thomnelson - Slashdot User

Russian Scholar Warns Of US Climate Change Weapon 415

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @11:11AM from the hurricane-cannon dept.

According to Russian political scientist, and conspiracy aficionado Andrei Areshev the high heat, and poor crop yields of Russia, and other Central Asian countries may be the result of a climate weapon created by the US military. From the article: "... Areshev voiced suspicions about the High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), funded by the US Defense Department and the University of Alaska. HAARP, which has long been the target of conspiracy theorists, analyzes the ionosphere and seeks to develop technologies to improve radio communications, surveillance, and missile detection. Areshev writes, however, that its true aim is to create new weapons of mass destruction 'in order to destabilize environmental and agricultural systems in local countries.'"

Comment Re:Because the Article Breaks Down the Claim Fully (Score 1) 830

by thomnelson on Tuesday August 17, 2010 @03:30PM (#33279766) Attached to: Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain

This is the other main flaw in Kurzweil's argument, that Moore's law somehow translates to software. Hardware has been following Moore's law, but software hasn't. We are just getting to the point of basic usability of voice recognition and computer vision, this does not translate into reverse engineering the entire brain in 10 years. In fact, I don't think we've sufficiently proven that it's even possible to replace the brain's wetware with hardware based on transistors. Also, the brain's ability to develop depends on its connection to the human body and the sensory organs; having a human-like brain that exists without a body is a postulation, not something that will just happen given enough time.

Girls Wired To Fear Dangerous Animals 224

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 14, 2009 @01:00PM from the don't-play-with-venomous-things dept.

Foot-in-Mouth writes "New Scientist reports that girls are more "primed" to fear spiders and snakes, compared to boys. Infant boys and girls were shown pairs of images, a fearful and a happy object (such as a spider and a flower), measuring the boys' and girls' dwell times on the images. And in another similar test, normally happy objects (such as a flower) were given a fearful face and fearful objects were given a happy face. The results of these two tests suggested to the researcher that girls are not wired to fear spiders, for example, but rather girls are wired to more quickly learn to fear dangerous animals. The researcher, David Rakison at CMU, 'attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. An aversion to spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.' This reminds one of men's obsession with video games. Will game designers use this information to tweak video games for gender, either to make the games more or less frightening?"

A Hacker's Audacious Plan To Rule the Underground 313

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 05, 2009 @05:47PM from the ambition-can-carry-you-just-so-far dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has the inside story of Max Butler, a former white hat hacker who joined the underground following a jail stint for hacking the Pentagon. His most ambitious hack was a hostile takeover of the major underground carding boards where stolen credit card and identity data are bought and sold. The attack made his own site, CardersMarket, the largest crime forum in the world, with 6,000 users. But it also made the feds determined to catch him, since one of the sites he hacked, DarkMarket.ws, was secretly a sting operation run by the FBI."

Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer? 611

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 05, 2009 @04:59PM from the not-in-my-backyard dept.

thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."

Comment Re:Something Is wrong (Score 1) 180

by thomnelson on Monday September 17, 2001 @01:31PM (#2309910) Attached to: Lutris Closes Enhydra Source

I doubt Lutris is going to use much of the RI code. The RI is pretty worthless except for the fact that it passes all the compatibility tests, so if you have access to the code, you can get pointers on how to pass those tests yourself.

The problem is that as long as Sun holds on to SCSL, Java and open source are basically incompatible, especially GPL-based projects. The scary thing about JBoss is that at any time Sun feels that they're a threat, they can send out their lawyers and have all references to J2EE specs removed from JBoss docs and code.

The open source community needs an open source J2EE-like platform which isn't tied to Java. We need to look at the features of J2EE and .NET, figure out the ones that are really useful, and develop our own platform without using Java or specs controlled by Sun or Microsoft.

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