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Comment C- is the new D (Score 1) 617

by robbievienna (#33060832) Attached to: School District Drops 'D' Grades
In British Columbia, Canada, the school board did away with the D grade. Shortly thereafter, they formalized C- (C-minus) as an "official" grade. (The other pluses and minuses were not official). Effectively, they replaced D with C-. I've seen other schools which mandate that the lowest grade a student can earn in a quarter is 50%... that way, a student who doesn't answer a single test question or do any homework for a whole semester can still salvage his grade with new work in the third and fourth term, and pass. Alternately, once a senior has passes his first semester with a 75% or higher, gotten into his colleges of choice for the following year, there is no way he can fail the course for the year (75+75+50+50)/(4)=62.5, a passing grade.

Comment Nokia N900 (Score 1) 289

by robbievienna (#32715196) Attached to: Best Phone For a Wi-Fi-Only Location?
Full pocket-sized computer running linux (Maemo comes pre-installed, upgradeable to MeeGo... and Android 2,2 runs beauifullly on it, too). It does everything a laptop computer does - I think you can even get the Gimp running on it. Dell Small Business was selling it for $369 last week (no plans, no locks,etc.), so you can bring it to other countries, buy a local SIM card and you're good to go. More info at Engadget.

Comment No limits, no borders (Score 1) 245

by robbievienna (#32478472) Attached to: Time For Universal Data Plans?
Unlimited would be great... unfortunately most people forget the most ubiquitous limit: borders. All plans are limited as soon as you cross an international border. There are lots of world travellers who want a low-cost single provider solution. I want something to cover me in New York and Paris and Abu Dhabi.

Comment Sites, certificate authorities, and gov'ts, oh my (Score 1) 309

by robbievienna (#31787040) Attached to: How Truthful Are You When Creating Web Accounts?
I may well trust a site, without necessarily trusting the certificate authority (one of the major North American credit bureaus is a huge CA) or the governments claiming jurisdiction over my data. Keep in mind that governments are now claiming access to data that pass over their wires (i.e. the US accesses data transferred ebtween Mexico and Canada). Sorry, but no sale.

Submission + - MIT says 'A unified theory of AI' found 1

Submitted by aftab14
aftab14 writes: From the news source:

“What’s brilliant about this (approach) is that it allows you to build a cognitive model in a fantastically much more straightforward and transparent way than you could do before,” says Nick Chater, a professor of cognitive and decision sciences at University College London. “You can imagine all the things that a human knows, and trying to list those would just be an endless task, and it might even be an infinite task. But the magic trick is saying, ‘No, no, just tell me a few things,’ and then the brain — or in this case the Church system, hopefully somewhat analogous to the way the mind does it — can churn out, using its probabilistic calculation, all the consequences and inferences. And also, when you give the system new information, it can figure out the consequences of that.”

News url: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/ai-unification.html
Books

Submission + - Book Review: A User's Guide to the Universe

Submitted by
alfredw
alfredw writes: "[NOTE TO EDITORS: Disclosure: I am a graduate student in the same department as one author (Goldberg). I've taken his Cosmology and Graduate Electricity and Magnetism class. He's not my academic advisor, nor is he on my thesis committee and he has no determination of my grades or future performance. I also shared an office with the other author (Blomquist) for about a week in 2008, when I was joining the department and he was leaving. We're casual acquaintances only.

Please publish only my obfuscated email address.

I have chosen to review this book because it was released recently (end of Feb, 2010).]

Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party? Do you have the burning desire to sit down with a professor and ask a laundry list of "physics" questions about time travel and black holes? Do you want to know more about modern physics, but want to do it with pop culture experiments instead of mathematics? If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you're in the target audience for A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertaintym

A User's Guide to the Universe (hereinafter "A User's Guide") is the physicist's answer to Phil Plait's Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End.... What Goldberg and Blomquist have created is a fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates. The book assumes very little scientific background on the part of the reader. Those with some knowledge (this is Slashdot, after all) will find the explanations of well-known concepts (the double slit experiment, for example) lucid, direct, brief and entertaining.

A User's Guide covers topics like relativity, time travel, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and alien life. It does so with a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and footnotes that act as the authors' very own peanut gallery. While this humour lightens up what could otherwise be a few dry areas of discussion, the littering of the text with pop-culture references is bound to make the book feel a bit dated in years to come. For now (March 2010), though, A User's Guide is so fresh you might call it ripe.

Unlike Death from the Skies, this book is well illustrated. The pen-and-ink cartoons are omnipresent, and serve to both illustrate the text, and to take every opportunity for a joke (cheap or otherwise) that presents itself. Overall, I felt that the cartoons were a strong addition to the book, as they can provide a needed laugh in a serious section, or can eliminate the proverbial thousand words when describing an experiment or concept.

The chapter on time travel is a stand-out. It presents several "practical" designs for time machines, which use black holes, cosmic strings or wormholes as components. I am an avid reader of pop-sci books, and I found designs that were new to me. The discussion of the Grandfather Paradox (if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you were never born and could never have committed murder) and ways around it are very helpful and present a solid physical framework for thinking about these issues. When the Grandfather Paradox is reformulated using pool balls, instead of thinking humans, it becomes clear that the issues are physical and not metaphysical. Also, the authors helpfully include a chart ranking sci-fi shows and movies for their time travel savvy.

You'll also find a strong and entertaining treatment of inflationary cosmology, including discussions of the evidence behind the theory and a look at some consequences. This book avoids both a heavy technical treatment and a historical look at the development of the theory (see, for example, Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe for that) and instead dives right in to the juiciest parts. This style is well-suited to the reader who wants the funs bits without all of the baggage.

If you're curious about quantum mechanics, the second chapter contains a one of the best introductions in the field. By asking questions like "can we build a Star Trek transporter?" the authors drive a quick and satisfying tour through the weirdness of the microscopic world. This "evil genius hands-on" approach is this book's most important contribution to pop sci literature, and its most endearing feature. You'll start by looking at Star Trek, but end with the mysteries of the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.

Finally, at the end of the book, the authors helpfully include two sets of references: one to the pop sci literature, and one to the technical literature. Many of the best pop physics books of the past are listed, and the bibliography could serve as useful direction to more depth for the interested.

Overall, A User's Guide accomplishes what it sets out to do. It combines a hands-on, question-driven approach to physics with a tongue-in-cheek, pop-culture-based sense of humour. And then it throws on a layer of great cartoons to make the entire package something that most science books aren't: enjoyable. This book is fine, and you may well learn something in the process."
Censorship

Chinese Root Server Shut Down After DNS Problem 91

Posted by timothy from the need-a-new-source-of-ginseng dept.
itwbennett writes "After a networking error first reported on Wednesday last week caused computers in Chile and the US to come under the control of a system that censors the Internet in China, the 'root DNS server associated with the networking problems has been disconnected from the Internet,' writes Robert McMillan. The server's operator, Netnod, has 'withdrawn route announcements' made by the server, according to company CEO Kurt Lindqvist."
Data Storage

Open Source Deduplication For Linux With Opendedup 186

Posted by timothy from the its-missing-apostrophes dept.
tazzbit writes "The storage vendors have been crowing about data deduplication technology for some time now, but a new open source project, Opendedup, brings it to Linux and its hypervisors — KVM, Xen and VMware. The new deduplication-based file system called SDFS (GPL v2) is scalable to eight petabytes of capacity with 256 storage engines, which can each store up to 32TB of deduplicated data. Each volume can be up to 8 exabytes and the number of files is limited by the underlying file system. Opendedup runs in user space, making it platform independent, easier to scale and cluster, and it can integrate with other user space services like Amazon S3."

Comment Who owns the spectrum? (Score 0) 64

by robbievienna (#31639076) Attached to: Decoding Mobile Carriers' Latest Push For Profits

"[AT&T] told the US government to stay out of wireless — meaning don't regulate prices or impose Net neutrality — while also asking the government for more spectrum. You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services"

Unfortunately, we're falling victim to the mindtrap that the government "owns" the electromagnetic spectrum in a specific jurisdiction, which is about as laughable as thinking it owns the weather. ATT is consisstent in asking the government to relax control over the spectrum, and relax control over the company. It's not asking the government for a handout.
Portables

Submission + - Rugged laptop/tablet suggestions (2010 version)

Submitted by robbievienna
robbievienna writes: I'm currently living in the Arabian desert. Typically, unless a building has been sealed against the elements, sand and dust get everywhere. I purchased a keyboard cover for one of my laptops, and noticed that there was more accumulation on the underside than the topside. I've had sand crunk up the guts of one laptop and one tablet (Nokia N810). My coworkers who are native to the region tend to trade out their technology every six to twelve months, but I don't want to migrate data and adjust to new hardware that frequently. I was wondering what suggestions people have for working in this type of environment — both for laptops and for tablets.
For reference, I work in a pseudo-secured zone where computers (phones, etc.) are not permitted to have cameras. A DVD drive would be nice, but is unnecessary. The more USB ports, the better.
The last time the question was posted on Slashdot was five years ago, so I'm presuming that there are new industry leaders. http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/08/0212209

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