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Comment Re:Puerto Rico first on list for statehood (Score 3, Funny) 98

by BarbaraHudson (#48932957) Attached to: Canada Upholds Net Neutrality Rules In Wireless TV Case

What do you mean, we "took"? Céline Dion was born in Québec, which last time I checked is part of Canada.

And as a Canadian, I can assure you that those of us north of the US border are quite happy with how it worked out. Really. You can keep Celine Dion and Justin Beiber as long as you want ...

Comment Re:OK, based upon notebook shopping thus far (Score 4, Informative) 118

That's called compromise. And what you have to do in a small package.

Can you fit a V12 in a Mini?

If you can fit a V-12 lambourghini engine with all-wheel drive into a 1971 Fiat 500, then you can probably find someone crazy enough to do the same for the new mini cooper.

Submission + - Need for oil the most important reason for interfering in another country's war (warwick.ac.uk)

Submitted by KCStymie
KCStymie writes: University of Warwick reports that researchers have for the first time provided strong evidence that support conspiracy theorists claims that oil is often the root cause for interfering in other countries civil wars. They found that the decision to interfere was dominated by the interveners’ need for oil over and above historical, geographical, or ethnic ties.

Submission + - Mozilla dusts off old servers, lights up Tor relays (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by TechCurmudgeon
TechCurmudgeon writes: According to The Register:

Mozilla has given the Tor network a capacity kick with the launch of 14 relays that will help distribute user traffic. Engineers working under the Foundation's Polaris Project inked in November pulled Mozilla's spare and decommissioned hardware out of the cupboard for dedicated use in the Tor network. It included a pair of Juniper EX4200 switches and three HP SL170zG6 (48GB ram, 2*Xeon L5640, 2*1Gbps NIC) servers, along with a dedicated existing IP transit provider (2 X 10Gbps). French Mozilla engineer Arzhel Younsi (@xionoxfr) said its network was designed to fall no lower than half of its network capacity in the event of maintenance or failure.

The Polaris initiative was a effort of Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Centre for Democracy and Technology to help build more privacy controls into technology.

Comment Re:OK, based upon notebook shopping thus far (Score 1) 118

I've been waiting for a decent and affordable laptop ever since Toshiba first came out with color screens on theirs. I still don't have a laptop.

I don't know what you call "decent and affordable", but I bought a new laptop last year - quad core, 8 gig ram, 500 gig hd hdmi out, usb3, for $401.00. At the local big-chain pharmacy (they sell everything these days). They also have lower-spec machines for less if you can make do with 4 gig ram and dual core.

Submission + - The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics is a free PDF download (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you wanted to pinpoint the beginning of the PC era, you could do worse than to declare that it began when the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine came out. It cover-featured the MITS Altair 8800, the first successful PC, and inspired Paul Allen and Bill Gates to found "Micro-Soft." I wrote about the issue, which is now available for free in PDF form (along with every other issue of Popular Electronics).

Comment Re:What? (Score 2) 98

by BarbaraHudson (#48932343) Attached to: Canada Upholds Net Neutrality Rules In Wireless TV Case
I would have said "look at the other nordic countries", but then there's Russia. So much for THAT theory :-)

Besides, we have the government refusing to hold a real probe into the murder rate of Aboriginal women (28 times higher) because it would expose their "tough on crime" stance as all show, no go, and a flawed allocation of resources that could better be used in prevention. And their craptastic treatment of returning veterans with injuries, especially PTSD, which is more along the lines of the Canadian equivalent of "dont' ask, don't tell."

Submission + - New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance on Biofuels

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes that turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand and that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population. “I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated,” says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.

Timothy D. Searchinger says that recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. “It’s true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise,” says Jason Hill said. “We’ve found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system.”

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