Comment Happens to me all the time (Score 2) 132
Did they check the seat pocket and overhead bin, that's where my jacket was that one time.
Comment Re:Literally six years old, still not real/practic (Score 1) 157
Indeed. Headline is "unveils", and yet. Oh well, moderators gonna moderate.
Comment Literally six years old, still not real/practical (Score 5, Insightful) 157
Old news. Just new hype.
http://www.chinahush.com/2010/...
Not a real thing, not practical in almost any area that needs high capacity transit, and just a distraction from real things we already know how to build but refuse to pay for.
White House Panel Considers New Paths To Space 151
Neil H. writes "The White House's Human Space Flight Plans blue-ribbon panel (the 'Augustine panel') has posted the material from their first public meeting on the future of NASA's spaceflight program, which was held on Wednesday. NASA officials presented their Ares I rocket plans and their belief that they can work around its design flaws, with projected development costs ballooning to $35 billion. The panel also heard several alternative proposals, such as adapting already-existing EELV and SpaceX rockets to carry crew to orbit; these proposals would have better safety margins than the Ares I, be ready sooner, and cost NASA less than $2 billion to complete, but are politically unattractive."
Irish Reject E-Voting, Go Back To Paper 154
Death Metal tips news that the Irish government has announced their decision to abandon e-voting and return to a paper-based system. "Ireland has already put about $67 million into building out its e-voting infrastructure, but the country has apparently decided that it would be even more expensive to keep going with the system than it would be to just scrap it altogether." John Gormley, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, said, "It is clear from consideration of the Report of the Commission on Electronic Voting that significant additional costs would arise to advance electronic voting in Ireland. ... the assurance of public confidence in the democratic system is of paramount importance and it is vital to bring clarity to the present situation." He added that he still thinks there is a need for electoral reform.
Comment Re:Thank goodness (Score 1) 1190
Yes, yes, one study was debunked. The infamous hockey stick graph was based on incorrect data. However, over ten other non-debunked studies show very similar data, so it's time to grow up and stop complaining about one single tree in a forest.
See these sites for helpful links to other studies, and accurate graphs showing that there is still an obvious issue we need to be concerned about:
Canadian Court Orders Site To ID Anonymous Posters 358
An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian court has ordered
the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The
required information includes email and IP addresses. The court ruled that anonymous posters have no reasonable expectation of privacy, a major blow to online free speech in Canada."
Why Doctors Hate Science 1064
theodp writes "A 2004 study found some 10 million women lacking a cervix were still getting Pap tests. Only problem is, a Pap test screens for cervical cancer — no cervix, no cancer. With this tale, Newsweek's Sharon Begley makes her case for comparative-effectiveness research (CER), which is receiving $1 billion under the stimulus bill for studies to determine which treatments, including drugs, are more medically sound and cost-effective than others for a given ailment. Physicians, Begley says, must stop treatments that are rooted more in local medical culture than in medical science, embrace practices that have been shown scientifically to be superior to others, and ignore critics who paint CER as government control of doctors' decision-making."
CBS Hosts Ad-Funded TV Series, Incl. Original Star Trek 276
eldavojohn writes "On Friday, CBS launched a TV Classics section to their ad based online service. Which means that Trekkies can now watch all three seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series online at the expense of a few commercials. Alongside this CBS is offering all of MacGyver, Twin Peaks and even three seasons of the original Twilight Zone. A side note, they seem to work perfectly fine in Linux. "
Microsoft To Kill Windows 7 Beta Februrary 10th 216
mamaphoenix writes "Paul McDougall of InformationWeek reports Computer enthusiasts who want to get their hands on the trial version of Microsoft's next operating system have just two more weeks to do so.
The company says it will end availability of Windows 7 Beta on Feb. 10.
There are a couple of loopholes, however. Users who started to download the OS before that date will have until Feb. 12 to complete the process. Also, Microsoft will continue to distribute product keys beyond Feb. 12 to users who have previously downloaded Windows 7 Beta but have yet to obtain a key.
'We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers and feedback coming in to meet our engineering needs, so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability for Windows 7 Beta,' said Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft's in-house Windows blogger, in a post Friday.
Microsoft will post warnings on its Web site that the download program for Windows 7 is about to end starting Tuesday. A final version of Windows 7, Microsoft's follow-up to Windows Vista, is expected to be available in late 2009 or early 2010."
Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note 659
theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."
Perimeter Institute Launches Modern Physics Resource 30
An anonymous reader writes "You can find six new online sources of info about hot topics in modern physics at the 'What We Research' outreach page of Perimeter Institute. The info includes text, graphics and online presentations dealing with Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information and Particle Physics. The resource section at the bottom of each page recommends a wealth of interesting online lectures by some famous scientists. PI is an independent, nonprofit scientific research and outreach organization."
Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine 354
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness 199
Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours.
You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com.
Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."
How Duct Tape Saved Apollo 17's Moon Buggy 203
Ant points out a story
spotted on Boing Boing in which NASA "shares a story that turns back the clock 36 years to reveal the "key roll of duct tape in the Apollo program." The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me, and the duct-taped fender here is no exception.
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Heuristics are bug ridden by definition. If they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms.
