Comment Re:Amusing story (Score 1) 1186
Of course we are assuming here a wet gallon not a dry gallon. Yaaay four kinds of gallons!
Comment Re:Not a tax scam (Score 1) 1505
I wish I could mod them up as well. And while the US isn't alone, I think they are well out in front. Of the four countries I've lived in, the US tax code is the most complicated by far. Admittedly I pay much less tax here but then it shows in the services received from government.
Comment Re:I've got your denial right here. (Score 5, Insightful) 757
Mod parent up. No OS can protect you from deliberately installing malware. Getting your software from an untrusted source and then giving that software install and admin rights on your machine is not a sign of a defective OS. Just a defective user.
Comment Re:Surprise? (Score 1) 429
I say all that just to get to this: They still don't understand the Internet. They want to have their cake and eat it too*;
* Stupidest expression ever? I think so.
I always thought it made more sense to say it as "Eat your cake and have it too."
Comment Re:Seriously, guys... (Score 1) 348
That's what I love about the Brits. Yes, we Yanks/Americans get all the crap for not speaking English properly. Yet somehow our Canadian friends to the north, who except for a few odd British spellings (colour) and a few strange words (ever sat on a Winchester? It's not a gun.) say almost the same thing as we do with an accent that's close to ours, yet they escape condemnation.
I believe there is less residual animosity since they didn't flip the bird to the Poms when they went (mostly) independent.
And don't get me started on the Aussies, who would probably say some crap like this: Apfo pan
Yeah, us Aussies hate superfluous syllables.
April Fools' is tired (note the apostrophe because the day is April Fools' Day with an apostrophe)
After the 's'? If it meant the 'Day of the Fool in April' it would be April Fool's Day.
they have to tell us that "it's pants", which somehow we non-Brits will all magically know. For shizzle my nizzle.
Obviously, it works both ways! Nizzle?! Gotta love that cross-culture clash.
Comment Re:Camera card reader -- please (Score 2, Informative) 619
Apparently there is in the 2nd gen touch.
Comment Re:and who ISN'T going to pay up? (Score 1) 325
Upon moving to the US from Europe and when filing my first tax return here I was explicitly told by the tax agent to not declare foreign income earnt in that financial year while still working in Europe. I said, "They have no claim on it". "Doesn't matter," he replied, "they'll tax you on it anyway."
Didn't have the same problem when shifting to Europe from Australia though. No problem honouring their tax treaties.
Submission + - Telstra offers 100Mb Cable to Australian Capitals (news.com.au) 1
highways writes: In a move clearly to threaten the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), Telstra has announced a $300M upgrade to their cable network in Melbourne (and later to most capital cities in Australia), claiming speeds of 100Mb/s.
Telstra was excluded from the NBN bidding process in December (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F15%2F0258239&from=rss and http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Telstra-ups-the-ante-on-broadband-network-$pd20090304-PSPPF?OpenDocument) after submitting a non-compliant proposal to the Australian Government.
Competitors claim that Telstra is attempting to undermine the financial viability of the NBN by cherry-picking profitable city customers without having to service rural users.
The winner of the NBN tender was due to be announced last week (http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25162618-5013040,00.html), but has been delayed as a result of the Victoria bushfire tragedy.
Telstra was excluded from the NBN bidding process in December (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F15%2F0258239&from=rss and http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Telstra-ups-the-ante-on-broadband-network-$pd20090304-PSPPF?OpenDocument) after submitting a non-compliant proposal to the Australian Government.
Competitors claim that Telstra is attempting to undermine the financial viability of the NBN by cherry-picking profitable city customers without having to service rural users.
The winner of the NBN tender was due to be announced last week (http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25162618-5013040,00.html), but has been delayed as a result of the Victoria bushfire tragedy.
Submission + - iPod Touch 2G Jailbreak (tecurious.com)
Tecurious writes: "The NitroKey team has finally jailbroken the iPod Touch 2G. For the price of $15, you can get NitroKey Slipstream and jailbreak your thiner, volume-rocker'd iPod, and finally be able to tell your friends that your 2G is now better than their 1G in every possible way.
The jailbreak works on the 2.2.1 firmware, and installs the Cydia for jailbroken apps, complete with its new paid apps store.
I'll personally be waiting for someone to do this for free, but until then I'm sure I'll run into a few people who drop their cash on this. Will you be getting this, or waiting for a free jailbreak?"
Submission + - Original Portrait of Shakespeare Discovered
Hugh Pickens writes: "A 400 year old portrait has been discovered that shows William Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. "His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty," said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. "There is nothing superior or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a face set off by such rich clothing. It is the face of a good listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint." The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, "Searching for Shakespeare," and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family's art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s. "No one who has seen the four paintings can doubt that the Cobbe portrait is the original," says Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthday Trust. "You don't need an expert to see that.""
Comment Re:change is a comin' (Score 1) 54
It's a major pain in the butt to go through my university library to track down the article, when I'm not even sure if it's useful yet. So yeah, open access is a good thing.
That's right! In my day, going to the library to track down an article was called research.
Comment Absolutely, positively, (Score 5, Funny) 672
There will be no black holes, well except for very tiny ones that will wink out of existence in mere nanoseconds. Certainly no more than a couple of microseconds. At most a second. Likely tops of a minute. Absolutely can't be more than seven minutes ...
Submission + - Password cracking with a GPU
xav_jones writes: New Scientist is carrying a story about Elcomsoft's recent US patent filing for password cracking, claiming it has an "advantage [with] the 'massively parallel processing' capabilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU)". The company's CEO, Vladimir Katalov, says it increased the speed of its password cracking by a factor of 25 using an $800 graphics card from nVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra.
Finally another way to justify a decent gaming card?
