Comment Variable rate of decay? (Score 3, Interesting) 199
If the rate of radioactive decay can vary, how would this affect things like carbon 14 dating? Very interesting.
Comment Re:use the same system for slot machines (Score 1) 198
Not a bad idea, except that the main source of security for a slot machine comes from the fact that it is under 24/7 surveillance. Give someone unsupervised physical access to the machine though, and all "security" is lost.
Comment Re:People should pay for their choices (Score 1) 842
I think this point is completely missed by most people, and I wish it were talked about more in the news/media. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Either we pay for our own healthcare or we all bow to the tyranny of the majority "for the common good". I prefer the former.
Comment Selling a limited resource as "unlimited" (Score 1) 331
Is this really that bad? Selling a limited resource as "unlimited" is not sustainable. I'd rather have the smaller proportion of folks who use a larger proportion of data pay more for it. So what?
Comment Confusion... (Score 1) 44
I'm confused as to how a book "lacking in foundational knowledge and often foregoing explanation of research" can present "a comprehensive and well-referenced view of modern evolutionary research".
Don't get me wrong, the book might be terrific, but what an oxymoronic summary (there's some jargon for ya)!
Comment Re:Depends how it is funded. (Score 1) 583
Do you really think there's anything about being on the Moon that is going to change human nature? Will the Moon colonists share everything and unite in a Moon-wide kum-bah-yah?
Of course there's going to be weapons up there, and of course the US will want to "hog" all the glory. Better than China or Russia at least...
Comment The real story here... (Score 1) 198
is that China can hold the rest of the world hostage once they are able to nudge the largest WMD ever either towards or away from the Earth.
Comment Re:Misleading headline (Score 1) 238
I would counter that water is always wet. Ice is a solid and steam is a gas. Would you ask for extra Frozen-Water-In-A-Solid-Form cubes in your water?
Linux 2.6.37 Released 135
diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."
Comment This is good! (Score 1) 207
This is actually a good thing. Selling a limited "resource" as unlimited is not a sustainable system. Just ask AT&T...
Comment Re:Seattle COL (Score 1) 866
Simply put, if someone is making over $200,000 (or any other amount for that matter) it's nobody's business how they spend their money. Take your silly class warfare elsewhere.
Comment Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace! (Score 1) 797
The govt should not be as involved in price fixing, nor does their insistence upon doing so grant them any extra rights.
3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away 470
Nzimmer911 writes "Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers according to a 20 years study following 1,824 people. From the article: 'But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that - for reasons that aren't entirely clear - abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.'"
Did Sea Life Arise Twice? 238
eldavojohn writes "Dr. Adam Maloof has found fossils of sea sponges in Australia from 650 million years ago. You might think this is no big deal unless you consider that sea sponges were thought to have arisen 520 million years ago. These fossils predate the oldest hard bodied fossils we have by a hundred million years. Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.' So how is it that life survived the Marinoan glaciation? The BBC has a video on the topic and Wikipedia has a time line of the Proterozoic Eon into the Paleozoic Era."
Wireless PCIe To Enable Remote Graphics Cards 181
J. Dzhugashvili writes "If you read Slashdot, odds are you already know about WiGig and the 7Gbps wireless networking it promises. The people at Atheros and Wilocity are now working on an interesting application for the spec: wireless PCI Express. In a nutshell, wPCIe enables a PCI Express switch with local and remote components linked by a 60GHz connection. The first applications, which will start sampling next year, will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor. wPCIe works transparently to the operating system, which only sees additional devices connected over PCI Express. And as icing on the cake, wPCie controllers will let you connect to standard Wi-Fi networks, too."
