Comment Re:Eeep! (Score 1) 187
It seems appropriate to make a joke about the Mall in Edmonton, but I haven't had enough caffeine today.
New Estimates Say Earth's Oceans Smaller Than Once Believed 263
Velcroman1 writes with this snippet from Fox News: "Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big? As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume — the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute set out to more accurately answer that question — and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles. And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor."
Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
xkcd, Devotion To Duty 167
xkcd really hit the nail on the head today.
Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
Comment Re:Why implants? (Score 2, Insightful) 314
I was thinking that, too.
The oldest computer I have around is a 1990 Amiga 500; I mostly use new kit, of course. Anyone who gets an implant is going to be stuck with it pretty much for life, or commit to brain surgery every 3-5 years to install the newer one.
On the other hand, a 'trode net or hat would seem doable; sign me up for that.
Comment Re:2010 Year of the linux (Score 1) 485
Me, too
I wonder if we'll be able to hear the giant sloshing sound -- starting 24 months after the iPhone 3G came out -- of everyone moving away from AT&T / iPhone to whoever is offering a good plan with reasonable price/terms/etc. On the other hand, the iPhone is still a (historical) game-changer, in that it got everyone away from horrible dumb-smart-phones that couldn't even keep a calendar in a user-friendly way.
I wonder if we'll be able to hear the giant sloshing sound -- starting 24 months after the iPhone 3G came out -- of everyone moving away from AT&T / iPhone to whoever is offering a good plan with reasonable price/terms/etc. On the other hand, the iPhone is still a (historical) game-changer, in that it got everyone away from horrible dumb-smart-phones that couldn't even keep a calendar in a user-friendly way.
Submission + - Initial Reviews of Google Wave (louisgray.com) 1
bonch writes: "Reviews of Google Wave are out, and opinions are that it has potential as a development platform but is noisy to use for real-time communication. Robert Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and calls trying to use it a "productivity killer" compared to simpler mediums like email and Twitter."
Submission + - Obama bars federal workers from texting and drivin (computerworld.com)
CWmike writes: "A two-day Distracted Driving Summit in Washington concluded Thursday, after experts raised multiple thorny questions on how to reduce cell phone and texting while driving, with a big emphasis placed on driver and employer responsibility. But that was not before President Obama signed an executive order that tells all federal employees not to engage in texting while driving government vehicles. LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether and restrict cell phone use by truck and interstate bus drivers, and disqualify school bus drivers from receiving commercial driver's licenses if they have been convicted of texting while driving. His department also plans to make permanent some restrictions placed on the use of cell phones in rail operations, he added without offering further details. The executive order "shows the federal government is leading by example" and "sends a signal that distracted driving dangerous," LaHood said."
Submission + - Why isn't AT&T Femotcell Technology an App?
hajihill writes: "The technology behind a femtocell is essentially a network bridge which connects to a cell phone signal and bridges that signal via an authenticated VOIP connection back to, in this case, AT&T where it is routed as a phone call normally would be. This is understood. What I don't get is why a smartphone, with wifi capabilities, would need a femtocell to operate where there is already an available wireless connection in place. At the point where AT&T has worked out how to authenticate a call routed over the open internet as coming from your handset, isn't this extra piece of hardware they are charging us for superfluous?
I hope you choose to carry this story as it seems to be a case of AT&T blatantly profiting from customer ignorance and really shouldn't be tolerated. AT&T instead should release an AT&T branded VOIP app for it's iPhone handsets, instead of peddling additional hardware to it's customers when it should have beefed up it's wireless networks in the first place. Of course, the same could be said of others carriers and their respective smartphones, however, with the connectivity issues experienced by AT&T and iPhone users, I think this is particularly pertinent."
I hope you choose to carry this story as it seems to be a case of AT&T blatantly profiting from customer ignorance and really shouldn't be tolerated. AT&T instead should release an AT&T branded VOIP app for it's iPhone handsets, instead of peddling additional hardware to it's customers when it should have beefed up it's wireless networks in the first place. Of course, the same could be said of others carriers and their respective smartphones, however, with the connectivity issues experienced by AT&T and iPhone users, I think this is particularly pertinent."
Submission + - Is there a zero-day OpenSSH exploit in the wild? (dshield.org)
eefsee writes: sans.org reports 'Over the past 24 hours we've had a number of readers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use.' It is not clear if this is a real exploit or sysadmin CYA masquerading as exploit, but some web hosts have already turned of SSH in response. On 7/5 HostGator shut down SSH on all its shared servers. Site5 did the same thing the next day. The loss of SSH, of course, kills SFTP on these hosts as well, forcing customers to fall back on FTP. Now that is security!
Submission + - RIAA's Bid to Stop Jammie From Objecting Fails (blogspot.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA's motion to prevent Jammie Thomas-Rasset from objecting to evidentiary problems with the RIAA's copyright registrations has been denied. The decision by Judge Michael J. Davis (PDF) held that 'The Court's Order granting a new trial in this matter granted an entirely new trial on all issues. The fact that Defendant did not object to Plaintiffs' evidence of registration in the First Trial does not preclude Defendant from putting Plaintiffs to their burden of proof on this issue in the retrial.' Judge Davis rejected the RIAA's contention that he could take 'judicial notice' of the validity of the registrations, since 'judicial notice' doctrine is only applicable to matters which are 'not subject to reasonable dispute'."
Comment Re:economics as usual (Score 2, Informative) 266
No, the problem is that we really do need more address space. IP addresses include identification information and network topology information. We really do have almost that many computers, and almost that complex of topology.
Forcing the holders of large legacy allocations to give them up would hurt more than moving to IPv6, and it'd only get us a few more years of IPv4 growth. Opening up the class-E space would also hurt more than moving to IPv6, and still only give us a few more years.
NAT effectively adds 16 more bits to the address, but does so on a per-connection basis, not a per-node basis. It requires the network to be stateful, instead of just passing packets while the end hosts carry all the state. (This means that the end hosts can't just route around problems.) NAT is messy, but it happens to work because it can steal some bits of TCP or UDP to make up for not having enough in the IP header.
IPv6 adds way more address space than anyone can think of a use for. So it can encode a lot of information about the node's position in the network, plus keep an address unique for (practically) ever.
Comment Re:Old Tech Costs? (Score 1) 204
300,000 Americans is a big N.
Erm, 300,000,000.
