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Google

Submission + - Google, H.264 and WebM - the mud clears (sort of)

Submitted by rudy_wayne
rudy_wayne writes: When it was announced that H.264 was being dropped from Google's Chrome browser I thought it was really weird since Google converted all of YouTube's videos to H.264 just 3 years ago. Now, Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian says the decision to drop H.264 was made entirely by the Chrome team and did not come from Google's top management. A related article at ZDNet sums it up as "Google is not giving up H.264 on YouTube, H.264 will continue to be supported in Android, and it has nothing to do with YouTube storage issues, H.264 license pricing or Google's desire to be totally open source — it's about Chrome wanting to be disruptive.
Science

Submission + - The LHC Grid can't model the Grid (nature.com)

Submitted by gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: Nature News has just published a story that tracks data from the Large Hadron Collider across the machine's computing Grid. As I mention in an accompanying blog post, one odd fact is about the Grid is that the people running it don't have very good models of it. They've tried, but the whole system (roughly 200,000 processing cores in 34 countries) is just too complex. Fortunately, the Grid seems to work pretty well regardless.
Security

Submission + - FAA: Lasers pointed at aircraft doubled in 2010 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Perhaps it is the advent of cheaper lasers that anyone can afford or maybe just an increase in morons, but the FAA today said that in 2010, nationwide reports of laser beams being pointed at airplanes almost doubled from 2009 to more than 2,800, making it the highest number of laser events since the FAA began keeping track in 2005.

Comment Re:So about auto insurance (Score 1) 1505

by interfecio (#34537784) Attached to: Judge Declares Federal Healthcare Plan (Partly) Unconstitutional
You are only required to carry auto insurance to pay for damages that you do to OTHER people / property. This is called having just liability. You are not required to carry full coverage, unless the bank owns your car, then it's really not your car, so again, you're paying in case you damage other persons (the banks) property. Having only liability, you're self-insuring your own vehicle of damages and will pay everything out of pocket to fix your vehicle. Think of the law requiring you to provide full coverage on your vehicle. You are also not required by law to purchase a vehicle.
Social Networks

Top Reason for Facebook Unfriending Is Too Many Useless Posts 300

Posted by samzenpus from the if-you-don't-have-any-thing-say dept.
alphadogg writes "The No. 1 reason why friends dump friends on Facebook is when they get fed up seeing too many useless posts, according to new research out of the University of Colorado Denver Business School. Posts about polarizing subjects such as politics and religion as well as inappropriate and racist comments also sever many Facebook relationships, according to Christopher Sibona, a PhD student in the Computer and Science and Information Systems program. 'Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online but little is known on how those relationships end,' said Sibona, whose research will be published in January by the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 'Perhaps this will help us develop a theory of the entire cycle of friending and unfriending.' Sibona surveyed more than 1,500 Facebook users to get to the bottom of why people dump each other. Not surprisingly, people who flood others with posts are at great risk of being unfriended. 'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said." Samzenpus likes this.

Comment Probably cheaper... (Score 3, Insightful) 182

by interfecio (#33183344) Attached to: Google Testing an Airborne Camera Drone
...more efficient, and faster to get up to date imagery for maps than to wait and pay for satellite imagery. Military has these planes that fly by themselves to take pictures to update maps. This looks like it's just the civilian sector following lead. I can only imagine that aligning and presenting imagery data from an aircraft is a lot easier and requires less compute/man hours than satellite imagery. Especially if the need is only for new imagery of a small area.

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