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Comment Re:Summary wrong (Score 1) 191

A measurement cannot have such great precision that the inaccuracy in the measurement is shorter than the plank length.

That is not known to be the case. Got a reference for that?
It's also something entirely different from suggesting that space is discretized in Planck-length units, which is certainly not the case. In fact, it's a fundamental postulate of QM that the wave function is smooth and continuous (and hence, so is the location-probability distribution). If it wasn't continuous, then you'd end up with undefined momentum.

Comment Re:You newbs, MJ is not a scam... (Score 1) 243

I would think that the number of people who have a cell phone with no contract, but have broadband and a computer on 24/7, is vanishingly small.

I've got a prepaid cell phone (I use maybe 20 minutes airtime per month, it's mostly for when I'm out on jobs or actually want someone to be able to reach me when I'm not home, then I forward the landline to it). At least one computer on my LAN is always on (and is connected by DSL through an ISP whose TOS doesn't object to my servers so long as I don't do anything stupid). My total connectivity (cell, landline, DSL, ISP) is about US$95/month.

But in general, you're probably not too far off.

Comment Re:bad omen (Score 1) 162

That isn't necessarily true. It's just as possible people are wasting time fixing unimportant issues and ignoring more important ones.

I'm not trying to disparage the OpenBSD team or anything. It's just that no development team is perfect.

NASA

NASA to Test Emergency Ability of New Spacecraft 126

coondoggie writes "NASA this will show off the first mock up of its Orion space capsule ahead of the capsule's first emergency astronaut escape system test. NASA said it will jettison the full-size structural model off a simulated launch pad at the US Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The launch escape vehicle sits atop the Orion capsule which is slated to be bolted on an Ares rocket. The escape vehicle is made up of three solid rocket motors as well as separation mechanisms and canards, and should offer the crew an escape capability in the event of an emergency during launch, according to NASA."
The Media

Submission + - Associated Press puts credibility on the line

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Crenson a political science professor and a AP National writer had a piece published on ethanol. Just at the time when Bush is visiting Brazil. A country that uses ethanol for energy extensively. In case you wondered, the Associated Press, or AP, is an American news agency, the world's largest such organization.
This article says that ethanol use for energy is a bad idea no matter how you cut it. Even when some parts of this long article are correct, they are outwheigthed by the baseless inaccuracies. From " most analysts conclude its environmental benefits are questionable at best. " all the way to " even the most generous analysts estimate that it takes the energy equivalent of three gallons of ethanol to make four gallons of the stuff. " Plus the question-answer format of the middle portion of the article has a nauseating fact feeding style.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070311/ap_on_sc/ethan ol_q_a_9
Censorship

Submission + - Thailand block YouTube!

LewCPE writes: Authorities in Thailand were trying to do session hijack on every request those try to reach YouTube on last Friday. Most of requests to http://www.youtube.com/ will get reply as "301 — Permanently Removed" while the request to http://youtube.com/ or directly request to IP like http://208.65.153.251/ still success. Bangkok Post has report on this activity, it referred my post on Blognone.com[Thai]. The interesting part is the hijack server identify itself as "Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_hwforward_1_0", while the mod_hwforward_1_0 seems to be never exist. But many countries found something like this too as you may see it on Google.

Jupiter Gets New Red Spot 141

saskboy writes "The planet Jupiter is growing a new red spot. Jupiter is already well known for its Great Red Spot storm which is visible through modest backyard telescopes, so it will be interesting if this newer spot sticks around and grows. From the article: 'The official name of this storm is Oval BA, but Red Jr. might be better. It's about half the size of the famous Great Red Spot and almost exactly the same color. Oval BA first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. A similar merger centuries ago may have created the original Great Red Spot, a storm twice as wide as our planet and at least 300 years old.'"
Data Storage

Linux Support for Hybrid Hard Drives? 86

christoofar asks: "HHDD (Hybrid Hard Disk Drive) technology has been receiving some buzz lately. The concept is not new, but Samsung has been working on a consumer version of HHDD that everyone can use. HHDDs are disk drives that carry onboard RAM (in this case, NAND flash) which is non-volatile and offers to speed boot times and writes to the disk. This carries enormous benefit to laptop users who need to keep their disk activity to a minimum in order to preserve battery life. Given that Microsoft is adding support for Hybrid Hard Drives in their upcoming Windows Vista release, what efforts are being undertaken in the Linux realm to use this new storage technology?"

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