Comment I'd be happy to just put a webcam up there. (Score 3, Interesting) 199
With telemetry back to Earth. Seriously... NASA could do that with their eyes closed.
Lunar Cam 2011. That's MY crowd source mission.
UVB-76 Broadcasts New Voice Message 560
Doug52392 writes "Following days of increased activity, the Russian numbers station UVB-76 has sent out a new voice transmission. The transmission, sent out on August 23, 2010 at 9:35AM PST, recited the following in Russian: 'UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4' The station, believed to be a part of the former Soviet Union's dead man's switch system, has been continually broadcasting for over twenty years, and its purpose has never been fully explained."
Comment That's all it does? (Score 1) 429
And yet the activesync lock-up remains....
Comment It's not censorship. (Score 1) 588
That word has been bastardized beyond belief... in an effort to cry about how "oppressed" someone *feels*, they've watered down true censorship.
Apple made a "business decision", maybe a crappy one, but it is still a business decision. The First Amendment (for us U.S. folks) guarantees you the right to say something, but it doesn't require someone hand you the soap box... nor does it suppress *their* right to free speech in countering your argument.
China practices true censorship. People go to jail in an effort to silence them. The government shows up at the door and demands that you delete, or deletes it for you.
When the US Government Built Ultra-Safe Cars 520
Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]."
Ultrasound As a Male Contraceptive 599
TeslaBoy writes "The BBC has an article about using ultrasound aimed at the testicles as a reversible male contraceptive. This can last for six months. With a grant of $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers at the University of North Carolina will push ahead with more clinical trials, fine tuning, and safety tests."
Comment Re:Microsoft LifeCam Cinema (Score 2, Informative) 218
I second this. The Cinema HD is head and shoulders above the old Lifecam's, and better than anything else I've seen on the market (to date). Catch it on sale you'll pay $50. (And it's easily disassembled for hacking/repurposing.)
Does HP + Palm = Facepalm? 236
ChiefMonkeyGrinder submitted a bit of commentary on yesterday's news that
Hewlett-Packard was buying Palm. From TFA:
"When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles ('clueless' was how I tweeted it). Why, I wondered, did it need to pay $1.2 billion for a dying platform when it could have used the increasingly popular Android for nothing? (OK, it probably picked up a few useful patents, as well.) I also thought that it didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones."
Comment Isn't the cut off for nomination February 1st? (Score 4, Insightful) 1721
That is one hell of a first 11 days.
(Or one hell of a consolation prize for not scoring the Olympics.)
(Or an ironic thing to give a man who declared war on the moon.)
(Or one hell of a band-aid for being satirized on SNL)
Comment And what, exactly, connects *TO* the cloud? (Score 3, Funny) 157
And how do you connect to it? I hate this idiotic world view that we all magically plug into the cloud and the data mystically appears in front of our eyeballs.
Last time I checked, the cloud holds the data... it doesn't get us to the cloud, nor does it process the data (well, in some cases, maybe).
They're all unknowingly implying that we're going to plug into some matrix style knowledge bank.
And if that really is the case, I guess my IT job will shift to cleaning those metal brain plugs.
Comment Hw incredibly short-sighted... (Score 2, Insightful) 829
We can give them 4 billion dollars and have aircraft to show for it, or give them 4 billion in bailout money to save the jobs this will impact and have NOTHING to show for it.
Comment Going old school... (Score 1) 459
Anyone remember the old-school trashing technique of using the chemicals from strike anywhere matches on a 5.25 floppy disk. Insert disk, r/w head hits surface, ignition.
So I offer, pack the shell with ohio blue tip matches. A bigger brain than mine (not so much) will need to figure out how to light them.
The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool 165
$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"
Tricked Into Buying OpenOffice.org? 543
mldkfa writes "Recently I told a friend about OpenOffice and how it was a great alternative to the big name pay office suites. She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0. The next time she opened her e-mail she found a request for 98 [Euro] for her 1-year subscription to OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the company that she downloaded it from. Apparently the EULA stated this cost and here in Germany she is required to pay up. So I thought I would ask Slashdot, should she pay? On the OpenOffice.org German website there is a warning of these schemes being legal. Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else? It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends." Below, read Google's translation of the warning; it wouldn't be the first time that open source software has been lightly repackaged and sold in ways that should raise eyebrows among anyone familiar with the wide, free availability of the same apps.
Bats Inspiring Future Micro Unmanned Aircraft 76
coondoggie writes "It's not the first time researchers have tried to emulate flapping as a way to fly aircraft, but US Air Force-funded researchers are now looking at how bats move to help them develop future micro-aircraft. According to these researchers, birds, bats, and insects have some highly varied mechanical properties that researchers have so far not utilized in engineering flight vehicles. The idea is to reproduce bat mechanics and develop technology could lead to small, remote controlled aircraft able to move in places where fixed-wing aircraft have a hard time — like the interiors of buildings, caves, or tunnels."
