Comment Re:Not bad (Score 1) 86
I was wondering how best to add a cow into the fire tornado.
Comment Re:Not bad (Score 1) 86
I don't think the wet sponge and lighter fluid technique would work for that.
Submission + - Is Sarah Palin a Computer Criminal?
pickens writes: Marcia Hoffman writes for the EFF that according to a recent article in Vanity Fair, Sarah Palin's distinctive voice on Facebook and Twitter may actually be someone else's and while lots of high-profile people probably don't update their own Facebook pages, Facebook's terms of use prohibit several things that Palin and her ghostwriter may have done: accessing someone else's account, sharing their passwords to let someone else access their accounts, transferring their accounts to someone else (without Facebook's written permission), providing false personal information, and "facilitating" or "encouraging" someone else to violate the terms of use. Violating a website's terms of use is a big deal, according to Facebook. In fact, Facebook says it's a federal crime. In Facebook v. Power Ventures, Facebook sued a service that lets social network users view all their information from various social networking sites on one page. Like the way Sarah Palin's ghostwriter accesses Sarah's account, Power's service uses your password to access your account, with your permission. Facebook claims that this violates its terms of use, and any act that violates its terms of use is a violation of computer intrusion laws such as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. "Are Sarah Palin and Barack Obama computer criminals? We don't think so," writes Hoffman. "Facebook and other companies need to stop trying to misuse computer crime laws to turn violations of terms of use into crimes."
Submission + - (Don't!) make your own fire tornado (physicscentral.com)
Flash Modin writes: In the last two weeks, both water and fire tornadoes have been widely covered by the media. As any physicists would have, we immediately thought 'I want to do that!' SO... You should absolutely, under no circumstances, attempt to recreate the following fire tornado; but if you did, here's exactly what you would need, how you would do it, and what it would look like.
Submission + - Firm can't fire man for 1.8 cent theft (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: BERLIN (Reuters) A German company that fired a man for the theft of 1.8 euro cents (two U.S. cents) worth of electricity had no grounds for sacking him, a court ruled, dismissing the firm's appeal against his reinstatement.
Network administrator Oliver Beel lost his job after charging his Segway, a two-wheeled electric vehicle, at work in May 2009. After he connected the vehicle to the firm's power source for 1-1/2 hours, his boss asked him to remove it.
Twelve days later Beel found himself without a job.
Network administrator Oliver Beel lost his job after charging his Segway, a two-wheeled electric vehicle, at work in May 2009. After he connected the vehicle to the firm's power source for 1-1/2 hours, his boss asked him to remove it.
Twelve days later Beel found himself without a job.
Submission + - Cheerleader Wins Libel Suit... By Suing Wrong Site (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the "y" at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it.
Submission + - Developer demands Pirate Bay not remove torrent (geek.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This week TPB got a very different e-mail, though. It was a “Notice of Ridiculous Activity” from a software developer who had found one of its apps cracked and listed as a torrent on TPB.
The app in question is called Memories developed by Coding Robots. Memories is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you’ve enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That of course didn’t stop someone cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent.
Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it he was upset, not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it.
The best section of the e-mail has to be this, though:
I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.
The app in question is called Memories developed by Coding Robots. Memories is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you’ve enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That of course didn’t stop someone cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent.
Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it he was upset, not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it.
The best section of the e-mail has to be this, though:
I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.
Comment Re:Says who? (Score 1) 4
They didn't "come up with" the 70-percent figure. That was done by another team at the University of Hawaii, as they cite very clearly. The focus here was on ambient shipping noise, not on the low frequency (10 Hz) waves covered in the previous paper. So no there isn't a 70-percent increase for waves in the 100-1000 Hz range, as they clearly state IN the paper. In fact, that was the point of this most recent work, to show that not just low frequency waves will propagate farther, ambient shipping noise will as well. And THIS research was published by the Acoustical Society of America, so yes THE acoustics guys do take them seriously. And your superiors in the Navy do as well: They sponsored it!
Comment Says who? (Score 1) 4
One or two decibels close to a noise source is indeed a small difference, but at a 2 dB increase for 1000Hz here amounts to a 60-percent increase in energy.
And the 70-percent figure came from a paper published in a Nature Journal. You're welcome to conclude that if you'd like, but I think I'd rather trust that to acoustical physicists at one of the most respected oceanographic organizations and the editors of Nature/ASA.
Read the paper for free...
http://scitation.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=JASMAN0001280000030EL130000001&idtype=cvips&prog=normal&bypassSSO=1
Submission + - Deep ocean to get louder with climate change (physicscentral.com) 4
Flash Modin writes: An increase of carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere is expected to coincide with an increase in ocean CO2 levels as well over the coming century. Physicists modeled how shipping noise will travel through the deep ocean over the coming century by taking into account changes in pH and found that sounds will eventually penetrate deep places that are normally quiet. Previous work had suggested that an increase in ocean acidity would decrease the number of sound absorbing boron ions and allow low-frequency sound to travel 70-percent farther. In this paper, published last week in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, physicists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that the impacts will also be seen at frequencies more commonly produced by ships, with an increase of a couple decibels in the frequency range of 100Hz to 1000Hz. A few decibels isn't much, but deep in the ocean and far away from such noise sources, that can be a large difference. The researchers say it's unknown what effect, if any, this might have on deep sea life because little work has been done on how marine animals hear.
Comment Not so hard to escape a "random walk" (Score 1) 320
There was some research released a few months ago that showed if you're escaping from a predator that behaves in a random walk type way (i.e. a zombie) then you're safest bet is a maze like environment. So if the $*&T does hit the fan, head to the mall, not some huge barn.
What Happens To a Football Player's Neurons? 176
An anonymous reader writes "It seems like every week there's a new story about the consequences of all those concussions experienced by football players and other athletes — just a few days ago, the NY Times reported that some athletes diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease may actually have a neural disease brought on by head trauma. But missing in these stories is an explanation of what head trauma actually does to the brain cells. Now Carl Zimmer has filled in the gap with a column that takes a look at how neurons respond to stress, and explains how stretching a neuron's axon turns its internal structure into 'mush.'"
Comment Re:Wow, I got that one right ... (Score 1) 15
Actually, if you read the paper these guys are also working on designing better champagne flutes that will retain more of the bubbles.
Scientists Find a Better Way To Pour Champagne 15
BuzzSkyline writes "It's better to pour Champagne the way a good bartender draws a beer, by running it down the inside surface of the glass. The revelation, which appears in July 2010 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, flies in the face of age-old French traditions, which require the bubbly to be poured in a stream that free-falls straight down the center of a champagne flute. By using infrared thermography to image the carbon dioxide that escapes over the rim of a Champagne glass for various style pours, the researchers proved that the gentler, beer-like technique allows the wine to retain more of the dissolved gas that is critical to the whole Champagne experience."
Comment Holography's not dead (Score 4, Informative) 86
FermiLab had an awesome holography art show awhile back. There's still some out there.
This docu is great though, and Doctor Laser is too. Pretty sweet for a make your own contest.
