Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Quite the Opposite (Score 5, Insightful) 271

Time to move to management. Fluff the resume a bit and put yourself out there as someone who can manage a decent term project and get stuff done. Job interviews, much like everything in life, comes down to 10% what you say, and 90% how you say it. Come across as wise not old, confident not down on yourself, and have an air of "If you don't hire me you're a f'in moron" without actually saying that, and you might be surprised what you get.

Comment Re:Two problems (Score 2) 276

I respectfully disagree. Especially if I'm the sysadmin of the centralized cloud servers.

Although my original comment was somewhat fatuous, a user on a single machine is much more often a security/failure risk. It's not so much which is better and more reliable these days (it's certainly centralized control and storage, aka 'The Cloud'), but who controls that central point. This all started decades ago with centralized file servers, and processing farms for big data. It's eventually going to be just the browser, or more likely some sort of Chromeish OS that works on a cloud. Again, being able to setup and control that cloud is the real crux of it.

Science

Chimpanzee Intelligence Largely Determined By Genetics 157

As reported by National Geographic, intelligence in chimpanzees appears to be strongly heritable, according to research led by William Hopkins, a primatologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, who examined both genetic and environmental factors for a group of related chimpanzees with varying measured intelligence: To find out how much of that variability is due to genetics, Hopkins and his team assessed the cognitive abilities of 99 captive chimpanzees. They used a battery of 13 tests measuring various manifestations of intelligence, such as how the animals dealt with the physical world, reacted to sound, and used tools. The group of chimps tested had an expansive family tree, ranging from full siblings to fourth and fifth cousins. This allowed the researchers to calculate how well scores on cognitive traits aligned with genetic relatedness. Two categories of tasks were significantly heritable: those related to spatial cognition, such as learning physical locations, and those that required social cognition, such as grabbing a person's attention. Some chimps are quite clever, making kissing sounds or clapping their hands to draw an experimenter's attention, Hopkins said. "This one is a real measure of intelligence and innovative behavior."
Science

Fish-Eating Spiders More Common Than Thought 39

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Lying in wait at the water's edge, four legs on a leaf and four legs feeling the water for vibrations, the Dolomedes triton spider can catch a fish twice its size in an instant. Holding on tight, it injects its aquatic prey with a deadly dose of venom and drags it to dry land, where it spends hours pumping it full of digestive enzymes and slurping up the fish's liquefied flesh. Fish-eating spiders sound like something out of a nightmare, but until recently, scientists were pretty sure only a few kinds of arachnids could do it. Now, a new survey shows that at least 26 species of spiders know how to fish—and they live on every continent except for Antarctica."
Transportation

Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? 800

An anonymous reader writes "Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic State University explores one of the ethical problems autonomous car developers are going to have to solve: crash prioritization. He posits this scenario: suppose an autonomous car determines a crash is unavoidable, but has the option of swerving right into a small car with few safety features or swerving left into a heavier car that's more structurally sound. Do the people programming the car have it intentionally crash into the vehicle less likely to crumple? It might make more sense, and lead to fewer fatalities — but it sure wouldn't feel that way to the people in the car that got hit. He says, '[W]hile human drivers may be forgiven for making a poor split-second reaction – for instance, crashing into a Pinto that's prone to explode, instead of a more stable object – robot cars won't enjoy that freedom. Programmers have all the time in the world to get it right. It's the difference between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter.' We could somewhat randomize outcomes, but that would lead to generate just as much trouble. Lin adds, 'The larger challenge, though, isn't thinking through ethical dilemmas. It's also about setting accurate expectations with users and the general public who might find themselves surprised in bad ways by autonomous cars. Whatever answer to an ethical dilemma the car industry might lean towards will not be satisfying to everyone.'"

Comment Re:I don't care if he was supporting a bill to imp (Score 1) 1116

I must respectfully disagree. By simply campaigning against him, he may consider himself harassed. Free speech, to be really free, must have license to offend.

There is no reasonable definition of harass here, that's the real problem. It's basically what you could probably get a civil jury to agree with, and I think we've all noticed how split right down the middle this whole case is. Is it harassment if 90% of the Mozilla user base stops using the product? Is it harassment to write a letter to the board protesting their choice? Is it harassment to stand outside their offices with a placard chanting? If he feels harassed he has every right to file protective motions in a court of law, I doubt he'll be following that up though.

As for your uncivil points, a lot of people would argue that 'yes' he was being uncivil when he donated money to that cause. Other people would disagree (maybe me included). People are going to have their say, and California criminal codes don't trump the constitution of the land.

Nice post though, made me stop and think for a minute. It's a shame we have to tolerate the horrible, nasty, venom filled, bigoted, hurtful, degrading and insulting free speech to allow all the other good stuff. But it's well worth that offence and harassment.

Comment Re:Started something (Score 2) 51

Matrix Reloaded was merely a disappointing film. Matrix Revolutions was a shitty, nasty sorry excuse and complete waste of time for a film. Mostly because it wasn't set inside the fucking Matrix. Honestly, if you're going to have a final war between man and machine, set it up to occur inside the matrix, not just the final fight. An army of super humans against machines.... much better than that mech crap we all fell asleep watching.

Now you've got me started ... Ties pfft ... goddam

Programming

Subversion Project Migrates To Git 162

New submitter gitficionado (3600283) writes "The Apache Subversion project has begun migrating its source code from the ASF Subversion repo to git. Last week, the Subversion PMC (project management committee) voted to migrate, and the migration has already begun. Although there was strong opposition to the move from the older and more conservative SVN devs, and reportedly a lot of grumbling and ranting when the vote was tallied, a member of the PMC (who asked to remain anonymous) told the author that 'this [migration] will finally let us get rid of the current broken design to a decentralized source control model [and we'll get] merge and rename done right after all this time.'" Source for the new git backend.

Comment Re: wtf (Score 2) 662

He wasn't charged with falling to answer, nor was he beaten until he did. The court and jury were simply informed of his answering pattern and it convinced them to find him guilty.
We've got the same crap in the UK, they can now tell the jury that you remained silent and doesn't that look guilty?
The solution is now not to say 'no comment pig', but to say, 'on the advice of my lawyer, no comment pig'! This way you have an excuse in court. You point at your lawyer and claim he told you to.

Comment Welcome to 3 years ago (Score 5, Informative) 243

I'm in the high risk card not present industry and if it wasn't so painful it'd be funny how bad it is.

3DS solves problems for Visa and nobody else. It transfers the liability from the merchant to the customer. No more 'it wasn't me'.

Only problem is, it's crap.

Bit like the chip and pin problem in the UK which is a similar joke. If I can get your card and your pin I can go shopping as you and good luck trying to explain that to the bank.

If I can fool you into giving me your 3DS password somehow, I can shop online as you with great false trust, and the merchants don't care because they're protected. Kind of.

Most merchants refuse to deploy it anyhow unless forced. It causes a 5-8% immediate drop in throughput. I wouldn't use a site that used it either.

Data Storage

How To Verify CD-R Data Retention Over Time? 303

Peter (Professor) Fo writes "I've recently had two CD-Rs reported to me as faulty which are just 3 years old. This is worrying — I suspect the failure rate for this batch could be 10%. When researching CD longevity there is old and unreliable information; pious 'how to cosset your discs so they last 100 years' blurb; and endless discussions of what sort of dye to use, don't use cheap media, burn slower (or don't), but not much by way of hard facts besides there's a lot of data loss going on. Does anyone know of a generic utility (win or *nix would suit me) that can map sector readability/error rates of CDs? I'd like to measure decay over time in my environment with my media and my other variables; and I expect others would too."
Programming

Non-Programming Jobs For a Computer Science Major? 936

An anonymous reader writes "I recently graduated from a 'major' university in America with a BS degree in Computer Science. I unfortunately must admit that I am not very skilled with programming. I finished with the degree, and I've spent much of my college career working a job doing technical support (fixing laptops, troubleshooting Windows problems, etc). What jobs can I get with a computer science degree that are NOT mainly programming jobs? A little programming wouldn't be bad, but none would be preferred. And what kind of salaries do these jobs typically fetch?"

Slashdot Top Deals

U X e dUdX, e dX, cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159...

Working...