7915512
submission
Entropy98 writes:
FTA: Iranian troops have entered southern Iraqi territory and taken control of an oil well, reports say.
Iranian soldiers crossed the border and raised an Iranian flag over the Fakkah oil field, a US military spokesman told the AFP news agency.
Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Ali al-Khafaji confirmed the incursion had taken place, and said 11 Iranians had dug-in at the oil well and had not left.
'At 3:30 this afternoon, 11 Iranian soldiers infiltrated the Iran-Iraq border and took control of the oil well. They raised the Iranian flag, and they are still there until this moment,' he told the Reuters news agency.
He said there had been no military response from Iraqi forces..
'We are awaiting orders from our leader,' he said.
7907602
submission
supersloshy writes:
The Consumerist reports an incident where an anonymous reader's netbook's protection plan was apparently voided when he installed Linux on it. "The manager of the Geek Squad informed me that installing Ubuntu Linux on my machine voided my warranty, and that I could only have it serviced if the original Windows installation was restored.", says the anonymous reader. However, his problem was because his "touchpad and power adapter had been broken", which is clearly a hardware issue. He re-installed Windows so he could have them repair his netbook, but they insisted that Linux caused the problem and kicked him out of the store.
7854588
submission
Entropy98 writes:
From the article: "Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers — skin and lung — a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.
Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, say the Wellcome Trust team. The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.
The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.
From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke.
Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer."
Yet another step towards curing cancer. Though it will probably take many years to study so many mutations. My moneys still on viruses as the cure for cancer.
7854348
submission
coondoggie writes:
NASA’s Mercury planet exploration team this week said they have created critical tool for the first orbital observations of the planet – a global map of Mercury that will help scientists pinpoint craters, faults, and other features that will be essential for the space agency’s extensive 2011 mission. That’s when NASA’s satellite MESSENGER (The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER) will become the first spacecraft to actually orbit Mercury — about 730 times — beaming back pictures and never-before-available pictures and information on the planet.
[spam URL stripped]Link to Original Source
7850380
submission
MojoKid writes:
WD (Western Digital) is starting to implement a new hard disk drive format structure, known as Advanced Format, that enables 7-11% greater capacity on standard spinning hard disk drives. Traditionally, on standard hard drives each track is composed of a series of sectors. Currently the user data on the media is stored in 512 byte sectors. The storage industry and WD is improving this legacy architecture by changing the size of the sectors on the media to store 4,096 bytes of data rather than 512 bytes of data. Each sector also has a gap currently for Sync/DAM (lead-in) and error correction information. Legacy architectures are very inefficient for ECC (Error Correction Code). It requires lots of overhead to support multiple blocks of ECC. With Advanced Format technology WD (and others eventually) will be removing Sync/DAM blocks, inter-sector gaps and 8 separate blocks of ECC, gaining back approximately 7-11% in usable disk space.
