Opera does not kill applications, Apple kills applications

My take on "Guns don't kill people, people kill people"

Simply, SyFy is about as relevant to Science Fiction as the Home Shopping Network.

It just sucks ass. We used to watch 2-3 hours of Sci-Fi each night (Babylon 5, Farscape, Lexx, etc... ) now if I had a choice I would dump the channel completely.

Even the low rent UHF channels back in the mid 70's had more science fiction (The Spider, The Blob, Creature Features, etc...) What we have now is just embarrassing.

I am amazed that Sony is persisting in being a BUNCH OF JACKASSES. When I purchased a PS3 several years ago most of the appeal was the "Other OS" feature. Sure, I have bought my share of games (>20) and enjoy those too. Selling something (Other OS) and then taking it away makes many of us just think that Sony management is full of Mother-Fuc&ers.

Sony should be embracing the Other OS crowd and giving us more options to use the platform for high end computing.

Hey assholes, you made the news as a forward thinking company when you gave us the Other OS feature. Now you are making the news for being just as backwards and ignorant as Micro$oft.

What the result will be (for me) is that I will enjoy the games I have but will not spend another dime on PS3 games. Guess what, I am doing that just to spite you.

I see where Mozilla is coming from. They are looking at how many folks do not like being tracked and the popularity of programs like Adblock Plus, NoScript, etc...and are trying to add some of that functionality into the browser. Not a bad idea as there are significant numbers of folks who do not put any enhancements into their Firefox install other than some dumb toolbar. As Firefox will appeal to more and more non-technical types there would be some benefit to adding that functionality up front.

You can bet that the IE crowd will say that their browser works better and only compare the base load of Firefox.

The "do not track" header is a fine idea but it will only work for those sites that play by the rules.

Most don't.

Even with the additional "don't track header" capability I will not throw caution to the winds. I will continue to use Adblock Plus, NoScript and a few other tools.

It would be called lunathermal but yes, they think that the moon has at least a small molten core. The problem is that we are used to geothermal energy coming in some form of carrier (water) and in that regard the moon is a pretty dry place. There are more than enough thermal differences between sun/shade on the moon that you would not need to go to the complexity of drilling a borehole to get to a hot spot. Just put it in direct sunlight and there is a few hundred degrees of difference. A better bet might be to use a Carnot cycle engine (let's say with ammonia as a working fluid in a closed loop system, part in the shade, part in the sun). Or Peltier thermoelectric conversion (same hot/cold difference but with the direct conversion to DC electricity). For human habitation the best bet is underground (the deeper the better) to stabilize the temperature extremes, shield from radiation and as a fine building material. We have had a little bit of long term experience in operating machinery in a near vacuum (Mars) where odd things happen (solids that flow like fluids) and with bearing surfaces where conventional lubricants are fairly rare (other than the shuttle or the ISS). A solar furnace on the moon would develop a tremendous amount of heat for smelting operations. The moon appears to have abundant resources like aluminum in the regolith but it may be harder to find iron (meteorite mining). Going to the moon will need to yield "something" that is more difficult to get or manufacture than on the earth. Finding that technology and the market for the products will be a big challenge.

I have worked for two companies that went down the same road. One started issuing all sorts of stock options, then they did a reverse 700:1 split and the new shares ended up going for about $3 each (originally they were as high as $38 a share before the split. At one time, during the.com boom it would have been around $2.24 million dollars in stock. After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257. They did re-issue new stock options at the revalued price, it was just an insult.

For seven years I worked the 50-60 hour weeks. Ended up with ulcers, heart problems, insomnia and some stress related disorders and on a laundry list of meds (I still take 12 prescriptions a day, eight years after I was finally laid off).

Seeing the doctor at the time I was taken aback when she said "just quit, no job is worth your life". It all made sense at the time, put in a few more years, exercise my options on a few million dollars and retire by age 40.

The second company just wanted more billable hours (consultant) as they could bill on the hours you put against a project. They just one day, unilaterally decided that our billable targets were set to 50 hours/week. Even working a 60 hour week you still lose hours when doing emails, phone calls, company motivational presentations and the obligatory after hour "social" get-togethers.

I tell ya, unless it is time with someone you really are in love with, after 50 hours a week the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the folks you work with.

Usually the folks who make these sorts of proclamations on "50 hour work weeks" have already been through a few divorces (because their job was way more of a priority than their families) and would not know what to do with their time if they were not at work. At this last company I was working a really long day, it was around 8 pm when I swung by the owners office to say good night to find him sitting there drinking Jack Daniels from a paper cup in his office. That is the type of life they wanted us to live. Only one priority in the world, work your ass off to make money for them. Not giving a damn about what your decisions mean to other people (probably why his wife dumped his ass too) and making all sorts of money so at your death you can have a viking funeral, burning on piles of $1 bills.

I have worked with EPB on some other comms projects. Their system is fiber to the home.

Jamming has been going on since the second day after radio was developed. New technologies are developed to adapt to jamming conditions, then jammers get more complex to go after the new tech.

I learned many jamming techniques and countermeasures in a few graduate level courses on receiver design back in the mid 80's. What was being done was very complex, and we were only exposed to the "SENSITIVE NOFOR" security classification of what was going on. "Gating" a radar was developed back in WWII, frequency hopping around the same time, same with spread spectrum. When we were learning the tech the jamming systems could detect and jump on a new frequency in a few milliseconds. Nowadays I bet those response times are in the tens of microseconds and cover everything from "DC to daylight".

The US government would spend $8 million dollars to develop one model of a particular jammer and not blink twice at a $50,000/ unit purchase price. This would have been news if there were three more zeros after the price tag.

I would rather take the folks on death row and vivisect them for spare parts. If a death row convict makes it to space it will be as a spare kidney.

The same problem applies to electroplating operations. If your electrolyte bath is not in perfect condition, if temperatures are not right, if the current is too high, etc... you will get a bad plating finish.

Batteries (lead, lithium, nickel-cadmium, carbon-zinc) all have the same problem. A certain percentage of the metals end up in a state that is useless for battery operation. This should not be a big surprise to anyone who understands the chemical processes.

Crowdsourcing may be great for evaluating the popularity of a particular statement but it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of any statement, ideology or belief. I cannot think of a worst way to evaluate the accuracy of any piece of data.

Since when did Hawking become the end-all, be-all font of all wisdom? Yes, he is a brilliant man who has more intellectual power in one lobe of his brain than most people have in their entire heads. He sells us his "Theory of Everything" as if there is a universal truth right around the corner and more recently has began to express his opinions on God and faith.

It is nihilistic of him to now proclaim that there is likely no universal set of rules that can apply to both the quantum and macroscopic world. It is as if he is ready to dismiss it all because the secrets have not been revealed to or by him. I think we need to book this guy as a judge on America's Got Talent as he has such a irrefutable claim on knowing what's right.

Maybe, just maybe, the universe is a lot more complicated than even he (or we) can conceive. In the twilight of his career Dr. Hawking has lost his sense of wonder with the universe and wants the toy box put up on the shelf in the garage.

Audio levels are measured in millivolts mV or decibels dB. If you look up the HDTV standards there are standards for the signal level of broadcast audio. At the time I was working on this a few years ago it was also interesting to note that the signal levels for commercials was indeed set to be much higher than the normal broadcast.

Another trick that the producers of commercials do is to use speech compression to run the commercial at the maximum allowable gain. This results in a higher average signal level and is also why commercials can sound harsh. Normal human speech has amplitude variations in addition to frequency (tonal) variations. When speech compression is used it will make everything equally loud and most folks sense this as if the announcer or commercial was "yelling" at them.

It seems that the folks who must review a commercial before it is put on the air do it without the benefit of listening to how crappy the commercial sounds after it is dumped through the speech compressor. Either that or they are just dicks and think that it is cool, as long as their message gets out there.

Speech compression does have it's advantages in AM radio broadcasting where the power level of the transmitter is varied, according to the audio level and quiet pauses in a broadcast results in a much lower RF power output. BTW, this was also one of the advantages of FM radio, it transmits a constant carrier level and modulates "sideways" away from the carrier instead of up and down on the carrier..

I had worked up a hardware design using some OP amps to detect the presence of compressed audio and to kick in an attenuator on the audio signal until the compression went away. When I built my prototype I had set in 10 dB of attenuation. When I tried it out, many commercials were attenuated back to just background noise until the regular broadcast resumed. It was a "jinky" circuit and took quite a bit of twiddling to get it to operate fast enough to keep you from being blasted for a second or two at the beginning of a commercial or from attenuating the sound levels of things like action movies. I gave up on the project a few years ago and just DVR record everything I want to watch and skip through the commercials. I know, I know, I could have implemented it in software... I am a hardware hacker and do a minimum of programming.

I do not believe that this is a publicity stunt through up by some marketing department. The amount of money they are asking for is very modest and can probably pay for the electricity, network connectivity, server space and a developer or two.

I have used Xmarks for several years and it has been a painless experience to sync across machines and platforms. In fact it is so easy to use that I forget that there is a real application running somewhere that takes care of the synchronization and storage.

If they renew their pledge for data privacy and keep it spam/ adware free I will pay a modest annual fee to keep the service up and running.

For those who want to gripe about paying $10 - $20 for this service, either you have never used it or you are whining on the grounds that "all software should be free and someone else should donate the hardware, administrative expenses and electricity".

Be real folks, this would cost as much as one pizza, once a year.