Comment Re:Public information - the cops use it too. (Score 1) 847
So, an idiotic judgment by a judge justifies more idiocy?
Comment And somewhere across the pond... (Score 3, Funny) 334
... an EADS executive is laughing with glee...
US Cell Phone Plans Among World's Most Expensive 827
Albanach writes "An OECD report published today has shown moderate cell phone users in the United States are paying some of the highest rates in the world . Average US plans cost $52.99 per month compared to an average of $10.95 in Finland. The full report is available only to subscribers, however Excel sheets of the raw data are available to download." (You'll find those Excel sheets — which open just fine in OpenOffice — on the summary page linked above.)
Earth's Period of Habitability Is Nearly Over 756
xp65 writes "Scientists at this year's XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but that: 'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years.' Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Garbage Collection Algorithms Coming For SSDs 156
MojoKid writes "A common concern with the current crop of Solid State Drives is the performance penalty associated with block-rewriting. Flash memory is comprised
of cells that usually contain 4KB pages that are arranged in blocks of 512KB. When a cell is unused, data can be written to it relatively quickly. But if a cell already contains some data, even if it fills only a single page in the block, the entire block must be re-written. This means that whatever data is already present in the block must be read, then it must be combined or replaced, and the entire block is then re-written. This process takes much longer than simply writing data straight to an empty block. This isn't a concern on fresh, new SSDs, but over time, as files are written, moved, deleted, or replaced, many blocks are a left holding what is essentially orphaned or garbage data, and their long-term performance degrades because of it. To mitigate this problem, virtually all SSD manufacturers have incorporated, or soon will incorporate, garbage collection schemes into their SSD firmware which actively seek out and remove the garbage data. OCZ, in combination with Indilinx, is poised to release new firmware for their entire line-up of Vertex Series SSDs that performs active garbage collection while the drives are idle, in order to restore performance to like-new condition, even on a severely 'dirtied' drive."
Submission + - Microsoft 'update' breaks Office 2008 for Mac (channelregister.co.uk)
yumyum writes: A week ago the MS Office 2008 install on my MacBook Pro notified me that there was an update available, Service Pack 2. I dutifully granted it permission to do its business and update my MS Office 2008 stuff. However, today I found out that I could not open a PowerPoint presentation. The message I got was that perhaps the file was corrupted. Other files exhibited the same behavior. Checking online, I found this article letting me know that I was not alone in my problem. In it there is a link to a MS help topic that mentions some, frankly, stupid workarounds for those of us afflicted by this "cannot open" issue, and a faint glimmer of hope that sometime in August there will be a fix for what MS broke. So, for those of you contemplating installing MS Office 2008 Service Pack 2, two words: DON'T
Comment Re:Glad I left that shithole (Score 1) 301
It's Arpaio, by the way. My favorite antic is what he's been doing against New Times staff... I still wonder why he hasn't been arrested yet.
Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 301
But we're in the land where supply-side economics is king. Raising taxes is BLASPHEMY! :(
Comment Re:Arizona is worse than California (Score 1) 301
I get your point, but do you really want these people to stick around any longer than the bare minimum?
Emacs Hits Version 23 367
djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."
Comment Re:Wrong! (Score 1) 189
Plugging that into Google Maps (which Apple conveniently uses for the map and provides a driving directions link for) shows that the two locations are separated by 8.5 miles. So they're not even close.
However, in Phoenix terms, that's 10 minutes of driving. Everyone drives in here (widespread suburbia, awesome freeway network, horrible public transportation outside the central Phoenix-Tempe-Mesa corridor, and oven-like temperatures), and someone from Scottsdale won't particularly mind driving down to the Chandler location if he wants to get his dose of Apple for the day. Also, consider that both the Scottsdale Quarter and Fashion Square are near the Pima Freeway -- State Route 101L -- so they really aren't as far as the map says they are.
Jellyfish Swimming Is Mixing the Oceans 47
eviltangerine writes "A new article from LiveScience suggests that marine creatures, such as the jellyfish, may contribute as much to ocean mixing as wind and tides. Wired is also covering the story and includes a video of the jellyfish in action. From the article, 'The mere act of swimming implies that some water travels with the swimmer,' said CalTech engineer Kakani Katija, co-author of the study in Nature Wednesday. 'Drift applies to all animals, to anything with a body.' No word yet on when the jellyfish blender is to debut."
Classilla, a New Port of Mozilla To Mac OS 9 170
oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs,' and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."
Stacking of New Space Vehicle Begins At KSC 121
Matt_dk writes "For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a new space vehicle will begin stacking on a mobile launch platform (MLP) at Kennedy Space Center. The Ares I-X aft skirt, which was mated to a solid fuel segment in the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility at KSC, rolled over to the 528-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building today, where it will be lifted and placed on the MLP in High Bay 3. On that platform, workers will secure the aft booster and continue adding segments of the first stage rocket, the upper stage simulators, the crew module mockup and the launch abort system simulator, taking the vehicle to a height of 327 feet."
Comment Re:Laws Of Technology..... (Score 1) 519
Now it's not fair to assign the blame for those penmanship incidents to doctors replacing penmanship with typing. Doctors have always had horrible and illegible handwriting, since they have to digest a horrible amount of information being recited at them in the shortest amount of time possible (as a doctor friend of mine told me). So, their handwriting degenerates to a modified shorthand, which they retain after leaving med school...
