrandsma writes about Google's new system for ranking the truthfulness of a webpage. "Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them. Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. 'A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,' says the team. The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score. The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings."
How One Climate-Change Skeptic Has Profited From Corporate Interests 448
Lasrick writes Elected officials who want to block the EPA and legislation on climate change frequently refer to a handful of scientists who dispute anthropogenic climate change. One of scientists they quote most often is Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun's energy can largely explain recent global warming. Newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon has made a fortune from corporate interests. 'He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.' The Koch Brothers are cited as a source of Dr. Soon's funding.
Comment Uber has something the others don't (Score 2) 252
Uber has something the others don't... customers. It could be argued that the government created the market for them.
Comment Retaliation (Score 0) 98
Apple, took a look at it's bottom line, and had to call the government on their BS. This is the retaliation.
Install some others source with your own cert, and it can cause issues.
Apple's issue, if there is one, would be shipping a device with working encryption.
Install some others source with your own cert, and it can cause issues.
Apple's issue, if there is one, would be shipping a device with working encryption.
Comment Re:Technicalities (Score 1) 198
I would advise you to go back to your course components on non-parametric and Baysean statistics.
Because a study isn't ideal (and I am not saying that small studies like this are ideal) does not mean that they are devoid of useful information. If you don't understand statistics well enough to use that information, then that's fine. But your incomprehension does not give you the right to go around accusing other people of fraud in a public place.
That sounds like I would say if I was running a fraudulent study.
Comment Re:Technicalities (Score 1) 198
Excuse the brevity, but if there's not enough resources to do a proper study, then why publish results? The results are bogus because of the sample size. At the end of the day, nine is not a sample; it's still a fraud. Publishing it as if it means anything is even more of a fraud. Coming on here to defend it is just silly.
Comment Re:Technicalities (Score 1) 198
I really hope you are paid to write that dribble.
Between all the name calling, I gather your point as expense of a medial trail being too expensive.
Because, come on... a trial with only nine subjects is not a trial... it's simply a fraud. Even, in the US you need a jury twelve to get a criminal conviction.
Like I care about the chimps... I care about humans. How many of those people get dosed for each monkey in your bogus-trial?
Between all the name calling, I gather your point as expense of a medial trail being too expensive.
Because, come on... a trial with only nine subjects is not a trial... it's simply a fraud. Even, in the US you need a jury twelve to get a criminal conviction.
Like I care about the chimps... I care about humans. How many of those people get dosed for each monkey in your bogus-trial?
Slashdot Top Deals
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
