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Comment As a beekeper (Score 5, Informative) 252

I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.

Comment Re:Great experience with Asus RT-N16 (Score 1) 196

Agreed. I've had my RT-N16 for about a year. It is great with DD-WRT (I guess it supports Tomato, but I haven't had a need to upgrade). I did have problems with mine overheating (not overclocked or anything), but some left over heatsink coolers from way-back and an ancient graphics-card cooling fan completely fixed the issue for me.

The RT-N16 seems to have some quality control issues, but for the price, there was nothing better when I bought mine. There may be better options now though.

Comment Re:So sad! (Score 1) 359

I loved my RX-7s. I've owned 2 1st gen 13B RX-7s, 1st in high-school then a 2nd in college once the 1st gave up the ghost (mostly due to upstate NY winters). They were a pain in the ass in the winter, with the manual choke, and an engine that was really easy to flood, and they ate catalytic converters, but it was a very pretty car, and I still pine for mine occasionally.

Comment Re:ubuntu's rocky upgrade road (Score 1) 320

I've been running lucid for a few days, and I think quality control has significantly slipped in Ubuntu. Yes they are only betas, but with only 2 weeks left before release, I have seen lots of bugs still remaining. Within a couple days I found that screen-saver crashes often, several apps can't properly auto-disable PulseAudio anymore and don't work without hacks, PHP 5.3.2 segfaults, themes didn't install fully on upgrade, and (of course) the memory leak which results in Lucid using up all the RAM in my system (yes I've submitted bugs (or found previously submitted tickets) on most of these already). Other things like Wine segfaults seem to be resolved by reinstalling, but overall this upgrade has not gone smoothly for me. I've been, overall, happy with (X)Ubuntu over the years, and like the 6 month cadence, but, in my opinion, they should really focus more on quality for their LTS release. I certainly wouldn't recommend an upgrade to 10.04 in its current state, though I plan to stick with Ubuntu personally. Generally, I consider Ubuntu to be a more user-friendly and more current Debian, which I like, but I guess I should learn not to be an early adopter if I care about stability.

Earth

Permanent Undersea Homes Soon; Temporary Ones Now 122

MMBK writes "Dennis Chamberland is one of the world's preeminent aquanauts. He's worked with NASA to develop living habitats and underwater plant growth labs, among other cool things. His next goal is establishing the world's first permanent underwater colony. This video gets to the heart of his project, literally and figuratively, as most is shot in his underwater habitat, Atlantica, off the coast of Key Largo, FL. The coolest part might be the moon pool, the room you swim into underwater."

Comment Re:MythTV automatic commercial skipping (Score 1) 536

I love MythTv, and have been using it for years and years, but it is absolutely not easy (though I have more obscure hardware, and have never used mythbuntu). I've also tried being a sysadmin for my friends' myth boxes....I would never wish that on anyone. The stability has always been the biggest issue. Random crashes are extroadinarily annoying. With Firewire, I found recording very unreliable, image quality is very dependant on the capture method. But I haven't seem anything that can support my High-Def recording with auto-commercial detection, and for that,I'm willing to stick with it.

I've heard that you can run 'Play On!' in a virtual-machine on windows to convert netflix to upnp streams (which can then be watched on Linux). I haven't tried it myself though. Certainly not ideal, but perhaps viable for those certain use models.

Also Blu-Ray is still really hard in Linux. I've considered a Windows MythTV frontend with a linux backend which might give me the flexibility I want, but I don't think there's a good integrated solution for that.

Space

Pics of the Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century 97

Vinod writes "Yesterday thousands of people around Asia witnessed the longest solar eclipse of the century. Although it was not clearly visible in some parts due to overcast weather, thousands of people gathered to view this spectacular event. Yesterday's solar eclipse lasted for 6 to 7 minutes, making it the longest solar eclipse of the century. Here is a collection of 33 beautiful images of the solar eclipse from around the world."

Comment Re:As long as.. (Score 5, Interesting) 251

According to a-v comparatives:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/corporate-reviews

Microsoft's AV software is very good. It has low false-positives and generally scored quite well. If the same capability is free, I don't see a reason not to recommend its use. I certainly don't work for a-v comparatives, but they were around before Microsoft was in AV business, and their top rated software changes pretty freqeuntly. I'd call them reasonably unbiased, but judge for yourself.

Robotics

Submission + - Carnegie Mellon wins DARPA Urban Challenge

angio writes: "Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing team won the DARPA Grand Challenge, narrowly beating out competitors Stanford and Virginia Tech in a closely-watched race. Eleven finalists started the race on Saturday, with six finishing. The top three winners received $2 million, $1 million, and $500 thousand, respectively. Blow-by blow blogging of the event was covered by the register, Wired, and Popular Mechanics."
Digital

Submission + - 16 billion pixel image of Last supper online (haltadefinizione.com)

xiashunkai writes: "the original size of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece "last supper" is about 4.6m * 8.8m, painted on a n stone wall covered with resin and pitch. Now it is digitalized by technology experts to a huge image with 160 billion pixel. think about the surface area of our earth, it is about 510 million square kilometers, in spite of oceans, the land is about 149 million square kilometers, with 100m resolution remote sensing image fully covered earth land , the pixel numbers of there imagery will be in the same magnitude order of the digitalized painting."
Space

Submission + - European physicists take photo of neutrino

An anonymous reader writes: European physicists said Tuesday they had sent an elusive particle known as a neutrino on a 730-kilometer (456-mile) trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors. In the October 2 event, a neutrino hit one of the 60,000 bricks that had been installed in San Grasso, leaving a tell-tale track of a muon on the film. The experiment is important, say the investigators, as it could help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the Universe — its missing mass. When scientists tot up the mass of all the visible matter in the Universe, they arrive at a total of just 10 percent of what they know to exist. For years, neutrinos were not thought to have any mass, although that theory has been challenged by experiments at Japan's SuperKamioKande lab, which suggested that they may have a mass, albeit a very tiny one.
Space

Submission + - 2 killed in SpaceShipTwo motor test explosion (cnn.com)

RZG writes: Two people were killed and 4 were injured during a "cold fire test" of the motor for SpaceShipTwo. This obviously is a setback for Virgin Galactic and the non-government space community in general. "Aerial video of the blast aftermath showed a charred and twisted flatbed trailer attached to a truck cab with a large silver tank next to it. Large pieces of debris appeared to be strewn for hundreds of yards from the center."
Space

Submission + - Virgin Galactic Explosion

the_Bionic_lemming writes: An explosion at an airport home to Scaled Composites — the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space — killed two people and left four seriously hurt Thursday, a Kern County Fire Department official says. It happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port during a test of a new rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo — a spaceship being built for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company, a source said. The motor uses nitrous oxide, the source said.
Television

Submission + - Where to find porn?

An anonymous reader writes: Where to find porn videos that play in flash? There are plenty of porn sites and it is claimed that porn industry uses the latest technology, pushes on the boarders. How come there are so few sites that are using flash-embedded videos? Only pornotube.com and the newcomer screwtube.com Is it the fault of the technology (flash)? are they tied with some rights (content owners have deals tied with WMP)?
Security

Steam Hacked, Credit Card Numbers Taken 141

An anonymous reader writes "DailyTech reports that Valve's Steam content distribution system has been compromised. According to the article a hacker claims to have 'bypassed Valve's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including: screenshots of internal Valve web pages, a portion of Valve's Cafe directory, error logs, credit card information of customers, and financial information on Valve.'"

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