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Comment Re:Mod parent up (Score 4, Interesting) 627

by mgv (#27444943) Attached to: Quantum Setback For Warp Drives

Yeah but you need a massive amount of fuel to accelerate to C and then slow down again. About 40,000 times the size of the shuttle's boosters.

Perhaps this is why, despite our best efforts, no other civilization has contacted us. It's simply too hard to bridge the huuuuge gap between the stars.

Yes, if I was going to build a universe with all sorts of playthings in it, I'd probably separate the experiments with enough spacetime that when the odd experiment blows up it doesn't really affect any others around it.

Not that I think that the universe was actually designed, but if it was, that would be how I would do it.

Michael
Networking (Apple)

Submission + - Kismac soon to become illegal (kismac.de)

Submitted by
mgv
mgv writes: "From the website: "There has not been a lot of time for KisMAC lately. However the motivation for this drastic step lays somewhere different. German laws change and are being adapted for "better" protection against something politicians obviously do not understand. It will become illegal to develop, use or even posses KisMAC in this banana republic." So, unfortunately, one of the better passive wireless network detection programs for the mac is being wound up. If you are able, download the binary and source code now."
Security

Submission + - Keeping Emails (abc.net.au)

Submitted by
mgv
mgv writes: "In a rather fascinating admission, the government of Western Australia has stated that they do not back up email for longer than three months. This came to light when the director general was identified as having email communications with Mr Brian Burke, the ex-premier of Western Australia (equivalent to a state governor). Mr Burke is more famous for the time he spent in prison for corrupt deals with companies, whose subsequent collapse cost the state government around $600 million dollars. However, this leaves the interesting question of the missing emails. Which poses questions for Slashdot: What can be done to get the emails? How many mail servers can even be configured to delete the body of a message, but not the headers? And what justification could there be for a 3 month message deletion policy? It seems hard to believe that anything this recent is gone, especially when the government claims it still has the email headers, just not the body of the messages. For the record, the government uses microsoft exchange server."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - Firefox now serious threat to IE in Europe

Submitted by Tookis
Tookis writes: Mozilla's Firefox (FF) web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13517/53/
Power

Submission + - America's First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant (ecogeek.org)

Submitted by
hankmt
hankmt writes: ""The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. HECK YES! This is very exciting...why?"

In short: First: Because cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Second: Because while corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for everyone unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol, cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process.

The new plant will be online, producing 100 million gallons in 2008."
Wireless (Apple)

Submission + - One-in-three Americans want iPhone

Submitted by
mgv
mgv writes: "Apple's iPhone could emerge as the most succesful product introduction of the 21st century, according to a survey that showed 30% of people surveyed planned to buy an iPhone. 8% planned to buy the phone in the next 3 months, ensuring that apple's initial sales aren't likely to fade away after the initial early adopter rush."
Power

Submission + - Solar Power without the hassles of ownership

Submitted by
cybrthng
cybrthng writes: "CitizenRe takes a unique approach on solar energy by installing & maintaining solar systems for users based upon their local net metered rate. This approach frees home owners from the ongoing expenses and initial capital of being green to simply paying for what they use and having the ability to locking today's rates for the next 1,5 or 25 years. To qualify Your state/municipality must have net meetering arrangements."

Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes 320

Posted by Zonk from the down-with-woes dept.
rbgrn writes "A123 Systems claims to have invented a Lithium Ion battery that not only can discharge at very high rates of current but can be recharged very quickly without damage to the cells or overheating. From their website: 'A unique feature of A123Systems' M1 cells is their ability to charge to high capacity in 5 minutes or less. That's a significant improvement over traditional Li Ion, which typically requires more than 90 minutes to reach a similar level of charge.' Using this technology, General Motors has announced a plug-in hybrid SUV and Venture Vehicles is developing a fully electric 3 wheel vehicle. Politics aside, the main technological hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars has been a fuel station replacement when driving distances beyond a single charge worth of range. Will we finally be seeing high current recharge stations in the next decade?"
Music

Submission + - Classical Music Hoax of the Century?

Submitted by
Retrospeak
Retrospeak writes: "The CD recordings of Joyce Hatto, a concert pianist often described as "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of" and praised by one critic as performing "the most extraordinary recordings I have ever heard" has come under a cloud of musical suspicion, as reported in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/arts/music/17ha tt.html?th&emc=th). Seems that many the Hatto recordings are digitally identical to those of a variety of other classical performers, some relatively obscure and some more famous. Because of the growing storm of sonic controversy, the British audiophile magazine "Gramophone" requested the folks at Pristine Classical to subject some of the tracks in question to detailed digital scrutiny and the results are very interesting (http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html)."
Privacy

Submission + - UK Conservatives Want to Slash National ID Card

Submitted by
VE3OGG
VE3OGG writes: "While it would seem that both sides of the American political spectrum are in favour of the national ID card in America, the same cannot be said for Britain. Apparently, the sticking issue across the pond is wasted money: "As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID card project immediately on our being elected to government." Why is there such uniformity in the states, but disunity amongst the Brits?"
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia: On the brink? Or crying wolf?

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "Might Wikipedia "disappear" three or four months from now absent a major infusion of cash donations? The suggestion has been made by Florence Devouard, chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation. And while her spokesperson has since backpedaled off that dire prediction, there can be little doubt that the encyclopedia anyone can edit could use a few more benefactors to go along with all those editors.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1137 6"
Microsoft

Submission + - State of Microsoft source code revealed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the Comes v. Microsoft case in Iowa comes an expert report filed by Andrew Schulman (author of Undocumented DOS and Undocumented Windows): http://iowaconsumercase.org/index.html ... 2. Microsoft can't keep track of its source code for Windows. Mr. Schulman's report, which was an exhibit to the deposition, reveals that Microsoft is unable to keep track of the source code for Windows. Mr. Schulman quoted from an April 2001 email written by Jim Allchin, in which Mr. Allchin complained that some components shipped with Windows did not check their source code into the Windows build tree: "Windows as you know contains many pieces of functionality from different groups around the company. Regardless of product, good engineering practice would require us to be able to do a fresh build of a product at any time using the same tools. Unfortunately, we cannot do this with Windows today. . . . We need all the source code for Windows being built out of one place with one consistent set of tools. It is actually amazing how we have not done this for so long. . . We need to be able to build what we ship long after we RTM. . . . There are legal obligations regarding our ability here. . . . There are 27 components . . . that are still dropping binaries [on Whistler]. . . ." As Ms. Conlin observed in a November 11, 2006 hearing: "Microsoft has made statements, public statements, reported statements that governments and third-party security auditors have conducted thorough and exhaustive reviews of its Windows source code. That, of course, can't be true if, in fact, they don't seem to have all of their Windows source code." (11-09-2006, Tr at 54:11-54:17). During that hearing, counsel for Microsoft confirm that Microsoft still is unable to keep track of its Windows source code. Mr. Schulman's report is posted online at http://iowaconsumercase.org/assets/attachments/Sup p_Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf

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