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Comment Re:If you can't handle calculus, science isnt for (Score 4, Interesting) 467

by shdo (#31720834) Attached to: Help Me Get My Math Back?

I would mod you up if I had any points. Sad as it may seem calculus was where I *learned* trig. For me, trig is one of those subjects that you beat your head against for months and years and one day *POOF* it makes sense. My first semester of college level calculus was were I learned trig. The second time I took that first semester of calculus - man I got it.

Don't forget to brush up on the basics - algebra, trig, analytical geometry as well as your calculus.

goes looking for an old text book just to tinker around with it.......
Patents

Submission + - Who Owns Your Great Idea?

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem. As long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment, that is. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NY Times reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."
X

Submission + - The Sorry State Of X.Org? (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix has up an article looking at the release of X Server 1.4.1. This maintenance release for X.Org, which the open-source operating systems depend upon for living in a graphically-rich world, is coming more than 200 days late and it doesn't even clear the BugZilla release blocker bug. Further showing signs of problems, the next major release of X.Org was scheduled to be released in February... and then May... and now it's missing with no sign of when a release will occur. There's still more than three dozen outstanding bugs. This forthcoming release (X.Org 7.4) will also ship with a slimmer set of features than what was initially planned. What can the Linux community do to improve this crucial part of the OS?
Government

Submission + - H.R. 4279: IP legislation for Federal seizure

Submitted by MrSnivvel
MrSnivvel writes: H.R. 4279: Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008, is gaining momentum in Congress to allow the Feds to seize hardware that has even one file coming from "dubious origins", e.g. downloaded from P2P. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-4279 If passed into law, it's already made it past the House, would create an Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General, and some other "it's for children" kind of lovin'. Rep. John Conyers is interviewed about the bill here: http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i4552e786232dd91baa8a825cc2f79780

Comment Re:Wireless broadband (Score 1) 588

by shdo (#23378812) Attached to: Dealing With Dialup
They may be required to offer it but trying to get them to sell it is a different matter. In San Diego there is only one company that will "sell" it but they will do everything in their power not too. The main reason they don't want to sell it is that they have a hard time billing it anymore. Seems they have lost their software that knows how to bill for the calls.
Space

Submission + - Astronomers discover new class of pulsating star (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "It doesn't happen very often but astronomers have discovered a new class of pulsating white dwarf. The work began last year when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found a few exotic white dwarf stars with carbon atmospheres. A mathematical model of these stars showed that in some circumstances the dwarfs could pulsate as the carbon was cycled through the atmosphere by convection. Now a few days observation of one of these stars has shown that it does actually pulsate as predicted (abstract on the physics arxiv)."
Idle

Quarter of Brits Think Churchill Was Myth 3

Posted by samzenpus
Just so you don't think Americans are the only people who have no clue when it comes to their history, a recent survey found a fair number of British people believe that Churchill, Charles Dickens, and Mahatma Gandhi were fictional characters. Who made the "real people" list? Over half the people asked thought Sherlock Holmes was real. Many people were surprised to find out that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was not a documentary.
The Military

Submission + - Boeing, USAF launch supersonic bomb firing tech. (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Boeing and the US Air Force today said they have tested new technology that for the first time will let military aircraft launch bombs from aircraft moving at supersonic speeds. Researchers from Boeing Phantom Works and the Air Force Research Laboratory used a rocket sled in combination with what researchers called "active flow control" to successfully release a smart bomb known as MK-82 Joint Direct Attack Munition Standard Test Vehicle (JDAM) at a speed of about Mach 2 from a weapons bay with a size approximating that of the U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber, Boeing said. Active flow control is a tandem array of microjets upstream of the weapons bay that, when fired reduces the unsteady pressures inside the bay and modifies the flow outside to ensure the JDAM munition travels out of the bay correctly. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22363"
Programming

Submission + - Free Pascal 2.2 has been released (freepascal.org)

Submitted by
Daniel Mantione
Daniel Mantione writes: "Free Pascal 2.2 has been released. Several new platforms are supported, like the Mac OS X on Intel platform, the Game Boy Advance, Windows CE and 64-Windows. Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that target 64-bit Windows. These advancements were made possible by Free Pascal's internal assembler and linker allowing support for platforms not supported by the GNU binutils. The advancement in internal assembling and linking also allow faster compilation times and smaller executables, increasing the programmer comfort. Other new features are stabs debug support, many new code optimizations, resourcestring smartlinking and more.

Further, Free Pascal has become extremely powerfull in developing portable software over the last years. The release article explains why."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use! Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
The Internet

Submission + - Rural broadband crisis hurts residents & compa (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Thanks to profit-oriented telco industry in the U.S., rural residents don't have as much access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas. According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service. But the problem is more than a conflict between Wall Street and small-town residents wanting to surf the 'Net or play Warcraft — the lack of broadband access prevents many businesses from growing and diversifying rural economies, as it's expensive or impossible to get broadband:

Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn't available, and the local cable service provider wasn't interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey's house — even if he paid the full $7,000 cost. Rossey ended up signing a two-year, $450-per-month contract for a T1 line that delivers 1.44Mbit/sec. of bandwidth. He pays 10 times more than the cable provider would have charged and receives one quarter of the bandwidth.
The author also notes that larger businesses are being crimped, from a national call center to a national retailer which claims 17% of its store locations can't get broadband."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Why I Hesitate to Upgrade LedgerSMB to GPL v3 18

Journal by einhverfr

The GPL v3 is a fundamentally different license than v2. It is three times as long, far more confusing, and even apparently misleading in places. While it purports to be in the same spirit as the GPL v2, it offers no more freedoms to downstream users than the GPL v2, and imposes greater restrictions on developers. I find the terms of the GPL v3 by my reading unconscionable though this will be subject to clearing a few things up with my attourney (IANAL), and vague enough to be a real litig
Space

Submission + - Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory (sciam.com)

Submitted by exploder
exploder writes: String theory is notorious for its lack of testable predictions. But if the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team's interpretation is correct, then a delay in the arrival of higher-energy gamma rays could point to a breakdown of relativity theory. A type of "quantum lensing effect" is postulated to cause the delay, which is approximateley four minutes over a half-billion year journey.
Security

Journal Journal: Sprint Fooling With DNS Queries

Journal by Shadowlore

Sprint is doing something odd with DNS queries. More than odd, it's disturbing.

Anyone using Sprint's Wireless Network card, try this experiment. Open a terminal and do a host lookup on slasdot.org. Tell host or nslookup to use a non-public IP, or an IP you know is not running DNS. Use the verbose output. You'll find that the server you indicated "responded" with information.

For example, on OSX or Linux do this:
host -v slashdot.org 192.0.0.1

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