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Comment What about EU (Score 2) 4

You may consider moving to the European Union, the patenting of software as such is prohibited here. It is only allowed as part of a technical application. The famous mention of doing something by means of a general purpose computer is not sufficiant to get a patent, it must be for instance the special GPS Equipment, the program used to drive it cannot be patented but only the entire technology of the gadget as long as it is novel and not obvious.

Comment A little knowledge in geography would be helpful (Score 1) 2

[...] Enter East Germany's Wunderland Kalkar — an incredible adaptive reuse project that transformed a never-used nuclear reactor into an amusement park!
[...]

Kalkar is a little city on the shores of the lower Rhine, some Kilometres away from the Netherlands border. This is definitely not Eastern Germany but only a few Kilometres away from the westernmost point of Germany!

The authors of the original article should pay a little more attention when writing such a crap.

Comment Re:Marxist bullshit (Score 2) 147

Neither chicken nor beef production are 'green' or 'eco friendly'. They both require huge inputs of energy and water to get out a given quantity of calories, compared to plant foods. Human beings are not supposed to eat meat, eggs, or cows' milk.
The fact that the idiots at NASA can't even begin to question 'what everyone else is doing' tells you how intelligent they are - not very.
They are even suggesting that long haul space flights have animals on board 'for meat'. Yeah, like that's a really efficient way of getting calories while in space...

Plainly bullshit, humans are omnivores and meat and eggs and milk are essential for our health, but at the same time vegetables are also.

Oracle

Submission + - Oracle cans commercial OpenOffice (arstechnica.com) 2

castrox writes: "Oracle gives up on development of the commercial branch of OpenOffice. The reason appears to be the drain of mindshare from OpenOffice to the newly created, vendor neutral, LibreOffice fork. Control is to be handed over to the community. I guess we'll see the details to this handover in the coming days or weeks."

Comment They may take a look at Arianespace (Score 1) 275

Wouldn't NASA and the american taxpayer better off talking to Arianespace and trying tp develop something in cooperation with them? Arianespace has a lot of knowledge in development procedures and technology which I think NASA was forced to scrap for political reasons.

There were a lot of advanced and promising technologies almost ready which NASA and the US industry dumped because your congress did cut the money when the device was almost ready.

These could be utilised in such a joint venture.

Comment Re:Solution: Tax gas more. (Score 1) 1139

Despite the highly taxation of fuel all over Europe, we have far too many trucks on our highways.

And if you look at the material flows, everybody with a little common sense will shake ones head.

Example: Milk is produced by ranchers in northern Germany, then it gets transported over the alps, roundabout 1000 miles (1600 km) or more to central or southern Italy to be processed to yoghurt, curd or cream and filled into plastic cups, which are produced at other places in Germany or other countries of the EU as well, also transported by truck.

Then all these products are carried over the alps all the way back to Germany partly labled as italian delicacy or as german milk product.

Now lets look at the figures.

A 40t truck loads roundabout 26 to 30 tons gross. Let the packaging and handling means (pallettes) count for 5% or 1.5 to of the load there remain for easier calculation 26t of the product.

The truck consumes roundabout 35 to 40 l / 100 km (~ 10 mpg) equals 650 l (170 Gallons) for the 1000 miles. 650 l * 1.20 €/l gives 780 € fuel cost.

A cup of cream of 125g is sold in the store for 0.80 € to 1.20 € so the price per kg is 7€ to 9€ per kg. 780€ / 25000 kg gives 0.03 € per kg merchandise. from these three cent, two cent are tax.

BTW the rancher gets 0.25€ to 0.35 € / l of raw milk and the retailer calculates a gross margin of 5% to 8%.

So even with tripling the fuel taxation, the cost of road transportation is a neglectible amount.

This is just an example of the complete madness in modern markets because of far too little taxation of the transportation.

Just my two cents

Comment Shake Shake Shake (Score 1) 821

We in Europe can only shake our heads and turn our eyes skywards when we see and hear of the US-American bigotery. On the one side there is every blank piece of human flesh "hurting and endangering society" on the other side an terror organisation like the NRA is praised for their support of fireweapons in childrens hand ?-(

CU

Intel

Submission + - Server benchmarking lone wolf bites Intel again (worlds-fastest.com)

Ian Lamont writes: "Neal Nelson, the engineer who conducts independent server benchmarking, has nipped Intel again by reporting that AMD's Opteron chips "delivered better power efficiency" than Xeon processors. Nelson's specific observations included:

1) Larger memory configurations deliver both higher throughput and better power efficiency, 2) Intel's power efficiency advantages decrease as memory size increases, 3) AMD's power efficiency advantages increase as memory size increases, 4) For primarily calculation type workloads, the Xeon delivers 8.0 to 14.0 percent higher peak throughput, and 5) For primarily disk I/O intensive workloads the Opteron delivers 11.3 to 19.4 percent higher peak throughput.
Intel has discounted the findings, claiming that Nelson's methodology "ignores performance," but the company may not be able to ignore Nelson for much longer: the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit company that develops computing benchmarks, is expected to publish a new test suite for comparing server efficiency that Nelson believes will be similar to his own benchmarks that measure server power usage directly from the wall plug."

Media

Submission + - Belgium prosecutes the church of Scientology

sheean.nl writes: "The Belgian Federal Judicial Authorities plans to prosecute the church of Scientology. The church is accused of being a criminal organisation which involves itself with extortion, fraud, unfair trading, violation of privacy laws and unlawfully practicing medicine. Both the Belgian and the European departement should be brought to court, according to the authorities. An investigation has been started in 1999 after former Scientologists complained about extortion by the church, this investigation has now been completed and the authorities want the case to be put through. The Belgians call this case a world's first. In some countries, including the US, the church of Scientology is officially recognised as a religion, with high-profile followers such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta."
Privacy

Submission + - Skype-Linux reads /etc/passwd and firefox profile! (skype.com)

mrcgran writes: "Users of Skype for Linux have just found out that it reads the files /etc/passwd, firefox profile, plugins, addons, etc, and many other unnecessary files in /etc. This fact was originally discovered by using AppArmor, but others have confirmed this fact using strace on versions 1.4.0.94 and 1.4.0.99. What is going on? This probably shows how important it is to use AppArmor in any closed-source application in Linux to restrict any undue access to your files."

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