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Comment Re:n/t (Score 1) 445

If the bag was pushed exactly toward or away from Earth, it would be back in one orbit. But it was pushed in a random direction. A sideways push makes it keep going away from the station; the orbits might later intersect after the bag's sideways travel takes it around the world. It would have to get a very strong horizontal push to go around the world in a short enough period for the astronauts to be willing to wait for it. And if the sideways push wasn't exactly horizontal, when the bag came back from the other side it might be too high or too low.

Comment Ontario is breaking its own regulations (Score 3, Informative) 541

The Ontario Ministry of Transportation, on its HOV lane page, promotes carpooling and links to SmartCommute.ca. This is an initiative of Metrolinx, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Metrolinx offers services to the "greater Toronto area". So the Ontario government is arranging carpooling across city limits, but forbidding another group from doing so.
Earth

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction 399

wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."

Comment I thought YOU changed the uranium bucket (Score 1) 618

This process will NOT "create" energy.

Yeah, this looks like it's a cogeneration incinerator. But if they'd push the temperature up enough to separate the stuff into molecules and atoms, they could make an industrial mass chromatograph. Separate the trash into its constituent atoms. A tube for the hydrogen, buckets for iron and lead... and a frequently-changed bucket for uranium. If it collects enough uranium for a nuclear power plant, the process might create more energy than it consumes.

Communications

EA Forum Ban Will Now Mean EA Game Ban 549

An anonymous reader writes "A post on the EA Support Forums from APOC, online community manager for Electronic Arts, outlines a new policy for their new forums, saying users who earn a ban based on their behavior in the forums will be locked out of all of the EA games tied to that account: 'Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned. Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it's all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature. All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but it's what we have to do.'" Update: 10/31 12:36 GMT by T : Not so! Pandanapper writes "After a flood of complaints the EA community moderator APOC corrects his statement about how banning you from the forums bans you from your game access as well:"That said, the previous statement I made recently (that's being quoted on the blogs) was inaccurate and a mistake on my part. I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad."
Microsoft

Microsoft Calls Today Global Anti-Piracy Day 500

arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.

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