ocean_soul - Slashdot User

Submission + - Samoa and Tokelau will be skipping 30/12/2011 (bbc.co.uk)

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ocean_soul

on Friday December 30, 2011 @08:21AM

ocean_soul writes: "Starting January 1, 2012 Samoa and Tokelau will be in time zone +13 instead of -11. This means there will be no December 30, 2011 in these countries. The decision to switch time zone was based on the changing international business relations of Samoa. Samoa had adopted the -11 time zone to make business with the US easier. However, currently Samoa's most important trading partners are Australia and New-Zealand. By switching time zone the work-weeks and week-ends on Samoa and Tokelau will be synchronised with those in Australia and New-Zealand."

Submission + - Firefly poster banned (gawker.com)

Submitted by

ocean_soul

on Friday September 30, 2011 @01:17PM

ocean_soul writes: "Probably because nothing more threatening was happening and they need to prove their usefulness the school police at University of Wisconsin-Stout decided a Firefly poster with the quote You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me. And you'll be armed. was a threat to the safety on campus. Wasn't that a quote about not killing people?"

Submission + - Ubisoft DRM problems remain unsolved (ubi.com) 1

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ocean_soul

on Saturday April 17, 2010 @09:23AM

ocean_soul writes: "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial "always on-line" DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keeps growing daily. The reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promis of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday. Something to keep in mind for Christmas shopping..."

Submission + - Crackpot scandal in mathematics (utexas.edu)

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ocean_soul

on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @07:33AM

ocean_soul writes: "It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics, thanks mainly to Zoran Skoda (and also to John Baez, known from the This Week's Finds blog). The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the "scientific" journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of which in the latest issue. Like many crackpots El Nashie has a kind of cult around him, with another journal devoted to the praising of his greatness. There was also a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for El Naschie which was supposedly written by one of his followers. When it was deleted by Wikipedia they even threatened with legal actions (which never materialized)."

Submission + - Free Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone (cornell.edu)

Submitted by

ocean_soul

on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @07:42AM

ocean_soul writes: "Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists it is the number one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a "normal" journal. A famous example is Perelman, who published his award winning paper exclusively on arXiv. Read the press release."

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