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Sci-Fi

Submission + - Doctor Who to marry Doctor Who's daughter (theregister.co.uk)

Google85 writes: Doctor Who the 10th, David Tennant, is planning to get hitched to his fictional daughter Georgia Moffett, who also happens to be the real daughter of his fictional fifth incarnation: Peter Davison.
Oracle

Submission + - OpenOffice declare their independence from Oracle (theregister.co.uk)

Google85 writes: The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company.
From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers.
Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.

Comment Obligatory: Yellow Lasers (Score 2, Funny) 88

Met her at the Star Wars convention.
Did I mention she was looking for love?
Had to call her bluff, "Lady, you don't mean how that sounded.
The thousand-pound dude in the 'no fat chicks' shirt's astounded."
Thought she'd take it back, revoke, rescind, rewind, retract.
"You heard me," she said, "I want any man here
to descend in the cave where you conquer the fear,
and I'll steer you to side of the force that you choose.
Somebody's man enough here -- now who?"
This girl, now you have to understand,
would not look out of place on the arm of an attractive man,
so the geeks in attendance got jaws on the floor. One extends his
saber but he tripped on his cloak. I stepped to the front then I spoke:
"I ain't spitting game, look, I got a Wookiee hat on.
But these guys here are used to getting spat on
by girls. See, you put em in shock.
And this ain't the right con to quote Mister Spock
but it's highly illogical to me." Girl looked in my eye, said, "is your mind free?

'Cause I got something for you. It is shiny, it is clean.
Come on up and I'll adore you with my yellow laser beam."

Sitting in her room upstairs,
watching her wind up the buns in her hair,
I declare that "I'd like to be Luke
unless that's a little bit too perverted for you.
I could be Jabba, a Jawa, an Ewok
when we talk, 'oo ga la gee bla!'
Wait -- I seen all the flicks, all the books that I read,
don't remember any character tied to the bed.
But that's all right, I'll just pretend that I'm encased in carbonite.
And why that's a nice gold bikini; you make that?
Shows off what you got, no mistake: that's
one fine view of Chewbacca you're giving me.
Lower that down here, we could be living the
linguistic lifestyle of the protocol droid."
Here comes the part where I'm not overjoyed.
"Fire!" she said, and before I could scream,
got a steaming mouth full of yellow laser beam.

Google

Submission + - Topeka, Kansas renames itself 'Google' (cnn.com)

Google85 writes: from the We're-definitely-not-in-Topeka-anymore dept.
Topeka Mayor William Bunten issued a proclamation declaring that, for the month of March, the Kansas capital would be known as "Google, Kansas — the capital city of fibre optics".
The name changes comes in a bid to convince google to choose the city for their FiOS experiment.

Transportation

The Tech Behind Preventing Airplane Bird Strikes 242

the4thdimension writes "CNN is running an article covering the technology used at Sea-Tac for preventing airplane bird strikes, like the one that occurred weeks ago to the now famous Flight 1549. The hardware used ranges from low-tech pyrotechnics, to netting, to lasers, to avian radar. Using a combination of all these technologies, Sea-Tac believes they save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in avoiding dangerous bird strikes."
Music

The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune 437

theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand." As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
Mars

Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet 200

Riding with Robots writes "NASA is announcing today that the definitive detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere means the planet is still alive, at least geologically, and perhaps even biologically. 'Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,' said one agency scientist. The gas was detected with observations made over over several Martian years with NASA telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Both biological and geological processes could explain the methane."
Windows

Why Use Virtual Memory In Modern Systems? 983

Cyberhwk writes "I have a system with Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) installed on it, and it has 4GB of RAM. However when I've been watching system performance, my system seems to divide the work between the physical RAM and the virtual memory, so I have 2GB of data in the virtual memory and another 2GB in the physical memory. Is there a reason why my system should even be using the virtual memory anymore? I would think the computer would run better if it based everything off of RAM instead of virtual memory. Any thoughts on this matter or could you explain why the system is acting this way?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo (yahoo.com)

slas6654 writes: Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.'s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure (reuters.com) 2

Google85 writes: Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.
The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.

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