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The Internet

Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera 218

Posted by Soulskill from the nuts-and-bolts dept.
future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

Researchers One Step Closer To Creating Life 292

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mad-science dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute are potentially one step closer to creating life. In an experiment they recently created enzymes that can replicate and evolve. 'It kind of blew me away,' said team member Tracey Lincoln of the Scripps Research Institute, who is working on her Ph.D. 'What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting.'"
Spam

CAN-SPAM Act Turns 5 Today — What Went Wrong? 301

Posted by kdawson from the calling-mister-hormel dept.
alphadogg writes "Five years ago, the US tech industry, politicians, and Internet users were wringing their hands over the escalating problem of spam. This prompted Congress to pass a landmark anti-spam bill known as the CAN-SPAM Act in December 2003. Fast forward five years. The number of spam messages sent over the Internet every day has grown more than 10-fold, topping 164 billion worldwide in August 2008. Almost 97% of all e-mails are spam, costing US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year. What went wrong here?"
Democrats

Change.gov Uses Google Moderator System 436

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-should-call-it-pigg dept.
GMonkeyLouie writes "The website for President-elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov, has unveiled a section called Open for Questions, which lets users submit questions and vote them up or down, in an effort to let the collaborative mind produce the questions that are the most important to the American populace (or at least the web-savvy portion). The page is powered by Google Moderator. It was unveiled yesterday, and CNet reports that when they went to post last night, '159,890 had voted on 1,986 questions from 3,255 people.'"
Education

Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds? 962

Posted by timothy from the don't-forget-cty-and-other-nerd-camps dept.
firthisaword writes "I will be teaching an enrichment programming course to 11-14 year old gifted children in the Spring. It is meant as an introduction to very basic programming paradigms (conditions, variables, loops, etc.), but the kids will invariably have a mix of experience in dealing with computers and programming. The question: Which programming language would be best for starting these kids off on? I am tempted by QBasic which I remember from my early days — it is straightforward and fast, if antiquated and barely supported under XP. Others have suggested Pascal which was conceived as an instructional pseudocode language. Does anyone have experience in that age range? Anything you would recommend? And as a P.S: Out of the innumerable little puzzles/programs/tasks that novice programmers get introduced to such as Fibonacci numbers, primes or binary calculators, which was the most fun and which one taught you the most?" A few years ago, a reader asked a similar but more general question, and several questions have focused on how to introduce kids to programming. Would you do anything different in teaching kids identified as academically advanced?
Biotech

Mad Scientist Brings Back Dead With "Deanimation" 501

Posted by kdawson from the way-science-should-be dept.
mattnyc99 writes "Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist (who also figured out how to diagnose lupus correctly) went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals. Inspired by NOVA and funded by DARPA, Roth has developed a serum for major biotech startup Ikaria that successfully accomplished 'suspended animation' — the closest we've ever come to simulating near-death experiences and then coming back to life. From the article: 'We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does — it burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O2 until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related. Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?' " The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism." If you can suspend your inner critic for a time, it's a fun ride.
Security

The Trap Set By the FBI For Half Life 2 Hacker 637

Posted by timothy from the well-deserved-shadenfreude dept.
eldavojohn writes "You might remember the tiny news that Half Life 2 source code was leaked in 2003 ... it is the 6th most visited Slashdot story with over one kilocomment. Well, did anything happen to the source of the leak, the German hacker Axel 'Ago' Gembe? Wired is reporting he was offered a job interview so that Valve could get him into the US and bag him for charges. It's not the first time the FBI tried this trick: 'The same Seattle FBI office had successfully used an identical gambit in 2001, when they created a fake startup company called Invita, and lured two known Russian hackers to the US for a job interview, where they were arrested.'"
The Internet

IBM Bringing Powerline Broadband Back? 141

Posted by samzenpus from the faster-tubes dept.
KindMind writes "IBM, in partnership with International Broadband Electric Communications, appears to be bringing back powerline broadband back from the dead. This time, the idea is to build out in rural areas not currently serviced by broadband, and isn't for competing with other broadband solutions. From the article: 'Their strategy is to sign up electric cooperatives that provide power to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States. Rather than compete toe-to-toe with large, entrenched cable or DSL providers, IBEC is looking for customers that have been largely left out of the shift to high-speed Internet.'"
Science

Scientists Turn Tequila Into Diamonds 249

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the still-working-on-a-use-for-the-worm dept.
MaxwellEdison writes "Researchers, oddly enough from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, have found a way to make diamond films using tequila. They were originally testing methods of creating the films with organic solutions like acetone when it was noticed the ideal ratios of water and ethanol turned out to be about 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. '"To dissipate any doubts, one morning on the way to the lab I bought a pocket-size bottle of cheap white tequila and we did some tests," Apátiga said. "We were in doubt over whether the great amount of chemicals present in tequila, other than water and ethanol, would contaminate or obstruct the process, it turned out to be not so. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds."'"

Comment A few of mine (Score 1) 702

by Pheersome (#25668517) Attached to: (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?

For vim compiled with X support, "* is the register corresponding to the X clipboard. So, "*p dumps the X clipboard into your file in a much more elegant way than i and middle-click.

Some large motions (:123, gg, G, probably others) set the ' mark. So, gg to go to the top of the file (say, add a #include or an import), then '' to go back to where you were. On a somewhat related note, ^I and ^O will traverse the list of places you've jumped to -- handy for finding your way back to where you were before you jumped to five or six different places via a search.

Somebody mentioned . earlier. If you're not using . religiously, you're using vim wrong.

High on my wishlist for vim tricks is a way to put delimiters on either side of a motion that supports . to repeat it. E.g.: say I have a few words and I want to parenthesize each of them. Put the cursor at the start of the first word, [some keys](, lparen and rparen magically appear around the word, move to the next word, hit ., parens appear around that word, etc.

Comment A few things I haven't seen yet (Score 1) 2362

by Pheersome (#25652949) Attached to: (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?

alias find="noglob find" # Lets me say "find . -name *.pdf" (etc) without escaping the '*'. I also do this with dpkg-query.

alias topten="(sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head)" # Print the top ten most common lines in whatever gets piped in

diff local_file.txt =(ssh remotehost cat remote_file.txt) # ssh is like a distributed file system, right?
# The =(cmd) syntax is pretty useful in general, for where a command expects a filename and you want to give it input from another command.

file =some-command # =word expands to the result of a $PATH search for word. This command tells me what kind of thing I'm executing...
readlink -e =some-command # ... unless it says "symlink", in which case the next step is to recursively chase symlinks until I get a real file...
file $(readlink -e =some-command) # ... *then* I can ask what kind of file it is. $(cmd) is preferable to `cmd` because it nests properly.
Businesses

After Domain Squatting, Twitter Squatting 201

Posted by timothy from the kept-in-a-special-safe dept.
carusoj writes "Squatting on domain names is nothing new, but Twitter has created a new opportunity for squatters, in the form of Twitter IDs. Writes Richard Stiennon: 'Is there evidence of Twitter squatting (squitting?) Let's check. Yup, every single-letter TwitID is taken ... How about common words? Garage, wow, war, warcraft, Crisco, Coke, Pepsi, Nike, and Chevrolet are all taken. My guess is that Twitter squatters have grabbed all of these in the hopes that they will be worth selling in the not too distant future. Of course the legitimate holders of brands can sue for them and Twitter can just turn them over if asked. But, because the investment and risk for the squatter is zero, you are going to see the rapid evaporation of available Twitter IDs.'"

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