Comment Re:Wrapper, not replacement (Score 1) 541
Maybe *you* didn't mind upstart, but I am fully in agreement with whoever called it a "lightly documented pachinko machine".
Comment Re:You're guessing (Score 1) 214
Okian Warrior sez:
In the mean time, feel free to send your kid to public school. Mine is home-schooled and I want to give him as much of an edge as possible. No, really: send your kid to public school, do us all a favor. This problem will sort itself out in a generation or two.
That is a bit harsh. It sounds like you would like to grind up other people's kids to feed yours. While it might be great if every family was like yours and could provide a good home school environment, that is not currently the case. Indeed, if it were the case, you would lose your edge so I guess it is to your advantage that public education be as crappy as possible.
Comment Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score 5, Insightful) 324
So if China was two countries, everything would be fine, since each country would only put out 2/3 of the C02 of the US, while maintaining their 1/3 output per capita. The way to solve climate change is obviously to divide up the big countries into smaller countries :)
Comment Re:The destruction of trust (Score 1) 397
Do anyone have any information supporting this assertion of MSF's involvement in intelligence and/or special forces operations?
Submission + - Urban explorers: you can't talk to each other for a decade (guardian.co.uk) 1
Trapezium Artist writes: Four friends apprehended exploring the disused Aldwych station in London's Underground are faced with an "anti-social behaviour order" (ASBO) which would forbid them from talking to each other for a full 10 years. The so-called "Aldwych four", experienced urban explorers, were discovered in the tunnels under the UK's capital city a few days before last year's Royal Wedding and the greatly increased security measures in place led to their being interviewed by senior members of the British Transport Police. Nevertheless, once their benign intentions had been established, they were let off with a caution. However, following an accident caused by another, unrelated group of urban explorers in the tunnels a few months later, Transport for London applied to have ASBOs issued to the Aldwych four. These would forbid them from any further expeditions, from blogging or otherwise publicly discussing any exploits, and even from talking with each other for the 10 year duration of the order. One could argue about the ethics of urban exploration, but this nevertheless seems like an astonishingly heavy-handed over-reaction by TfL.
Submission + - Multicellular life made in months (nature.com)
ananyo writes: The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth’s history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.
Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study.
The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells.
Many single-celled organisms, including yeast, often form clumps of genetically distinct cells. But Ratcliff’s snowflakes were made up of genetically identical cells that had budded off and stuck together. Many other multicellular organisms may well have evolved through a similar 'divide-and-stick' process.
Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study.
The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells.
Many single-celled organisms, including yeast, often form clumps of genetically distinct cells. But Ratcliff’s snowflakes were made up of genetically identical cells that had budded off and stuck together. Many other multicellular organisms may well have evolved through a similar 'divide-and-stick' process.
Submission + - Notes on Reducing Firefox's Memory Consumption (mozilla.com)
Skuto writes: At yesterdays linux.conf.au Browser miniconference in Ballarat, Australia, Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote gave a detailed presentation about the history of Firefox's memory consumption. The 37 slides-with-notes explain in gritty detail what caused Firefox 4's memory usage to be higher than expected, how many leaks and accidental memory use bugs were tracked down with Valgrind plugins, as well as the pitfalls of common memory allocation strategies. Current work is now focused on reducing the memory usage of popular add-ons such as AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and Firebug.
Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage.
Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage.
Comment On the front page of the CBC (Score 5, Insightful) 262
Headline: French nuclear waste site blast kills at least 1
Sidebar: At least 61 killed in Kenya pipeline explosion
Sidebar: At least 61 killed in Kenya pipeline explosion
Submission + - In pictures: Nasa's next Mars rover (wired.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: In August 2012, the Nasa rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. The size of a small car, it's four times as heavy as predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and comes with a large robot arm, a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven metres, a percussive drill and a weather station. Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. Wired has some high-resolution photographs from lab that is putting the next rover together.
Submission + - America - Like it or Unfriend It
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "As we celebrate America's birthday today, head over the to the NY Times and take a look at a very clever "op-art" creation, "Like it or Unfriend It" by Teddy Wayne, Mike Sacks, and Thomas Ng that represents what "America's Wall" would look like through our history. Beginning with "Christopher Columbus wrote on America's wall: 'This IS India, right?", through "America added Great Britian to Kingdoms I am Fighting With", through "The South has changed its privacy settings to accept carpetbaggers," and finishing with " America stopped playing the game Wild-Goose Chase While Nation-Building," and "America has joined the China Network" the wall includes dozens of invitations, likes, posts and changes to privacy settings that shows a summary of American history as seen from a Facebook perspective. Our favorite from the 1980's: "Ronald Reagan created a page: "Trickle-Down Economics" followed by "Half a million upper-income people like this.""
Comment Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score 2, Informative) 545
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
There is a lot of evidence for statistics like this, you can start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#United_States_domestic_policy.
Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007. Of these, 15,647 were incarcerated for violent offenses, including 2,915 for homicide, 8,966 for robbery, and 3,939 for other violent crimes. In addition, 10,345 inmates were serving time for property crimes, including 504 for burglary, 7,834 for fraud, and 2,006 for other property offenses. A total of 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. Also, 56,237 were incarcerated for public-order offenses, including 19,528 for immigration offenses and 24,435 for weapons offenses.
http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf
According to a federal survey of jail inmates, of the total 440,670 jail inmates in the US in 2002, 112,447 (25.5%) were drug offenders: 48,823 (11.1%) for possession and 56,574 (12.8%) for trafficking.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/sdatji02.pdf
Comment Re:Silly (Score 1) 622
Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.
According to my research, the plastic top and ring are separated during processing nowadays, which is possible because the two kinds of plastic are of very different density; apparently one type floats in water and the other sinks.
Girl Seeks Help On Facebook During Assault 417
A 12-year-old girl who was being assaulted by her mother's ex-boyfriend used some quick thinking by sending a message on her iPod to a friend's Facebook account for help. The friend was able to contact the girl's mother who then contacted the police. 42-year-old Raymond Ernest Cesmat was arrested and charged with two counts of criminal sexual conduct in the first degree. He is being held at the Dakota County Jail on $175,000 bail.
Comment Re:example for those who didn't get the point (Score 1) 1036
A woman naturally has about a dozen kids. Breast cancer is quite rare in countries where women birth early and often.
That is probably because she is dead before she has a chance to develop it.
Submission + - Aussie Internet Censorship Minister Censors Self (news.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes: Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the minister attempting to ram the great firewall of Oz down everyone's throat has been removing all traces of the unpopular legislation from his main website with a javascript filter.
From the article: "It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list.In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud", there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed"
Bare in mind this is the same minister that tried to get the ISP of tech forum Whirlpool to pull the site after users there posted a response email from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority). Time to move to Canda I guess....
From the article: "It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list.In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud", there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed"
Bare in mind this is the same minister that tried to get the ISP of tech forum Whirlpool to pull the site after users there posted a response email from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority). Time to move to Canda I guess....
