Comment Time for USAF to enter the picture (Score 1) 204
With Directed Energy Sea Mammals —even if thef Orbiting Pelican Relay Mirror (OPRM) is no longer needed to whack Osama.
Comment Re:Alcoholic puddings? (Score 1) 215
Tom Lehrer, you have a phone call on line three.
Comment Re:Not just the pay...it's the location. (Score 2) 235
If your customers want a City address and an 020 phone number, a virtual office is £LOTS cheaper.
Comment Article is almost old enough to drink (Score 1) 1
This article is so old that its subject has been the ODNI CIO for almost a year now.
Comment Dave Langford wrote about this, kinda (Score 2) 312
The Leaky Establishment, where the large engineering firm is the Atomic Weapons Establishment and the item to be smuggled back in is a physics package.
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.
