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Comment Re:Unit 1 should have been offline since February (Score 1) 769

I had no idea that Japan used two different power grid frequencies.

I searched for the reason behind it, and while I could not get any good results from Google, following the leads from the Wikipedia image you linked brought me to the page on "utility frequency" where it says how it happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency#Standardization

This originates in the first purchases of generators from AEG in 1895, installed for Tokyo, and General Electric in 1896, installed in Osaka.

AEG being a German company had its generators produce at 50 Hz, while the USA General Electric delivered 60 Hz.

Comment Cluster them by laptop usage. (Score 1) 804

What some professors do now at the University of Saarland (Germany) is to define three zones.
If you want to use the laptop for taking notes in class, you sit in the first rows, and if you want to do whatever else you sit in the last rows way back.
In the middle there is a DMZ without laptops at all.

The idea is to avoid getting distracted by flashy graphic stuff happening before you when you want to pay attention.

Comment Re:Viva La Libre Office! (Score 1) 648

More or less: in Spanish, "libertad" means "freedom". The word for the adjective "free" is indeed "libre", like in French. In Italian "freedom" is "libertà", and "free" varies with grammatical gender and number: masculine singular is "libero", while femenine is "libera", and plural is "liberi". (Well, while I'm at it, in Spanish the plural form is "libres", and I guess in French it might be the same)

Comment Re:Hooray for freedom (Score 1) 747

Your grocery store CCTV analogy to network packet inspection would be more accurate if the store demanded to put cameras in your home, not just in their premises.

The in-store measures you mention are analogous to inspecting the packets my computer interchanges with their servers and limiting the amount of concurrent users, which they can do without bugging my communications with other people.

(I realize that you say that "society in general" might not care about it anyway, not necessarily that you would agree with it.)

Comment Re:Do they resolve to cn or are they seperate? (Score 1) 116

Before the Hanzi Chinese CCTLDs were approved by ICANN, when the only way to use them was to install CNNIC's "Official Client-end CDN Software" in your computer, the registration of a .cn domain name with Chinese characters automatically gave you the version with the Hanzi Chinese CCTLD.

You can read it here in English: http://cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3218.htm
It's in the answer to the third question.

I don't have any confirmation, but I don't see why they would change their policy.

Comment Re:Epic Fail (Score 1) 128

The first thing I did when reading these news was to visit their website and look for a license, until I found the copyright notice you mention. Epic fail indeed. I wanted to do some processing of this content. As it is, it's no more useful for me than functions.wolfram.com, which might or might not have less content but is nicer looking anyway.

As I saw OpenMath in your post I got curious about you and clicked on your homepage link, but it says "This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.".

Comment Re:Been complaining about this for years (Score 1) 651

I can't speak on this specific case, but in general there are specific areas in china and IP ranges where attacks have come from for a while, many of which have no resale value on the market, or political value only to China.
One incident doesn't tell the story, but combined they do.

See http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/10/report-on-chinese-government-sponsored.html for more details.

Comment Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score 1) 255

I found quite precise information by searching for [nasa decompression lungs mouth test]:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=nasa+decompression+lungs+mouth+test

The first link (geoffreylandis.com) is written by a NASA employee.

While it seems that nobody was actually decompressed on purpose (a couple of accidents are mentioned), a bit down the search results there is a link to a NASA publication called "THE EFFECT ON THE CHIMPANZEE OF RAPID DECOMPRESSION TO A NEAR VACUUM".

Comment Re:One word.. (Score 1) 683

You might prefer to use do...while instead, to avoid the chance of unintended looping:

do
{
                if (!start_condition) break;
                action1();
                cleanup1();
                if (!test_condition1) break;
                action2();
                cleanup2();
                if (!test_condition2) break;
} while(0);

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 67

You can get a MIPS-based desktop system with 72 processors that consumes 300 Watts, from SyCortex. They call it their Deskside Development System for their bigger parallel computers, and they say it does have a fast backbone bus.

It does run Linux, but at $23,695.00 (48 GB RAM) it's not, I suspect, what you were asking for. I would also like some cheap barebones I could just go on populating with CPUs as I wanted.

The GP might like SGI's Molecule better though, it being Atom-based: 5000 chips, that's 10000 cores, in 3U size. But this one is only a concept computer.

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