Comment VüDü Linux improvement (Score 1) 58
Will CellOS make it easier to install Linux on a dead badger?
Ask Slashdot: Radiation Detection For Tokyo Resident? 371
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an American who is living in Tokyo. Stories have started popping up about 'radiation hot spots' in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures so I have begun to worry. I live on the first floor of my apartment building and right by our washing machine there is a gutter out there that is clogged with rain water and mud, which has me especially worried because my wife and I are planning to have kids soon. Obviously no one from the government is going to come by to check our gutter so I feel the need to take matters into my own hands. I have absolutely no idea so I'm asking you guys. What kind of radiation detector should I get? A Geiger Counter? If it measures Gamma rays is that enough? Are alpha and beta dangerous too? I know no one has all the answers regarding radiation but any advice you guys could give me would be great."
SpaceX Reveals Plans For Full Launch System Re-usability 227
FleaPlus writes "During a talk at the National Press Club, SpaceX's Elon Musk revealed the company's plans for making their Falcon 9 rocket fully reusable. A rendering depicts the first stage, upper stage, and Dragon capsule all separately returning to the Earth's surface and making a controlled, rocket-powered landing. During the next few years SpaceX will be testing VTVL (Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing) maneuvers and re-usability with their Falcon 9-based 'Grasshopper' testbed, with up to 70 test launches per year. Musk stated that if reuse is successful, it would result in a 100x reduction in their already-low launch costs, a key step toward Musk's long-term aim of lowering the price of a ticket to Mars to $500K."
Comment Re:Either way, its the end of T-Mobile (Score 1) 325
In eastern Washington, on the other hand, T-Mobile's coverage is majorly lacking. Tiny specks of UMTS around downtown Ellensburg and Yakima, maybe a little more in the Tri-Cities and Spokane; everything else is 2G or (more likely) hope-you-brought-a-US-Cellular-handset.
Comment Re:Either way, its the end of T-Mobile (Score 1) 325
Coverage in the US: Verizon > Sprint >>> AT&T > T-Mobile — US Cellular is up there in some areas of the country (e.g. WA, OR). Compared to VZW, Sprint may not be so hot, but it has somewhat more coverage than AT&T.
Also, by "somewhat more coverage" I'm taking AT&T's zoomed-out coverage map as gospel. In particular, I'm counting GSM as if it's real coverage. Considering UMTS only, which makes sense because a) GPRS blows goats and b) their marketing heavily emphasizes activities that require UMTS or HSPA, AT&T's coverage wouldn't suffice as a dancer's outfit in a titty bar.
Comment Re:Cool! (Score 1) 185
Why would you hack the average Pakistani's bank account? May as well hack Mr. Ten Percent's.
Oh, wait a second —Swiss banks aren't subject to this law. Never mind.
Comment Re:The thing with ASCII (Score 1) 728
+1. You can pry my vt320 out of my cold, dead hands. And, no, that's not a vt320 emulator.
NRO Warns They Are On Final IPv4 Address Blocks 282
eldavojohn writes "According to the Number Resources Organization, they will have issued their final twelve IPv4 blocks in a few months. Each block is 16 million addresses and represents 1/256th of the total addresses issued. We are now down to 12 blocks left in the global pool for issuing to Regional Internet Registries, who will then assign the last addresses that will run out sometime later in 2011. The pool of free addresses works out to be less than half of where we were in January. The new numbers from the NRO indicate estimated global pool IP address exhaustion in a few months, a year earlier than they estimated at the beginning of 2010."
Comment Re:Pigs in Spaaaaaace! (Score 1) 342
Bingo. Heavy-lift rockets are nifty, but trying to replicate Saturn V is just overcompensation.
Comment Re:End mail delivery on Monday, Wednesday, or Frid (Score 1) 504
My local post office (Yakima, WA) is only open Monday through Friday, 0800-1730. Where US post offices are open on Saturday, they're almost never open late enough that you can actually pick up a package on Saturday after an attempted delivery on the same day. I'd go for weekday delivery only in exchange for the post offices being open a minimum of twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
Comment Re:Neflix != Amazon, and postal service == bad (Score 1) 504
If there's a need to subsidize rural mail delivery, the government can just as well levy a tax on all postage and contract with privatized-USPS or someone else to provide service in areas where it would otherwise be uneconomical.
In the current system, the USPS monopoly allows it to have hours that make banks look good and send men with guns to shut you down if you even think about sending a non-urgent document by FedEx.
Obama Sends Nuclear Experts To Tackle BP Oil Spill 389
An anonymous reader writes "The US has sent a team of nuclear physicists to help BP plug the 'catastrophic' flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its leaking Deepwater Horizon well, as the Obama administration becomes frustrated with the oil giant's inability to control the situation. The five-man team — which includes a man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s — is the brainchild of Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary." Let's hope this doesn't mean they actually try the nuclear option. In other offshore drilling news, reader mygoditsfullofdoom informs us that a Venezuelan gas rig has sunk in the Caribbean (with no loss of life). This one is being laid at the feet of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, which hasn't exactly been regarded as uber-competent "after President Hugo Chavez fired half the company's managers and senior engineers following a 2002 strike."
Submission + - eyeDriver Lets Drivers Steer Car With Their Eyes
Hugh Pickens writes: "NPR reports that German researchers have tested a new technology called eyeDriver that tracks a driver's eye movement and, in turn, steers the car in whatever direction they're looking at speeds up to 31 mph. "The next step will be to get it to drive 60 miles per hour," says Raul Rojas, an artificial intelligence researcher at Berlin's Free University. A Dodge Caravan fitted with eyeDriver has been tested on the tarmac at an abandoned airport at Tempelhof Airport, However, it remains unclear when — or if — the technology will be commercialized as questions about safety and practicability abound: What about looking at a cute girl next to the road for a few seconds? Not to mention taking phone calls or typing a text while driving. But the researchers have an answer to distracted drivers: "The Spirit of Berlin" is also an autonomous car equipped with GPS navigation, scores of cameras, lasers and scanners that enable it to drive by itself. And should the technology-packed vehicle have a major bug, there's still an old fashioned way of stopping it. Two big external emergency buttons at the rear of the car allow people outside to shut down all systems."
Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn 405
unixan writes "In a report by the SEC Inspector General that smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, 33 recent ethics investigations all showed that the government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn — while the economy was tipping over. One cited example: 'A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.'"
Comment Re:My first first? (Score 1) 74
Outside the M25? Could be ages.
Then again, T-Mobile's US UMTS network is practically nonexistent. Take Boston as an example: they've got 3G inside 495, except for a large number of inexplicable nulls and EDGE-only areas. Then you go from Worcester to Springfield and it's EDGE only. 2G coverage for a 4G world.
