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Go to the shop and buy one they have already crammed android 2.2 into one so it is technically possible, how long till a cracked version comes out, not long! check more news about it here

Neil deGrasse Tyson :

“First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?"

Wikipedia says :

"NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.

According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion dollars per year over its fifty year history (NASA's 2011 budget is on a continuing resolution of the 2010 budget at $18.724 billion)."

This picture needs to be updated to show Firefox instead of IE eating glue. IE may release slower, but they let enterprises choose a version an stick to it. They also do have "rapid releases" of the trident engine called Platform Previews but only give an update of the full browser every one of two years.

Chrome is the new Firefox, as in the little browser that geeks like and Firefox has become the derpy retard browser. I say that as someone who used Firefox since the early days until 5.0 when I couldn't take the memory rape anymore on a system with TWELVE gigabytes of ram.

I am never amazed at the sense of helplessness I get from Europeans. They expect the government to do everything for and when it doesn't, for some reason petty theft is "justified". Pathetic.

Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." These current groups of thieves and thugs aren't noble citizens rising up against their oppressors. They are violent, thieving thugs with no concept of passive resistance -- no concept of the better good.

Poor you say? Look at these people

http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/

They are very well dressed. They are very well fed. These are not helpless Somalis trying to get their food aid. These people would be upper middle class in 75% of the countries on Earth but are so consumed by jealousy and helplessness that they have turned to selfish destruction.

Many of you, who are paralyzed by the thought of another citizen owning a gun, try to draw comparisons to the LA riots in 1992. Do you not remember Korea Town? Lack of gun control works. The LA riots were not brought under control by the police. It was private individuals, with their private guns, that laid down the law and stopped the anarchy.

The British people are helpless and dependent. From yesterday's Guardian:

  "Scotland Yard’s 6,000 street officers were hopelessly outmanoeuvred" by " boys and girls, most no older than 15, and some apparently as young as eight". One resident: “Where are the police? Why are they not here? People are frightened.”

Americans in the 1992 riots were in no such mood:

"We are glad the National Guard is here. They're good backup."

Many years ago a historian (please enlighten me to the name if you can remember) did a study on the rise and fall of civilizations. He identified a phase immediately before collapse: Dependence

1. ski mask
2. ???
3. profit!!

Sound advice. However, I suspect the majority of rioters on the streets at the moment aren't the type of people who read Slashdot nor think about the consequences of showing their face in public to all those people with smartphones.

For example: http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/ . No facial recognition technology with this site, just the "many eyeballs" technique.

Nobody has realized that the collision patterns might be from Superboy-Prime punching the walls of reality?

Check out Notch's (the creator of Minecraft) opinion on this:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam/

Bottom line: it's a scam.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

"It's a scam!

Perhaps you've seen the videos about some groundbreaking "unlimited detail" rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
Well, it is a scam.
They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That's cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let's assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it's not made up of that many unique voxels.
In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don't need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.
Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It's possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it's not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.
It's a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they're carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they're pretending like what they're doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it's been done several times before.
There's the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y
Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw
And there's more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc
They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It's a scam. Donâ(TM)t get excited."

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln83rsJ8lX1qjh397.gif

Well, as mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, I own three solar powered quartz movement watches, two of which have both an analogue and digital readout. All three watches are more accurate than my mechanical one, and yet - despite my general techno-lust - none of them are quite as beautiful and elegant.

On my wrist, one of them actually looks just as nice as the mechanical watch that cost (literally) ten times as much, uses atomic clock radio signals to stay accurate and can draw enough power from the sun even in a nuclear winter, so it should be reasonably functional. It just doesn't quite inspire me in the same manner as precision clockwork.

For pure function, my mobile phone does everything my watches can, lots more besides, and is generally within a few feet of me at all times. It's an altogether more impressive beast, and I'd get distressed with one I had to wind up. So the watch is a vanity item, intended to demonstrate visual elegance while providing internal joy that something so archaic and functionally outclassed has been created nonetheless.

I guess it's an emotional thing, but I'm not an EE :)

why aren't people designing / paying top dollar for rotary-dial or steam-powered cellphones

http://rotarymechanical.tumblr.com/

I love the looks, but don't think it'll have sufficient specifications to replace my current phone..

This is simply a crazy misinformed post by an idiot.

Smit re-named Pantyshot/Upskirt after a Japanese name. Not just any name, but popularly belonging to an Anime (adult comics) character

Anime is NOT adult comics. Anime is simply Japanese animation. Anime are moving pictures. Comics are the things that don't normally move and often printed on dead trees.

There's nothing "adult" to anime just like there's nothing "adult" to videos.

There's nothing "adult" to the character either. The character certainly does have strong "upskirt" and "pantyshot" references, but honestly it's not much of a "pantyshot" than a "boxershot", a running gag when the character's friend(s?) pull a prank on her by an upskirt and disappointingly realizes she wears "boxers" instead of sexy panties.

FYI, this is the typical "upskirt" in that "adult anime" we're talking about: http://25.media.tumblr.com/eO5rDDFIRmiprfxkBtraxpq6o1_500.jpg

You may say this is offensive, I understand people get offended over many things. But it's simply wrong and FUD to claim that this character has any "adult" connotations.

Like Momoko, who could be Momoko the Japanese porn star (AV Idol)

I do watch Japanese porn regularly (sorry) , and I've never heard of anybody half famous that goes with the name Momoko. A quick google indicates that a "Momoko Tani" is a "Japanese Idol" that wears suggestive clothings (usually scanty swimsuits/bikinis), but not anything that you could call "porn".

Search for Misaka and upskirt, and you'll get a Chilling Effects message from Google about the removal of alleged child porn from their search results.

Just donâ(TM)t âoeinterpretâ Momoko along with the term upskirt on Google or you'll get the same Chilling Effects child pornography warning.

Perhaps it's not the weird Japanese names that's causing Google to give you all those Chilling Effects, but maybe "upskirt"? I've turned off any "safe filters" in Google, and probably my jurisdiction is less anal about child porn (but I haven't seen any of child porn in those searches), so I can't check whether "Jessica upskirt" (or whatever) gives you the same warning, but I suspect it would.

---
I don't disagree that there are better choices of names than "upskirt" and "pantyshot", but seriously there's really no need to spread FUD and lies.

The misinformation above may be lies, or they may be misunderstandings by the author of TFA. If really the latter, she really has no standing writing this piece of misinformed piece of crap.

I found something. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnujmrWHlA1qmuig5o1_500.jpg

Here's a pretty good example, and not a goatse link either! Riker

I knew one of them got on camera: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnujmrWHlA1qmuig5o1_500.jpg

Hi! Welcome to slashdot, a place for news. Here's a link to my personal blog, my twitter account, my photo diary, my linkedin profile, ... Now let me abuse this news site even more to funnel traffic to my own stuff.

Iif you create a web page which does Bitcoin mining in the background while displaying something else, you may be able to get people to do the computation for you.

Already been done: via java http://bitcoinporn.tumblr.com/ (NSFW - as if the URL doesn't warn you)

And via WebCL, although it's closed now: http://kradminer.com/

Instead of...
1) an adaptive traffic phasing (that's the term for light changes) system
2) creating a tunnel for the dominant traffic route under the rotary
3) changing the traffic in that area entirely

A roundabout is used instead. It costs very little to maintain, and there's
no lights to change. Its sad though, once these choke points
pop up drivers resort to driving in the surrounding, heavily settled
back roads, as fast as they can get away with. Which just creates
more safety problems.

After visiting Europe often, it struck me that when the new world was
formed that none of the city planners got on the first boats :(. America
needs better city planning, and then things like better public transportation
and less cars will follow.

Or we can look forward to more crap like this:
http://newenglandthings.tumblr.com/post/6801503864/rotary-in-east-longmeadow-massachusetts

After reading your comments about Nintendo Music I cannot help seeing a vision of a ferociously concentrating hard core shooter fanatic pulling off headshots in "Now that's what I Call Modern Battlefield Honor 77" while a jingly Marioesque soundtrack plays in the background.

I don't have it in video, but how about music? As in Super Mario vs NIN, or Super Mario vs Public Enemy?

It's quite a psychedelic image.

Yes, yes it is.

Well, they need some hardware to run Powerpoint on.

"A PowerPoint Ranger is a military member who relies heavily on presentation software to the point of excess. Some junior officers spend the majority of their time preparing PowerPoint slides.[10] Because of its usefulness for presenting mission briefings, it has become part of the culture of the military,[9][11] but is regarded as a poor decision-making tool.[12] As a result some generals, such as Brigadier-General Herbert McMaster, have banned the use of PowerPoint in their operations.[10] In September 2010, Colonel Lawrence Sellin was fired from his post at the ISAF for publishing a piece critical of the over-dependence of military staffs on the presentation method and bloated bureaucracy.[13]

According to Jim Nelson, who served as a civilian translator with the Russian and American peacekeepers in Bosnia in 1996, one of the Russians said, "If we ever had a war, while you are working on your PowerPoint, we would be killing you.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_PowerPoint

http://voristrip.tumblr.com/post/230887512/death-by-powerpoint

See? If you dare to point out a SERIOUS problem all you get is called the Linux equivalent of nigger and faggot, aka troll and shill, and get told "You should tell your customers to learn our way, it is leet!" except its not, its a big giant shit sandwich that nobody has the balls to admit.

And your answer is a perfect example of what I was talking about, because if you had read my first post of this thread you would have seen very plainly I said you can't update Linux because it shits itself and here you are sir admitting you are running a badly out of date distro. Tell me, how much of the software on those machines is out of date? Which kernel do they run? How many of these vulnerabilitiesare your machines susceptible to?

I just want the community to either put up or shut up. You say that Linux is ready for the desktop? That it can replace Windows in peoples homes? Then prove it. Show me a SINGLE distro I can install TODAY that is guaranteed a minimum of 6 years of security updates without the upgrade death march, just one. No CLI horseshit (Proptip: Home users will not touch your precious CLI, they see it for what it is, a throwback to the 70s which is frankly stupid in the modern era. If you want to write a script for speed fine, but one should never HAVE TO use CLI to fix a problem on a modern OS) and no forum hunts, just an OS I can give to customers that won't be out of date and vulnerable by this time next year without jumping on the upgrade treadmill.

But the simple fact is you can't do it, because Linux geeks look at the CLI like it gives them mystical gonad powers and they think "its free so you should just upgrade" while ignoring the fact it is ONLY free if your time is worthless. my time on the other hand is a minimum of $35 an hour, so it takes less than 3 hours of forum hunts because Ubuntu Hairy Honky shits its network driver before you have cost me more than a Windows Home license.

And if it were simply one person trolling then please explain that long list of OEMs that have abandoned you? Please explain why NO retailer in the USA will touch your product? Why every. single. one. that has attempted to sell your product, from little shops like mine, to big fortune 500 companies like Walmart, have run away from your product like the clap after attempting to sell it?

I'll tell you why, because if you actually stand beside your product, if you actually offer even the teeny tint bit of support after the sale, you find out quickly the Linux driver model is shit. I can post link after link, showing you 10s of 1000s of posts of "update foo broke my driver!" where the ONLY "help" the user is given is a CLI voodoo dance which often needs to be "tweaked" because it was designed for hardware b rev g and they have hardware d rev k. This sir is simply unacceptable for a retail product.

Fix this and watch the world suddenly bloom with Linux choices. Watch as suddenly all those places that wouldn't give you the time of day suddenly have Linux boxes right beside the Windows ones. Watch as all the B&Ms from little places like mine to the big boys like Walmart carry your product. That is what the community wants right? A year of the Linux desktop. Then make it happen, put up or shut up. Because as it is Linux is a shiny covering over a shit sandwich. Once you get your initial install working it is pretty and all, but quickly the death march and the constant forum hunts will simply make it not worth the effort. And you want what will happen if you tell home users they have to deal with your precious leet CLI? They say "How much for Windows Home again?" and frankly who can blame them. It is 2011, not 1971. Get your shit together and join the rest of us in the 21st century. it is nice here!

Er... I can't speak for the Potter films, but in the book a number of good guy characters die by the end. I mean, geez, the story starts out with the main character's parents being murdered.

Why didn't he just rub some phoenix tears on them? Harry Potter is rife with lazy plot devices.

The word "Cloud" doesn't make it all magical, with faeries and pony's all over the place...

No... it adds unicorns...

Like this: Good old bear

They also have a great one about Michelle Obama which I've been tracking on Tumblr.

I don't know why it is always referred to as "The elusive Higgs boson" when Einstein was able to so clearly point to its existence decades ago:
Einstein proving that the Higgs boson can be found anywhere

I don't see anything bad about that.

Sea level rise wiping out coastal cities, droughts, flooding due to excessive rainfall, to name the most important problems with warmer temperatures.

So there will be both doughts and floods? Sounds no different than we have now?

Some of the good. Uninhabitable areas of the world become habitable. The net result is we are no better or worse off.

Sea level rise wiping out coastal cities, droughts, flooding due to excessive rainfall, to name the most important problems with warmer temperatures.

If the CEO has that to say then I don't know why anyone would go there.

(but seriously, everything there is so expensive and shoddy, the salespeople actually are that creepy, and hobbyists can usually afford to wait a couple days or even weeks to order the exact right parts for significantly cheaper from internet / China)

People magazine? I thought this was someone trying to expand Literally Unbelievable into exploring the credulity of Slashdot readers as well as Facebookers.

Rapture Rules:

Let us level the playing field.

If the rapture comes this Saturday (hopefully, not before Doctor Who airs), the non-believers are to burn in hell for eternity. We accept it, we stand by it.

If the rapture does not come, however, what will the believers do? What do they venture?

I suggest that if they are true believers ready to bet everything on their faith, they all gather in a certain place (desolate place to limit the unnecessary collateral damage would be best) and immolate themselves. For fairness sake.

http://dailymailoncology.tumblr.com/
http://thedailymailoncologicalontologyproject.wordpress.com/

If you read the real original post instead of the blog which only mentions this one you'll notice that it affected Tumblr and that the lady in question wasn't very active there.

If you hang on to a free service like Tumblr and are hardly active I don't think it to be that strange that they'll prefer someone more active using your alias.

This is also mentioned in their Terms of service and in a rather fair way IMO: right at the top under the first header "1. Access to services":

"Tumblr may change, suspend or discontinue the Services at any time, including the availability of any feature, database, or Content. Tumblr may also impose limits on certain features and services or restrict Subscriberâ(TM)s access to parts or all of the Services without notice or liability. Tumblr reserves the right, at its discretion, to modify these Terms of Service at any time by posting revised Terms of Service on the Site and by providing notice via e-mail, where possible, or on the Site. Subscriber shall be responsible for reviewing and becoming familiar with any such modifications."

Question should be obvious: If you're that scared of your identify why bother signing up for a service which makes it very obvious that your presence isn't fully yours ? Also note how easy this is to find: find Tumblr using Google and on the main page simply click "Terms of Services" at the bottom. This text will be right there, nearly at the top.

Want some quality with the service you're using? Consider getting a paid account instead, that is bound to remain the same no matter what!

What we should be discussing is that instead of developing a web app for a project in class that helps a fictional hotelier manage bookings, billing etc. they developed a real product and put it out into the world. This, surely, is a good thing, no matter how trivial their product.

Absolutely agree. As Derek "Spelunky" Yu says all too well of making games, the most important thing above all else is to FINISH THE PROJECT. All software developers know the feeling of the excitement of a new project gradually dwindling and eventually being shelved as something else comes along. I have a great respect for a class that can teach getting a product out the door.

The latter half of TFA is talking about the students' stories, as they went on to bigger and better things. It's not suggesting that anyone believed sitting in a room and writing Facebook apps was the future. It provided a start though, and getting a product out led to success. It's a valuable lesson in the value of prototyping, which indie game developers have been applying to great success in recent times.

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkjsa0vvlq1qzu2tdo1_400.gif

But there is enough of each image shown to right-click and open or save the image by itself. Or you could just go to the artists' site, as mentioned by someone below: http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/tagged/cinemagraph

It is interesting work based on a really nice concept.

if we don't, remember me

Yeah, I like the ones where very little is moving except maybe someone's eyes or hair, or their breathing. This one is one of my faves.

I believe you can find the original, with more animations, at http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/tagged/cinemagraph

Skip Gawker. Go to their website directly:

http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/tagged/cinemagraph

And yes, they are truly beautiful animations.

These are some of the best animated gifs I've ever seen.

The images aren't loading on the page, so here is the original blog with more images: right here. And I would also say one of the nicest looking web page designs I've ever seen.

VP8 is h.264

But that's wrong...

Here's Superman's origin in 8 words: http://fuckyeahgrantmorrison.tumblr.com/post/1043287938/fantomex-supermans-origin-4-panels-8-words

The point isn't that the movie includes the origin (although even that is stupid-- who wants to see a Superman movie but *doesn't* already know his origin?), but that the movies are *about* the origin. Show the origin in the film equivalent of 8 words (say, 1 minute), then move on and tell a story.

What we need is to find a way to coast uphill without having to coast downhill.

I've got it.

Put a magnet on the end of a pole in front of the car. It'll pull itself up a hill!

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_laxcr841Fm1qewll0o1_500.jpg

--
BMO

Maybe Apple is trying to avoid something like this

Don't click - this is worse than Goatse! Unless you already "theme" Android.

Maybe Apple is trying to avoid something like this

Yes, it's much better to simply start coding. Engineers always know the best way to use the software, and can deliver exactly what's needed by the business, even when they don't understand the business, and they don't understand the users.

In fact, life would be much easier if the Lusers would get out of the way and let us produce masterpieces of UI work like these Android screenshots, amirite?

I simply googled a few lines from some of her other posts, and saw that has happened before. For Example googling "Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No" from her article http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/03/13/no-impact-man-screening-panel-discussion-march-13/ Pulls up a summary from this site, which was published months earlier. http://bkfreestore.tumblr.com/post/1336085827/no-impact-man-an-outdoor-film-screening-with-colin

Fox News showed a map of the nuclear power plants in Japan. On that map, there was a suspect nuclear plant named "Shibuya Eggman". Turns out that's the name of a nightclub in the Shibuya area of Tokyo.

Fox news is hardly known for it's geographical accuracy

Fox News showed a map of the nuclear power plants in Japan. On that map, there was a suspect nuclear plant named "Shibuya Eggman". Turns out that's the name of a nightclub in the Shibuya area of Tokyo.

Now, how is that relevant? Give the fear-mongering media a piece of footage that can be misinterpreted to induce panic, and they won't waste a minute before misrepresenting it to induce panic. Sensationalism is how they get their ratings. The people of Tokyo leaving their jobs in fear and taking to the hills is NOT what Japan's battered economy needs right now. If you ask me, we simply shouldn't read too much into the authorities' actions just yet!