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Comment Re:Shuttleworth (Score 1) 251

by mknewman (#44423349) Attached to: Ubuntu Edge Smartphone Funding Trends Low
Interesting, they have sold 78 T-Shirts for $50 a pop in just a few hours. It'd be funny to get our phones funded by swag. If you look at the bottom graph http://ubuntu-edge.info/ you will see that although they have slipped under the trend line it's not that far off, and some people may be waiting till late in the project to plop down the $830 or less. That may be a wise move as I have tied up my money for a month, I have no doubt I can get it back but I'd rather have the phones.

Comment Use wind power or solar (Score 1) 775

by mknewman (#44166467) Attached to: Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All
My home power is 100% wind power. If I charge an electric car there is almost no polution (tires and a tad of grease here and there), so his argument is only valid if you don't make an informed choice to buy a renewable energy plan. I'm personally waiting for Tesla to come out with their $30k car and then I'll definately be looking to buy.

Comment Just like Steven Hawking (Score 1) 285

I think these House Republicans are a bunch of doomsday preppers who think that by getting to another planet/moon everything will be rosy for the human race. What they don't understand (because of their lack of science background) is that it's a lot easier to live in SPACE than on a body with a gravity well. We should be building ships to go to the asteroid belt and/or Jupiter and Saturn not wasting our time on cold dead planets/moons. Let's go somewhere interesting and easy not hard.

Comment Well it worked for me (Score 1) 295

by mknewman (#43567655) Attached to: Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School
I spent my youth reading everything sci-fi I could find (and there wasn't nearly as much as there is now). I wanted to be an astronaut so I took flying lessons (all astronauts were pilots back then) but my eyes were not good enough (late nights reading sci-fi?) but I ended up working at NASA and still love reading sci-fi. I tried to get my daughter interested in sci-fi but she is more into adventure. Oh well, each to their own. She did go to a very good school and Farentheit 451, 1984, and Flowers for Algernon were on her reading list.

Submission + - WIMPs found? (chron.com)

Submitted by mknewman
mknewman writes: Between 2006 and 2008 about four dozen physicists buried 19 Germanium-based detectors and 11 silicon-based detectors deep in a mine in Minnesota. They believed the Germanium detectors might be just right to capture the rare, but theoretically possible collision between a WIMP and an atomic nucleus. The silicon detectors were just there to confirm the result — i.e. if a Germanium detector recorded such a collision and a silicon detector did not, that would be good evidence for a WIMP.

After taking their data for three years the scientists got a ho-hum result — the Germanium detectors recorded two events, when on average they would have expected to see 0.9 events during the time period. This was not statistically significant, and moreover, they later concluded these events were attributable to the leakage of electrons.

Since the primary detectors showed no significant results, data collected by the silicon detectors, which could only detect WIMPs up to a mass of about 15 GeV were not analyzed.

Then, after some considerations, the physicists came to believe that maybe the WIMPs weren’t really, really big. So they went back and studied the silicon detector data and found three events, when they would have expected just 0.7 events during the time period of data taking. This is statistically significant.

So they published their results on Monday (see paper). Based upon their statistical analysis, they are 99.8 percent sure they have observed some WIMPs at a mass of about 8 GeV. But in particle physics, certainty doesn’t come until they are 99.9999 percent sure.

Submission + - Space station's antimatter detector finds its first evidence of dark matter (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by mknewman
mknewman writes: Scientists say a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station has detected its first hints of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.

The evidence from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, revealed Wednesday at Europe's CERN particle physics lab, is based on an excess in the cosmic production of anti-electrons, also known as positrons. The AMS research team can't yet completely rule out other explanations for the bump, but the fresh findings provide the best clues yet as to the nature of dark matter.
The Internet

Submission + - SiriusXM arbritrarly restricting mobile apps to it's high speed data service (ipetitions.com)

Submitted by mknewman
mknewman writes: I am a Lifetime member on SiriusXM and have low speed Internet access, which is free with the account. It works fine on desktop platforms but not on mobile devices. The Android app says to upgrade to High Speed Data when I log in. Talking to the tech support they acknowledge this and basically say to upgrade, at $3.50 per month. Three problems with this, I don't want to pay $3.50 per month for service I already bought, and don't need the high speed fidelity as the low speed sounds just fine, especially on talk shows, and lastly the high speed data will use up more of my monthly allotment.

I have created an onliine petition to request them to unrestrict this. Please sign it if you agree.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/siriusxm-should-allow-low-speed-internet-on-its/
NASA

Submission + - NASA Asteroid Capture Mission to Be Proposed in 2014 Budget (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by asteroinauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Obama signs 'Monsanto Protection Act' Into Law (rt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite over 250,000 people's names on a petition asking for a veto of the the spending bill, Obama on Thursday signed into law HR 933 which includes a rider referred to as the "Monsanto Protection Act." This provision "effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future... With HR 933 now a law, however, the court system no longer has the right to step in and protect the consumer."

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