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Comment Re:Pity download caps will kills this idea for now (Score 2, Insightful) 95

by dschuetz (#26218885) Attached to: Roku Box Adds HD, Grows Beyond Netflix

I think it might go the other way. It's one thing for a few geeks with home-brewed media center PCs to start streaming lots of movies and run up huge bandwidth totals.

It's a totally different thing for "Interweb" users with a cable modem and a single PC they use for online banking, when they get something like AppleTV or Roku and can start watching lots of stuff that way.

That is, once this starts to go mainstream, when average home internet users can start using these devices, there'll be a lot more pressure for ISPs to NOT impose those bandwidth caps.

At least, that's how I'm hoping it goes.
Education

Submission + - The Troubling Duality of Electricity

Submitted by
marciot
marciot writes: "Having obtained a bachelor's degree in EE (and CS, which is now my field), I am disappointed that some basic aspects of electricity were glossed over in such a way that even today I wonder whether I really grasped the fundamentals. One particular aspect that bugs me is that electricity is presented as seemingly having two separate alter-egos. In the world of Van de Graff generators and doorknobs, electrons are content to flow from one charged object to another without care as to whether they will eventually find their way back. In the world of batteries and light bulbs, electricity, we are told, stubbornly refuses to flow unless there is a circuit which neatly forms a round trip. Well, which one is it? Lest you think the answer is simpler than it is, let me pose a question: suppose I have a AA cell and a quarter. Now, if I were to touch the quarter to the positive end, and then move it to the other end, and repeat this motion back and forth, would I eventually discharge the battery? One could say that I am confusing electrostatics with electrodynamics, but it seems to me that giving one phenomenon two different names and treating them separately only avoids a troubling question and keeps us from true understanding. Any thoughts?"
Space

Submission + - President Ford, NASA, and the Space Shuttle

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Most of the media coverage surrounding the death of President Gerald R. Ford has focused, understandably, upon Watergate and the Vietnam War — twin events which lead many observers to view the past through a lens, darkly. While leaving the broader, brighter scope of Gerald Ford's legacy to others, this article considers the President's presence on matters of science and technology. From Project Nike to the birth of NASA and beyond, Gerald R. Ford was there from the beginning."
Google

Submission + - Google AdSense Screws Small Website Owners

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Not sure if this falls under the theme of Valleywag, but Google Adsense has just raised its monthly payment minimum to $100. When I started with Adsense in late 2004/ early 2005 the minimum was $25. Just when was about to hit the $25 minimum, they raised it to $50. Now that I have $45 in my account, the minimum is $100. Granted, I have a site with very low traffic, but how many website owners are getting screwed by Google? If the long-tail theory holds out, there could be millions of dollars of unpaid Google ads. Fuckity fuck. I want my $50. Google sucks!
United States

Submission + - Bush admits global warming endangering polar bear

Submitted by
oddmuse
oddmuse writes: "Bush embraces the endangered polar bear — and accepts the dangers of global warming http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2 108212.ece "In a landmark decision, the Bush administration has concluded that global warming is endangering the existence of the polar bear — an admission that could force the US government to act to curb the emission of greenhouse gases." Al Gore's inconvenient truth is slipping past the lips of his 2000 opponent in 2006. Maybe it just takes Bush a lot longer to realise the truth of a matter than the rest of society."
United States

Submission + - FDA: Cloned Food Safe to Eat

Submitted by friedo
friedo writes: After five years of research, the Food and Drug Administration has reached the rather obvious conclusion that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Gadgets spawn white lies

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wonder how this affects politicians? The research by UK pollsters 72 Point found that "techno-treachery" was widespread with nearly 75 percent of people saying gadgets like Blackberrys made it easier to fib. Just over half of respondents said using gadgets made them feel less guilty when telling a lie than doing it face to face, the study on behalf of financial services group Friends Provident found. The workplace was a favorite location for fibbing with 67 percent of the 1,487 respondents admitting they had lied at work. The top lie was pretending to be ill (43 percent) followed by saying work had been completed when it hadn't (23 percent). Worryingly for bosses 18 percent said they lied to hide a big mistake. But, employers were not the only ones on the receiving end of disingenuous statements. Just over 40 percent said they had lied to their family or partner. Key topics to lie about were; buying new clothes or the cost of them (37 percent), how good someone looked in something (35 percent) how much they had eaten (35 percent) and drunk (31 percent) and how much they weighed (32 percent). The survey found that while people were dishonest, most told lies with the best intentions and to spare others' feelings.
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Virtual Property Rights in online game Second Life

Submitted by
Michael J. Wade
Michael J. Wade writes: "Lance at A Second Hand Conjecture takes a look at the virtual reality game, Second Life, and some of the issues concerning property rights in that virtual world. He reviews a Washington Post article on the subject and poses some interesting questions for the future of virtual reality games and how the participants may be affected by new rules and regulations in the virtual world. In particular, Lance looks at how the virtual reality world can work as a model for real world policy issues concerning trade, economics and property."
United States

Submission + - NASCAR driver rebuked for Bush decal

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a decision announced Tuesday, the FEC sent an "admonishment letter" to Kirk Shelmerdine Racing. Kirk Shelmerdine, a former pit boss for the late Dale Earnhardt, has been an unsuccessful, underfunded and undersponsored driver. He has never finished higher than 26th.

So back in 2004, in a move perhaps designed to draw some attention to his car, he placed a "Bush-Cheney '04" decal on his rear quarter panel, which was otherwise unencumbered by advertising. Democratic activist Sydnor Thompson complained to the FEC, and the agency found that Shelmerdine "may have made an unreported independent expenditure or a prohibited corporate expenditure."

News blurb: http://www.examiner.com/a-478208~Yeas_and_Nays__Th ursday__Dec__28.html

FEC documents: http://eqs.nictusa.com/eqs/searcheqs (Enter 5563 in the case # field)

The reasonable dissenting opinion: http://eqs.nictusa.com/eqsdocs/00005875.pdf
The Internet

Submission + - Digg Used To Facilitate DDoS Attack

Submitted by
GoogTube
GoogTube writes: "yesterday a "story" was submitted to digg.com. But unlike most stories this one didn't intend on providing useful information, Breaking news or a funny video. the intention of this story was to initiate a DDoS attack against the site godhatesfags.com by using the digg community as a botnet.

A user posted a story entitled "Make GodHatesFags pay for their bandwidth" with the description "It's time to stop this shit. Feel free to use as much bandwidth as possible. Try downloading a few podcasts."

The story then rapidly received many diggs, 2139 at the time of this post, And soon found it's way onto the front page, At which point digg users started posting links to audio files in comments and soon knocked godhatesfags.com offline."
Censorship

Submission + - Secret govt documents will be declassified 12/31

Submitted by mozzwald
mozzwald writes: "This New Year's Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of U.S. government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they'll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption"
Encryption

Submission + - First HDDVD AACS crack made available.

Submitted by
SynapseLapse
SynapseLapse writes: "Popular dvd ripping/encoding site doom9 has a message thread running where user Muslix64 has released a program allowing users to rip their HD DVDs sans DRM. The program isnt a full crack along the lines of DeCSS, as it requires a legitimate KEY to perform the decryption. It is, nonetheless, a step forward to not being restricted by HDCP nonsense. AACS is the new DRM for HD-DVD that is supposedly far more difficult to crack. Any comments Jon?"
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Top Ten Apple Rumors of all time

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNET have taken a look back at 30 years of Apple rumors during which we have witnessed Apple's "rise, fall, and rise again, like a kind of technological Jesus Christ". Some of the rumors are outrageous, and some came true. The list includes such treasures as the Apple-Nintendo merger, which the article calls "utterly outlandish" and the persistent rumor that Apple will release OSX for PC — described as "so counter-productive and financially damaging for Apple that we doubt the company has ever seriously considered it". There is also mention of the iPhone which CNET says is "an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Steve Jobs to keep journalists busy".
Announcements

Submission + - Long-lived super heavy element created

Submitted by
treeves
treeves writes: "Radioactive nuclei that hang around for a mere half-minute before falling apart hardly seem stable. Yet compared with the fleeting lifetimes of their superheavy atomic neighbors, the roughly 30-second period that transpired from creation to disintegration of four atoms of a newly discovered isotope of element 108 qualifies those atoms as rock solid.

Theoretical physicists predicted years ago that some nuclei of elements much more massive than uranium should survive for a relatively long time — possibly long enough to probe their chemical properties — if they could be synthesized. On the chart of nuclides, theoreticians pinpointed a region with coordinates corresponding to 114 protons and 184 neutrons and indicated that nuclei with those "magic" numbers of subatomic particles should lie at the center of an island of stability. The nuclear longevity, according to the models, is due to the closing of proton and neutron shells, which renders the particles stable against spontaneous fission much the same way that a filled outer electron shell endows noble gases with chemical inertness. Experimentalists, though, haven't yet found a route to reach the center of the island.

Other theoreticians calculated the effects of subshell closings in other superheavy nuclei. They concluded that an isotope of hassium containing 108 protons and 162 neutrons (270Hs) should survive a long timemuch longer than the millisecond or shorter lifetimes typical of most of the heaviest nuclides.

Now, an international team of experimentalists has detected four of those atoms and probed some of their chemical properties during the roughly 30 seconds the nuclei survive (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2006, 97, 242501). The findings confirm the predictions and provide new statistical data with which such theoretical models can be refined. The team includes 24 scientists from 10 research institutions, including the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Institute for Heavy-Ion Research (GSI), both in Germany, as well as institutions in Russia, the U.S., Switzerland, Japan, China, and Poland.

As TUM graduate student Jan Dvorak explains, the hassium nuclei were formed by firing a high-energy beam of 26Mg projectiles into a target enriched in 248Cm. [http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i52/8452hassium.h tml]"

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