Comment The 0-click shopping is even better! (Score 1) 194
0-click-shopping: Buy something *unless* you press a button
Gamma Ray Mystery Reestablished By Fermi Telescope 95
eldavojohn writes "New observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal that our assumptions about the 'fog' of gamma rays in our universe are not entirely explained by black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies — as we previously hypothesized. For now, the researchers are representing the source of unaccounted gamma rays with a dragon (as in 'here be') symbol. A researcher explained that they are certain about this, given Fermi's observations: 'Active galaxies can explain less than 30 percent of the extragalactic gamma-ray background Fermi sees. That leaves a lot of room for scientific discovery as we puzzle out what else may be responsible.' And so we reopen the chapter on background gamma-rays in the science textbooks and hope this eventually sheds even more light on other mysteries of space — like star formation and dark matter."
The LHC Is Back Online 123
medea and several other readers noted that the LHC came back online early this morning. Here is the tweet from CERN announcing the milestone. As we discussed a few weeks ago, CERN plans to run the LHC at half power or less through 2011.
NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee 507
An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.
Comment A million monkeys... (Score 1) 177
might not be able to *write* the entire collection of Shakespeare, but with this setup, I'm quite sure that they would be able to digitize it!
Comment Re:What did we expect? (Score 5, Insightful) 627
Yah. The real heros bringing us the PC revolution was the guys reverse engineering the hardware/BIOS, and made cheap clones. The OS was just what became the de facto standard.
As we all know, DOS won over CP/M. CP/M was technically superior at the time, but lost for political and/or contract reasons, whatever.
Digital Research then went on to create a better DOS to compete. MS fought it with all means it could, and it went into oblivition.
At early stages, MS Windows was just a graphical shell on top of DOS. It wasn't particulary good either. There were competing graphical shells, for example Digital Research' GEM. Digital Research lost the patent lawsuit that MS essentially won, and GEM was limited to have only two windows simultaneously...who knows what it could have been.
MS has not had the technical best/superior solutions at any time. It was just better at legal and marketing stuff than anyone else.
The PC revolution would have come with or without MS. We'll never know how much innovation MS have killed on its way where it is, so to hail it as a savior is just plain stupid.
