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Comment AltaVista user interface (Score 1) 176

I know they use the same engine (Bing), but IMO AltaVista's results page seems more complete and intuitive than Yahoo's. For two equivalent searches, the AltaVista page has more similar searches, has more "more results from ...." links, and just seems tighter and more cohesive.
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"

Comment Tracking and identifying (Score 5, Interesting) 78

Interestingly the electrodes were implanted in the "tactile information" processor, so the infrared light is interpreted as touch. That would seem to mean that in "tracking" the source of the signal, the rats meander until the infrared light hits their eyes, and then head toward it as the strength of the touch signal increases.

TFA says "a new sensory input can be interpreted by a region of the brain that normally does something else," but isn't the input just being "converted" into the sense of touch by activating that region of the brain?

Comment Re:Circular Reference (Score 0) 732

So you increase the surcharge with some high school math.

If the cost is x and the surcharge is y, then we need:
(x + y) * .03 = y.
.97y = .03x
y = x * .03/.97


So the surcharge you should charge in this case would be y = 3.0928 (or in general, 3.0928% for a 3% credit card transaction fee).

Comment Not of practical use? (Score 0) 262

Of course this is practically useful. Even if you have to run it multiple times before arriving at the right answer, you're virtually guaranteed to get there in orders of magnitude less time. Just verify the result (multiply the factors, try to decrypt whatever you're guessing the key for, etc.) until it's correct.

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