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Comment Re:You always need to be first! (Score 1) 314

Not that I'm defending this idiocy, but...

Two equal camps, check.

Group all "current" scientists together, check.

Appeal to "reasonable folks" who want to find a "middle ground", check.

Can you push any more buttons from the anti-science and anti-evolution camp? This is simple physics - non-ionizing radiation does not cause damage to DNA, period. There is real research on this. What more do you want?

The next time I hear someone appeal to the average man for authority in politics I'm going to go crazy. If I wanted the idiot down the street making decisions for me I would have asked him myself. I want people who have actually spent some time researching this to give me information, thanks.

Image

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Mozilla

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272

supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3. Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Open Source

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment Re:I'm a climate sceptic, but not how you think... (Score 1) 822

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you might not have considered some of the impact of the rising temperatures. Since you seem like you're being fairly open-minded about this, and since I agree with some of your conclusions (particularly about technology), I don't mind pointing this out. In a lot of places a few more degrees would be nice. Unfortunately, humans tend to like water. They settle on rivers, floodplains, and low-lying coastal areas. Even more unfortunately, these also tend to be high-density, low-income regions. For instance, the nation of Bangladesh, which has 140 million people generally living in poverty is mostly <10m above sea level. (http://countrystudies.us/bangladesh/23.htm). Worse, the entire coastal area is essentially at sea level. A small increase in temperature would cause a small increase in sea levels, which would immediately displace millions of indigent people. Of course, this is only one small country. While not every country will have nearly the same scale of problems, it's clear that the human toll in some areas at least could be severe.

The environmental impact on wildlife is also actually rather interesting. I don't have any links or handy info available, but there have been a number of fascinating studies done on how life is adjusting or not adjusting to these issues. The warming that's happened so far has illuminated some interesting things that we might not have discovered otherwise. We stand to lose a great deal of biodiversity, however, at least in the short term (geologically speaking of course).

So, not all change is bad, man-made change can sometimes be really good...but I don't think that's the case on balance here. YMMV, though. Did you have anything concrete that you'd like to point out to support what you were saying? I would be interested to hear it (and not just as a rhetorical point, either).

Comment Re:Well, obviously... (Score -1, Offtopic) 232

I hope you're not implying that Goldman Sachs are a bunch of scammers. They're pretty much the only major financial institution to make it through this crisis without falling for the scams and without needing government money. In fact, they were forced to take it by the government so that people wouldn't single out companies receiving bailout money as being failures, not because it was necessary for Goldman. I'm getting really sick of this meme - if you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it.

Comment Re:those are some awfully dry pipes you have there (Score 1) 239

No, I'm sure that Flash is the bottleneck here. I bet it's really hogging the CPU. For example mplayer/ffdshow decoders play Flash video faster and smoother than Flash. And that's on Windows.

Yes, sure. Flash is the bottleneck. I agree completely. However, that means that it's not the pipes, it's the processor running bloated unoptimized software. So my point stands - the hardware is the bottleneck rather than the internet, even if it's not really the hardware's fault. This is a consistent experience for me. It used to be, downloading was slow but once it got to my computer, it was fast. Now, downloading is fast, but my computer can't take it. This may be because I'm getting the most expensive internet-only cable package offered, but it's a significant reversal from the mid 90's when I got the Internet. The old argument about the pipes being the bottleneck might still be true for a lot of things, but for the home internet user, it's not necessarily true anymore. And for 3D acceleration, I can almost guarantee that more often than not, it will still be the hardware.

Comment Re:Teenagers? (Score 5, Insightful) 397

Just because society expected teenagers to work in the past doesn't mean that there aren't significant mental (physical brain) changes going on during that timeframe.

And resources contracting back to a "solar economy"? Turn in your geek card - geeks believe in the power of technology to improve lives. There's no reason to expect that that won't continue.

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