gfineman - Slashdot User

High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @05:30PM from the subsidies-cause-fatter-corn-farmers dept.

krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"

Users Rejecting Security Advice Considered Rational 389

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @05:32PM from the no-thanks-for-the-externalities dept.

WeeBit writes "Researchers have different ideas as to why people fail to use security measures. Some feel that regardless of what happens, users will only do the minimum required. Others believe security tasks are rejected because users consider them to be a pain. A third group maintains user education is not working. [Microsoft Research's Cormac] Herley offers a different viewpoint. He contends that user rejection of security advice is based entirely on the economics of the process." Here is Dr. Herley's paper, So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users (PDF).

Google Makes Apps Script Available To All 61

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 14, 2010 @10:49AM from the come-one-come-all dept.

theodp writes "Formerly only available to Apps Users, Google has made Apps Script available to everyone (sample script), including you Google Docs low-lifers. Apps Script lets you automate actions across spreadsheets, sites, calendars, and other Google services. No spamming, kids!"

EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote 477

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @11:19AM from the good-news-everybody dept.

An anonymous reader writes "'The European Parliament defied the EU executive today (10 March), casting a vote against an agreement between the EU, the US and other major powers on combating online piracy and threatening to take legal action at the European Court of Justice.'"

Scientists To Breed the Auroch From Extinction 277

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 21, 2010 @12:18AM from the back-by-popular-demand dept.

ImNotARealPerson writes "Scientists in Italy are hoping to breed back from extinction the mighty auroch, a bovine species which has been extinct since 1627. The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6'6". The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant. A member of the Consortium for Experimental Biotechnology suggests that 99% of the auroch's DNA can be recreated from genetic material found in surviving bone material. Wikipedia mentions that researchers in Poland are working on the same problem."

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @05:29PM from the hey-cut-that-crap-out dept.

hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @05:53PM from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

Comment disaggregation (Score 1) 378

by gfineman on Friday December 04, 2009 @11:04AM (#30323812) Attached to: Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music

"movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" seems false. What else is YouTube?

Comment Open Secret is right (Score 5, Informative) 550

by gfineman on Monday May 18, 2009 @10:32AM (#27996241) Attached to: Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker

Open secret is right. I live about three quarters of a mile from the Naval Observatory and the government had to pay for damage, caused by the blasting, to the foundations of nearby residences (including at least one embassy). The local community governmental organization gathered and disseminated the procedures for getting such payments. Why is this considered news and even in Slashdot?

How Google's High Speed Book Scanner De-Warps Pages 209

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday May 15, 2009 @04:17PM from the onto-dewarping-brains-next dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Patent 7,508,978, awarded to Google, shows how the company has already managed to scan more than 7 million books. Google's system uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then 'de-warping' it afterward, Google can present flat-looking pages online without having to slice books up or mash them onto a flatbed scanner. Stephen Shankland writes that the 'sophistication of the technology illustrates that would-be competitors who want to feature their own digitized libraries won't have a trivial time catching up to Google.' First, a book is placed on a flat surface, while above it, an infrared projector displays a special mazelike pattern onto the pages. Next, two infrared cameras photograph the infrared pattern from different perspectives. 'The images can be stereoscopically combined, using known stereoscopic techniques, to obtain a three-dimensional mapping of the pattern,' according to the patent. 'The pattern falls on the surface of (the) book, causing the three-dimensional mapping of the pattern to correspond to the three-dimensional surface of the page of the book.'"

Comment GFineman (Score 2, Interesting) 324

by gfineman on Monday April 06, 2009 @01:21PM (#27478159) Attached to: Google's Plan For Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged

I fail to see the problem. It is not as if Google is taking away the card catalogs or the inter-library loan system or anything else. It is simply adding to the existing access abilities. The libraries are afraid that Google will charge too much for access? Libraries do not buy the access and can continue to use what they have today.

Comment Re:Nations do this all the time. (Score 1) 148

by gfineman on Sunday May 25, 2008 @11:47AM (#23536203) Attached to: Patriot Act Dampening Cloud Computing?

the US government would snoop on any foreign government's data available to it

This is very true. The assumption that the US government obeys its own laws is particularly inapplicable when it comes to the expansions of investigations allowed by the Patriot Act. The company I work for does hosting both in the US and in Canada. The customers in Canada operate on the simplistic notion that hosting in Canada is good and in the US is bad. Actually, it makes no difference where data is hosted, only who controls access to the data. We had a potential customer that whose database would be of interest to the US Homeland Security Department. They concluded that it made no difference where the database was located (including in house) and that it was most likely already secretly taken.

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